McCain Says Corporations Are Not People

After the 2008 election and his reelection campaign in 2010, I thought John McCain had lost every shred of honesty and integrity. But, doggone it, he's making me reevaluate my opinion of him.

In an interview with PBS McCain criticized my favorite billionaire whipping boy, Sheldon Adelson, for bringing foreign cash into US elections:

SEN. JOHN MCCAIN: Mr. Adelson, who gave large amounts of money to the Gingrich campaign. And much of Mr. Adelson's casino profits that go to him come from this casino in Macau. 

JUDY WOODRUFF: Which says what? 

SEN. JOHN MCCAIN: Which says that, obviously, maybe in a roundabout way, foreign money is coming into an American campaign -- political campaigns. 

JUDY WOODRUFF: Because of the profits at the casinos in Macau? 

SEN. JOHN MCCAIN: Yes. That is a great deal of money. And, again, we need a level playing field and we need to go back to the realization that Teddy Roosevelt had that we have to have a limit on the flow of money, and that corporations are not people. 

That's why we have different laws that govern corporations than govern individual citizens. And so to say that corporations are people, again, flies in the face of all the traditional Supreme Court decisions that we have made -- that have been made in the past.

McCain also said:

[Citizens United is] the most misguided, naive, uninformed, egregious decision of the United States Supreme Court I think in the 21st century. 

To somehow view money as not having an effect on election, a corrupting effect on election, flies in the face of reality. 

and

Look, I guarantee you, Judy, there will be scandals. There is too much money washing around political campaigns today. And it will take scandals, and then maybe we can have the Supreme Court go back and revisit this issue.

It's not just that the Supreme Court's is naive about the realities of money in campaigns: Justice Clarence Thomas immediately cashed in on it by having his wife set up a Tea Party lobbying organization. Why hasn't Thomas been impeached for such an egregious conflict of interest?

Perhaps I'm giving McCain more credit than he's due, given his oblivious comments about Romney and regulation in the first part of the interview. McCain is more like the conservative who used to be a liberal who was mugged, or the liberal used to be a conservative whose job was outsourced to China.

McCain experienced first hand the corrosive and corrupting influence of huge amounts of cash is in the hands of political operatives like Karl Rove. McCain was the victim of one of the worst whispering campaigns in the 2000 Republican primary, when push pollsters called voters in South Carolina and asked, "Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for John McCain if you knew that he fathered an illegitimate black child?"

McCain had adopted a child from Bangladesh, but Bush's campaign operatives turned this into a blot on McCain's honor, much as they Swift Boated John Kerry four years later for his service in Viet Nam (George W. Bush had cowered on a National Guard airbase during the war, only to disappear for the last year of his service on a coke binge or political campaign, depending on what you want to call it). The South Carolina primary was probably the biggest reason McCain saw the light and sponsored McCain-Feingold in the first place.

What's even crazier is how such huge sums of money can change directions in so short a time. Adelson and his family had given Newt Gingrich's PAC more than $10 million just a few months ago, used mostly to smear Romney, and now Adelson has just given Romney's PAC $10 million.

And now Adelson says he'll spend up to $100 million of his dirty casino money to beat Obama. I can just imagine what kind of campaign that cash will pay for.