[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 129 (Wednesday, September 24, 1997)]
[House]
[Pages H7820-H7821]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Arkansas [Mr. Snyder] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. SNYDER. Mr. Speaker, once again, my thanks to the staff here who 
are working late, as several of us have an opportunity to discuss these 
important issues.
  Mr. Chairman, it is my opinion and the opinion of a great many 
Americans that while we live in the greatest democracy in the history 
of the world, our democracy and the way we currently conduct our 
business has some major problems. Specifically, how do we do our 
campaigns? How do we elect our officials to come to Washington and do 
the people's business?
  Now, what is the specific problem? I will show my colleagues what the 
specific problem is. This is going to be a difficult number for me to 
read, because I do not know what this number is. I recognize $999,999. 
I can go one step further, $999,999,999. I can keep going to 
$999,999,999,999, and on and so. The reality is, whatever number this 
is, it is now legal for this amount of money to be donated to a 
political party, to a national political party. So if a person who had 
this kind of wealth wrote out a check to the Republican Party or the 
Democratic Party, it is completely legal to make this kind of donation 
and it not be disclosed where the money came from.
  Well, many of us in this House, many of us in America, think that is 
the wrong way to finance campaigns, and on January 11, 1995, the 
President and the Speaker of the House, in a very famous garden shot, 
shook hands and committed themselves to campaign finance reform. Since 
that time, we have not seen much action.
  The President is firmly committed to signing meaningful campaign 
finance reform, and as someone from Arkansas who was in the State 
Senate and worked with then Governor Clinton when he was in Arkansas, I 
know of his commitment to campaign finance reform and ethics reform. He 
had an experience when he was in Arkansas of calling a special session 
of the legislature in order to get ethics reform for lobbyists' 
disclosure, having that effort thwarted in the State legislature in the 
committee vote when that was the sole purpose of calling the session; 
and he took the issue to the States and initiated that to get 
signatures working in

[[Page H7821]]

conjunction with organizations like Common Cause and others, got the 
signatures, took it to the vote of the people, and in 1990, it passed. 
The President is committed to cleaning up the problems in our 
democracy.
  If the President is committed to it, then where is the problem? I see 
the problem, Mr. Chairman, as being the leadership in this House; 
specifically, the Republican leadership that will not let us bring this 
type of legislation to the floor. Since we have convened in January, we 
have had approximately 85 bills filed, but we have had no hearings on 
any bill, we have had, obviously, no bills passed, and so we find 
ourselves as we are talking now about winding down this first year, 
this first session of this Congress, making no progress on campaign 
finance reform, and I think that is a mistake. I think it is wrong, and 
I think the American people want something different.
  My own preference in all of these bills is the Hutchinson-Allen bill, 
this is the gentleman from Arkansas [Mr. Hutchinson] and the gentleman 
from Maine [Mr. Allen]. And it is the freshman, bipartisan bill, Mr. 
Hutchinson being a Republican, Mr. Allen a Democrat, that has seriously 
looked at the problems and has tried to do the doable, and what it 
specifically does is ban the soft money, to do away with the potential 
of these huge, huge checks, the kinds of several-hundred-thousand-
dollar, even million-dollar checks that sometimes come into political 
parties.

  No one likes raising money. I do not know of any politician that 
likes raising money. My own feeling is that raising money makes you 
weird. Raising money just does weird things to elected officials. But 
for parties to raise those huge donations makes our democracy weird. It 
distorts the system, it disillusions the citizens, and we have to do 
something better.
  So, Mr. Speaker, let me finally say, I do not want to see a check 
someday come in made out to a political party for $1 billion. I do not 
want to see checks come in to a political party for $500 million. We 
need to step forward. The Republican leadership needs to let this body 
consider campaign finance reform legislation, needs to let us vote on 
it, needs to let us debate on it, needs to let us move ahead with what 
the American people want: clean elections and a much-improved system of 
electing public officials.

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