'Too Liberal' McCain in Hot Water With Arizona GOP

Seems John McCain is getting too liberal for Arizona conservatives—so liberal that the state's Republican party has formally reprimanded the senator for his "disastrous and harmful" record, Politico reports. At a party meeting in Tempe yesterday, the party hammered McCain for assisting Democrats on immigration reform, ignoring a GOP plan to defund ObamaCare, and criticizing conservative Republicans while keeping "eerily silent against liberals." Not only that, he kept telling a rather unkind joke about Congress, the Atlantic Wire reports.

Congress "can't get lower in the polls," the joke goes (thanks, Atlantic Wire). "We're down to blood relatives and paid staffers now." But the censure sounds like no joke: The state GOP vowed to "no longer support, campaign for, or endorse" McCain until he backs the party platform. McCain's office had no comment, but former Sen. Jon Kyl, another Arizona Republican, spoke up for him: To say McCain "doesn't have a conservative voting record—that's just baloney," he told the Arizona Republic. "I’ve gone to dozens of these meetings and every now and then some wacky resolution gets passed." At this meeting, some 1,600 committee members also voted to abolish a Constitutional amendment allowing the direct election of senators by the voting public, Reuters reports. (More John McCain stories.)