House and Senate Career of John Mc Cain, Until 2000 - U.S. Senator - Senate Career Starts

Senate Career Starts

Upon entering the Senate in 1987, McCain kept a low profile. He became a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, with which he had formerly done his Navy liaison work; he was also given positions on the Commerce Committee and the Indian Affairs Committee. For his first two years in the Senate, he sat at the Candy desk.

McCain was a strong supporter of the Gramm-Rudman legislation that enforced automatic spending cuts in the case of budget deficits. He voted in favor of Reagan's failed 1987 nomination of Robert Bork to the U.S. Supreme Court.

McCain often supported the Native American agenda, advocating economic development and self-governance, as well as sovereignty and tribe control of adoptions. "Never deceived them," McCain once said, "They have been deceived too many times in the last 200 years." Along with Senator Daniel Inouye and Representative Mo Udall, McCain was one of the main drafters of the 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, which codified rules regarding Native American gambling enterprises and established the balance between Indian tribal sovereignty and regulatory oversight by the states of such activity. After its passage, McCain stated his personal opposition to Indian gaming, but said that when communities under poverty "are faced with only one option for economic development, and that is to set up gambling on their reservations, then I cannot disapprove." The Act enabled the growth of what would become, two decades later, the $23 billion Indian gaming industry, and McCain has been called "one of the founding fathers of Indian gaming."

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day had become a big issue in McCain's home state, with Governor Evan Mecham making opposition to it his signature stance. McCain had continued his opposition to the holiday by supporting Mecham's rescinding of the Arizona holiday for King in 1987. In 1988, Mecham was impeached and removed from office due to felony charges. McCain told Mecham, "You should never have been elected. You're an embarrassment to the party." By 1989, McCain reiterated his opposition to the federal holiday, but reversed position on the state holiday, due to the economic boycotts and image problems Arizona was receiving as a result of it not having one. He told Republicans opposing the state holiday, "You will damn well do this. You will make this a holiday. You're making us look like fools." In 1990, a state referendum on enacting the holiday was held; McCain persuaded Ronald Reagan to support it. However, Mecham led an effort that year that defeated the referendum.

During the late 1980s, McCain gained some national visibility. He delivered a speech, about a fellow Hanoi Hilton prisoner's persistence in making an American flag despite beatings, that drew audience tears and a standing ovation at the 1988 Republican National Convention. He was mentioned by the press as being on the short list for Republican nominee George H. W. Bush's vice-presidential running mate, and was named chairman of Veterans for Bush. In 1989, he became a staunch defender of his friend John Tower's doomed nomination for U.S. Secretary of Defense; McCain butted heads with Moral Majority co-founder Paul Weyrich, who was challenging Tower regarding alleged heavy drinking and extramarital affairs. Thus began McCain's difficult relationship with the Christian right; he would later write that Weyrich was "a pompous self-serving son of a bitch."

McCain supported the United States invasion of Panama in 1989. McCain partnered with Senator Al Gore on the 1989 Missile and Proliferation Control Act, which established sanctions on companies and nations that engaged in the trade or development of long-range missile systems, and the 1992 Iran-Iraq Arms Nonproliferation Act (commonly known as the Gore-McCain Act), which established penalties for persons and companies assisting Iraq or Iran in acquiring missile technology.