This almost certainly sound like a minor campaign flap, but let’s take a moment to consider the bigger picture.
About 3 p.m. Tuesday, Senator John McCain ducked off the Senate floor, entered the Republican cloakroom and took out his mobile phone. Just hours after accepting the resignation of his two top campaign aides, he was making a conference call to his top fund-raisers to urge them to keep up the fight.
The call, however, may only have exacerbated an already tough week for Mr. McCain. Senate ethics rules expressly forbid lawmakers to engage in campaign activities inside Senate facilities. If Mr. McCain solicited campaign contributions on a call from government property, that would be a violation of federal criminal law as well.
Now, I’ve always felt that the law in this area is a little odd. The point, originally, was to prevent politicians from abusing government facilities. But when modern technology enters the picture, legal quirks pop up — if McCain places a call to fundraisers in the lobby of a Senate building, it’s illegal. If he makes the same call to the same people from the sidewalk outside the same building, it’s legal.
With that in mind, I’m very much inclined to ignore a story like this. It’s clearly a sloppy mistake — he’s been around long enough to know where he can and cannot place these calls — and fits into the narrative of McCain in freefall, but I’m hardly inclined to demand an immediate Justice Department inquiry.
But — and you had to know a “but” was coming — there are a few reasons this story matters.
First, if McCain and his allies agree that this kind of “offense” is minor, they ought to explain why McCain led the misguided mob in 2000 when the shoe was on Al Gore’s foot.
Mr. McCain was well aware of the rules. Ten years ago he led Republican calls for an independent prosecutor to investigate accusations of violations of the same rules by Vice President Al Gore. Mr. McCain went on to make the episode a cornerstone of both his 2000 Republican primary campaign and his argument for the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. […]
Back then, the need for campaign finance reform was one of Mr. McCain’s favorite themes, and he often mocked Mr. Gore’s argument that there was “no controlling legal authority” forbidding his fund-raising calls from another federal property, the White House.
“The American people deserve a controlling ethical authority,” Mr. McCain used to repeat on the campaign trail, “as well as controlling legal authority.”
If Gore’s call from his VP office was such a big deal to McCain seven years ago, it’s only fair to consider McCain’s call an equally big deal now. Fair is fair, right, senator?
Second, McCain seems to be violating this law with some regularity. The NYT noted yesterday that McCain sat down with John Weaver and Terry Nelson, up until recently his top two presidential campaign aides, “for what turned out to be a loud and acrimonious discussion in his Senate office.”
No big deal, right? Perhaps not, but in April, the NYT photographed Barack Obama talking to campaign adviser David Axelrod in his Senate office, prompting some news outlets to pounce. Roll Call emphasized, “Congressional ethics rules forbid the use of federal office space for political and campaign activity.” It was the top story on Drudge for a day, and reporters buzzed about the senator’s “rookie” mistake.
Perhaps this is moot; McCain’s campaign appears to be just about done anyway. But it strikes me as annoying when Republicans are held to an easier standard, and even more annoying when Republicans engage in the very activities they claim to abhor.