It Never Ends for McCain

John McCain may have violated at least the spirit, if not the letter, of the Senate Ethics rules according to a New York Times report.

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.

There is no evidence that Mr. McCain has made a habit of making such calls or otherwise exploiting his office for political gain, and he is hardly the first lawmaker to call a donor from under the Capitol dome. But he made the call as he was in the spotlight because of the staff shake-up, sagging poll numbers and disappointing fund-raising of his Republican presidential primary campaign.

It was the kind of technical mistake that seasoned aides — like the ones his campaign is now letting go — are supposed to prevent.

There is a general prohibition against making campaign or fundraising calls from Congressional facilities, including the House and Senate Office buildings as well as the Capitol.

To be honest and fair, McCain was probably in a panic as his campaign staff have been running for the doors and his campaign is weathering a Force Ten storm on the shoals of potential defeat. In the pressure of things, he probably made a mistake and I think we should all be willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

But I don't think even a seasoned campaign aide would have or could have stopped this call. First, campaign aides are rarely at the candidate's side when the candidate is attending to official business, i.e. being a Senator. The reason is to prevent a "mingling" of official and campaign activities. So the aides wouldn't have been there in the first place. Second, we don't even know if an aide of any stripe was with McCain and if so, if McCain would have listened to a warning about the propiety of the call from the Cloakroom.

McCain is no doubt having as a bad a week as could be imaginable. Let's cut the man some slack.