John McCain Quotes
I intend to do what I can, working with my congressional colleagues, Republicans and Democrats, to help bring about the changes to the practices and Institutions of our democracy that they want and deserve.
McCain, John. Remarks on Campaign Finance Reform. United States Senate, Washington, D.C., 2001.
The dramatic thing about this quotation is that in public, the mantra of conservatives about the courts of America is that they make and change laws as opposed to just interpreting and clarifying the laws. They traditionally accuse judges who rule against their favorite positions as using the courts as an instrument of political and social change. Here a leading conservative federal jurist, who thereafter became a member of the Supreme Court, was acknowledging and advocating the courts as instruments for conservative social, economic, and political change.
Essentially, the key value is civilian control of the military. For centuries in human history the civil leader has been the strongest military leader or the most influential church leader. The notion of subservience of the military to the elected civilian government is crucial and where there are other traditional roles of the military such as policing government, eliminating corruption, enforcing the Constitution and the like, the democracy exists only to the extent that the military leaders will allow it to if they have the power to control things.
John Sidney McCain III was an American politician, statesman and United States Navy officer who served as a United States Senator for Arizona from 1987 until his death in 2018. He previously served two terms in the United States House of Representatives and was the Republican nominee for president of the United States in the 2008 election, which he lost to Barack Obama.
