McCain Blasts Bush Over FEC Nominee

Sen. John McCain on Thursday accused President Bush of breaking a written promise to speedily appoint a Democrat to the Federal Election Commission, reigniting their roiling feud just as McCain is about to regain the post of chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee.

McCain, an Arizona Republican, said he will “assume all future assurances and promises by this administration to be quite possibly insincere.” He told the Washington Post that the White House delayed the appointment as part of an “orchestrated and systematic undermining” of campaign finance reform legislation he championed and Bush only grudgingly supported.

The FEC is writing regulations to implement the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law and the current commissioners have approved several loopholes. Supporters of McCain’s proposed appointee, ethics lawyer Ellen Weintraub, say she would vote for stricter rules.

A White House official said Thursday that Bush plans to appoint Weintraub this morning -- less than 24 hours after the FEC finished the bulk of its work on the law. McCain called the timing cynical.

“The Bush administration has broken their word on an issue that has been of transcendent importance to me, and that’s hard to get over,” said McCain, who ran against Bush in the 2000 presidential primaries. “It will be harder for them to do business with the Senate, since a lot of it is done by handshake.”

McCain -- who was not invited to the ceremony when Bush signed the measure into law -- could launch investigations of the administration when the GOP takes over the Senate in January and he regains the chairmanship of the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation.

The White House made a deal with McCain in July to appoint Weintraub to the FEC. Weintraub, a former Democratic counsel to the House Ethics Committee, was the choice of Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.). Until the deal was struck, nearly 100 of Bush’s judicial and administrative nominations had been held up.

Even as the senator was voicing his anger Thursday, the FEC adopted a disputed regulation that McCain and his allies say epitomizes the kind of loophole Weintraub might have prevented.

McCain and groups such as Common Cause and the Center for Responsive Politics say the new regulation will let federal candidates control the spending of unlimited amounts of corporate, union and special interest “soft money” in the early stages of federal campaigns. A key goal of the McCain-Feingold law is to bar the national parties and federal candidates from raising and spending soft money.