Reform the reform, Senator McCain’s take

John McCain held another blogger conference call today. Ed Morrissey has a good account of it.
As Ed notes, I asked Senator McCain about reforming Sarbanes-Oxley, a topic I wrote about here. It was good to hear McCain say he made a mistake in voting for the original legislation in 2002, and that it needs to be redrafted from scratch.
I asked specifically about Senator DeMint’s amendment which would have given small companies the right to opt out of the double auditing requirement (having the outside audit reviewed independently by internal auditors). Senator McCain said he agrees with DeMint’s plan, though he thinks the job of fixing Sarbanes-Oxley extends beyond what DeMint proposed.
McCain did not vote on DeMint’s amendment. I don’t blame him, though. DeMint had only 35 votes, so it was reasonable for McCain to attend to his campaign (if that’s what he was doing) when the vote took place on April 24 of this year.
The breakdown on the vote was interesting. Mary Landrieu joined 34 Republicans in support of DeMint’s position (a “no” vote in this context). The following Republicans voted the other way:
Bennett
Bond
Cochran
Collins
Crapo
Enzi
Graham
Hatch
Murkowski
Sessions
Shelby
Snowe
Stevens
Thomas
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