[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 112 (Friday, July 26, 1996)]
[House]
[Pages H8586-H8587]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




            THE FACTS ABOUT THE CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM BILL

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Hoke] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. HOKE. Mr. Speaker, I also want to speak about the campaign 
finance reform bill that we defeated yesterday, as well as just 
campaign finance reform generally, because the one thing that has been 
said repeatedly is that it was a good thing that this bill was defeated 
because it would do nothing to limit campaign spending. That is simply 
factually untrue, and I am going to explain why that is untrue.
  I will preface that by saying that I did not think it was a perfect 
bill. There were a lot of things about the bill I was not particularly 
happy with but at least it moved in the right direction, and I did vote 
for it.
  As we could see, though, from yesterday's vote, Mr. Speaker, 
unfortunately it was soundly defeated in this House because apparently 
when it comes to campaign finance reform, people hide behind perfection 
being the utter enemy of the good, instead of making the incremental 
reforms that apparently are the only way that we can get anything 
accomplished with respect to reforming the institution itself or the 
way that candidates are supported and their campaigns are financed.
  Let me tell my colleagues specifically why yesterday's bill, from 
bottom-up as opposed to top-down philosophy, would have limited 
spending. It did two things that would have limited spending. It did 
two things that would have had an immediate impact on reducing the 
number of dollars in congressional campaigns.
  No. 1, it reduced the amount of money that could be contributed by a 
political action committee, that is, a special interest PAC. Most of 
them, as we know, Mr. Speaker, are located here in Washington and 
represent Washington's values, lobbyists' values, special interests' 
values, as opposed to America's values.
  It would have reduced the amount that those PACs could have spent 
from $5,000 to $2,500 or reduced the amount of money from PACs by 50 
percent, reduced them in half. At least that is what it purported to 
do. Unfortunately, the devil is always in the details and who knows 
that it might have only spawned twice as many PACs with different hats.
  But let us forget that for a second. Let us assume in fact it would 
have done what it was intended to do, and that was to reduce the amount 
of money that a PAC could give by 50 percent. That would have reduced 
by 50 percent all of the money that PACs contributed to congressional 
campaigns in the last cycle or in the next cycle. If the average amount 
that a candidate is receiving from a PAC is $300,000 or $400,000, it 
would have reduced it by half. Clearly, that has an immediate impact on 
reducing the amount of money that is being spent in political 
campaigns.
  Second, the bill also provided that 51 percent of all contributions 
must come from individuals who live in the district that the candidate 
wants to have the honor of representing in the United States House of 
Representatives; 51 percent. That immediately would have also had the 
impact of reducing the total number of dollars spent on a political 
campaign.
  Why? Because if 51 percent has to come from in-district, that means 
that in all of those districts where candidates are in fact raising 
more than 51 percent from out-of-district, which is in fact for those 
people who accept political action committee contributions, the 
majority of candidates, it would have also had the immediate impact of 
reducing the amount of money being spent in those campaigns, as well.
  So as my colleagues can see, this bogey that is being thrown up that 
this did nothing to reduce the amount of money in political campaigns 
is absolutely false and it is false because, No. 1, the amount of money 
spent by PACs would have been reduced. No. 2, there would have been an 
overall reduction because of the 51 percent in-district requirement.
  Now that is a consequence of otherwise good policies. I would go a 
step further and say this: If we are going to in fact make this body 
more representative of the districts of America, not of Washington's 
values but of America's values, then we have to completely eliminate 
the political action committee contributions.

                              {time}  1330

  The reason tha we need to do that is that something very, very 
insidious happens when a person makes a contribution to a PAC. In other 
words, if you are a member of a labor union or if you work for a bank 
and you make a

[[Page H8587]]

contribution to a bank PAC, or let us say that you are an individual 
who makes a contribution to a particular other PAC, what happens is 
that the character of that contribution changes from being complex and 
subtle and intelligent to being stupid and narrow and ugly, with only 
one or two specific political agendas for that term of Congress.

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