[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 133 (Tuesday, September 30, 1997)]
[Senate]
[Pages S10208-S10211]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




              CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM IS A PRESSING MATTER

  Mrs. BOXER. Mr. President, I was listening to the news this morning, 
and the reporter said, ``The Senate has agreed to set aside campaign 
finance reform and go to more pressing matters.''
  I thought to myself, campaign finance reform is a pressing matter. It 
seems to me there can be no more pressing matter. We ought to deal with 
this issue of campaign finance reform and let the chips fall.

  We have a lot of parliamentary games being played. One of my 
colleagues, Senator Dorgan, said earlier that if the American public 
was listening this morning and heard somebody say, ``There is a poison 
pill on a tree that has been filled,'' the public would not really 
understand what we were talking about. When we talk about a poison 
pill, we are talking about an objectionable amendment that is 
extraneous to what we are trying to do being offered in an attempt to 
kill the underlying bill. Filling the tree means using a parliamentary 
tactic to prevent opponents of an amendment from offering any changes 
to that amendment. So I apologize to the American public if they tuned 
in and heard somebody talking about a tree being filled with poison 
pills because it does get confusing.
  But the matter is not that confusing. The matter is, how do we 
finance our campaigns, and can we improve that system? I think all of 
America is crying out, ``Yes, we can improve it.'' Only a few say, 
``Don't touch it, it is great, and money is speech.''
  Now, it is true that a divided Supreme Court did equate spending as 
much money as you have with the right of free speech. But that was a 
close call. It seems to me our Founders would be turning in their 
graves if they believed at the time they stood up for free speech that 
it really meant ``only if you are rich,'' because, folks, that is what 
it is about.
  I am proud of my colleagues, Russ Feingold and John McCain, for 
pressing this matter across party lines, and standing up for campaign 
finance reform. I am proud of both of them because it is not easy. The 
status quo around here is what people like the best.
  I have to tell you, when I think about speech, I think about both 
sides of it. If

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you have an independently wealthy billionaire running against you in a 
State like California, and he writes checks every day and bashes you on 
television every day and bashes the other opponents that he is running 
against every day, I believe we should ask, what about the free speech 
rights of the opponents? What about the speech of the other people that 
are drowned out because of money? If you equate money and speech, it 
seems to me you are saying someone who is wealthy has more speech 
rights than someone who is not.
  This is not the American way. We are all created equal. That is the 
basis of who we are as a nation. I really hope that we can get past 
this notion that money is speech and that we will move forward with a 
comprehensive bill.
  My one disappointment with the substitute pending before the Senate, 
is that it is not as comprehensive as the first version of the McCain-
Feingold bill. However, I respect the judgement of the Senators that it 
would be best at this time to zero in on two horrible abuses of the 
system.
  One abuse is the soft money abuse, which means unregulated dollars of 
any amount that flow into political parties. We have seen the hearings 
that are going on by this U.S. Senate and over in the House. If 
anything, we come away with this: Let's put an end to soft money. We 
could point fingers all day--this politician, that politician, where 
the calls were made, who made them--but I guarantee that gets us 
nowhere. The issue is the system. There will be enough examples around 
from both parties. This is not the problem.
  So if we get exercised about these hearings--and I have seen 
colleagues here who are very exercised about them--they should go over 
to John McCain and Russ Feingold and tell them they are on their side. 
There ought to be some controls on the soft money contribution, and 
those controls are now pending before the Senate. The second area of 
abuse tackled by the McCain-Feingold bill is the so-called issues 
advocacy advertisements. This is where you take an organization with 
endless sums of money to put into an attack ad against the candidate 
they don't like.
  Under current law, individuals can only give $1,000 in the primary 
and $1,000 in the general to the candidate, but issues advocacy has 
grown into huge loophole. These so-called issues ads are not regulated 
at all and mention candidates by name. They directly attack candidates 
without any accountability. It is brutal. I have seen them. I have seen 
them from both sides.

  I can tell you, it is totally unfair and totally unregulated and 
vicious. It is vicious. We have an opportunity in the McCain-Feingold 
bill to stop that and basically say, if you want to talk about an 
issue, that is fine, but you can't mention a candidate. If this is 
truly issue advocacy, you can't mention a candidate a few weeks before 
the election.
  If you want to talk about an issue day and night, talk about the 
issue, whether it is choice, the environment, health care, gun 
control--talk about it. But once you attack a candidate, that is not an 
issue ad. This is what the Feingold-McCain will go after.
  I think we owe a great big thank you to those two colleagues for 
pushing this and moving this. I have to say that I am very disappointed 
at some of the debate, because one of our colleagues who is leading the 
charge against this says, ``We are going to kill this bill and we're 
going to be proud to kill this bill.''
  I don't know why someone would feel proud to kill a reform bill that 
the American people want to see us do. I don't think it is a proud 
moment. I don't think it will be a proud moment if we can't move this 
forward.
  I am both hopeful and fearful at this point. Hopeful because, as long 
as we are here in this body and this measure is pending and the people 
are listening, there will be an outcry for reform; but I am fearful 
because of some of the statements I have heard.
  Let me close by saying what it is like to run in a State like 
California. I am told by the people with the calculators that if you 
figure out how much a candidate from California needs to raise in 6 
years to run for the U.S. Senate, you would have to raise $10,000 every 
day, 7 days a week, in order to meet your budget. That is not right. 
That is not the way I think the American people want us to spend our 
time. I also don't think the American people want to make this an 
exclusive club for multimillionaires.
  If we get to that stage where everyone here is independently wealthy 
and they really don't understand what life is all about, I think we 
will lose a very special aspect of what a representative democracy is.
  I am hopeful we will rise to the occasion. We have done it before in 
this body. We have a chance to do it again. I see the Senator from 
Minnesota is on his feet, and I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Minnesota is recognized.
  Mr. WELLSTONE. While we are waiting for amendments, I ask if I could 
have up to 15 minutes to speak as in morning business.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President, I want to pick up on some comments made 
by the Senator from California. First of all, I express my 
disappointment that we are really not debating this campaign finance 
reform bill. There are a lot of games that are being played right now.
  What we have--my colleague from California was saying there is no 
reason to talk about filling up the tree and poison pill provisions--
but what we have going on here is an amendment introduced by the 
majority leader that has an Orwellian title called the Paycheck 
Protection Act. It is really kind of a union label working people gag 
act. In any case, it is a killer amendment and has no business being on 
this bill.
  Senator Daschle, the minority leader, has said if the majority leader 
wants to have a debate on this division provision, we will deal with it 
separately. We will agree to a debate on it. We will have amendments 
and we will deal with it.
  But what is going on right now is that this amendment and this effort 
to fill up the tree means that there is no way in which other Senators 
can introduce amendments. For that matter, I don't see us having much 
of a debate. I am hopeful we will get back to this debate.
  I want to be clear with people in the country that the fact that you 
have a campaign finance reform bill hanging out there on the Senate 
calendar, I guess starting at the end of last week and yesterday, 
Monday, doesn't necessarily mean we have really a high-quality debate. 
I am not even going to speak that long because I want to wait for 
colleagues to come out here on the other side and have a full-scale 
debate on this piece of legislation.
  Mr. President, we are very close to passing a reform bill. In many 
ways I am pessimistic because I think this amendment that the majority 
leader has introduced is an amendment which may very well destroy our 
chances for passing reform legislation if it passes. On the other hand, 
I think people in the country are pretty smart about this. I think they 
see it for what it is. My hope is that there will be a few more 
Republicans that will join Senator McCain and Senator Collins and 
Senator Thompson and Senator Specter and we will have the ability to 
defeat this amendment and then go on to the McCain-Feingold bill.
  I am willing to admit people have different views about how to solve 
this problem. I am convinced this is the core problem. I don't think 
there is a more important issue. I think people in the country know it. 
The problem is that people hate this system and they know it, and I 
think they believe that Government too often responds to the interests 
of the wealthy and powerful and not them. I think they are probably 
right. Even though I think individuals here in the Senate and the House 
have a highly developed sense of public service, people can agree to 
disagree, but systematically you have a huge imbalance of power because 
this whole political process has become too dependent on the heavy 
hitters and the investors and the givers and the people who have a 
whole lot of money. That tilts the system in a very dangerous direction 
toward the very top of the population, and it leaves the vast majority 
of people out.
  It also means we have a very, if you will, distorted debate on 
issues. I don't think it is any accident that ultimately when it came 
down to how we did deficit reduction, a good part of

[[Page S10210]]

many of the areas we made reductions in affected vulnerable people, 
low- and moderate-income people who are not the big givers. I don't 
think it is any accident we left most of the tax loopholes and tax 
deductions alone, because then we would have had to take on the big 
givers. I don't think it is any accident that there are a whole lot of 
questions that deal with concentration of power. I will take the 
telecommunications industry, since I think we made a big mistake when 
we passed that piece of legislation. I think the flow of information in 
a democracy is the most precious thing we have, but in a way this whole 
issue of concentration of power gets taken off the table.
  I don't think it is any accident when we were debating universal 
health care coverage very fine Senators would say to me, ``There is no 
way we can take on the insurance industry given the power of the 
insurance industry.''
  This is very corrupting in a very systematic way--not in an 
individual way, but in a very systematic way. I just say I think if we 
don't get the job done or if we don't at least get half the job done or 
if we at least don't get a quarter of the job done, I think people will 
be disillusioned and they will have a right to be. We will have given 
them every justification, every reason for being disillusioned with us.

  Now, Senator McCain and Senator Feingold are both close colleagues 
and good friends. Senator Feingold is my colleague from the State of 
Wisconsin. We have all worked together on these reform issues. I was 
proud to be one of the original cosponsors of the bill with Senator 
Thompson. What we had was an original--it's a little like hot sauce; we 
have the McCain-Feingold original formula, and we have the McCain-
Feingold extra mild, which is the new formulation. The extra mild is 
meant to get us past the filibuster and any diversion from the majority 
side, and I hope it does. But I have to say that I don't even think the 
extra mild has enough zing in it. I know this is a good-faith effort to 
move us forward.
  Let me talk in very concrete terms about what all this means for 
people in the country. I will get back to this in a more extensive way 
when we have the debate. What has already been dropped out, I think, is 
a shame. I think Senators Feingold and McCain are disappointed, but 
they are trying to move forward on some reform. What has been dropped 
out of this is the agreed-upon spending limits, reducing the amount of 
money that is spent in exchange for discount broadcast advertising time 
and direct mailing expenses.
  In other words, the very part of the legislation that actually would 
have reduced the amount of money spent in our races, Senate and House 
races, has been taken out. Actually, the one provision of this bill 
that I think would have led to a more level playing field has been 
taken out already. I think that is a shame. The reason that I got so 
involved in this whole debate about reform from the word go was because 
I just think an obscene amount of money is spent. The reason I got 
involved was, back in 1989 and part of 1990, it was so disillusioning 
to me to have just about everybody I talked to tell me I didn't have a 
chance to win because I didn't have access to the money. That is all 
people would talk about.
  Actually, the provision of this legislation that directly deals with 
our raising money and our spending money in our campaigns and the 
connection to how we vote--even though I think all of us hope there is 
no connection, it certainly looks that way to people--has already been 
taken out. What is in this piece of legislation that I think is 
important--there is one provision I disagree with. In the aggregate we 
have now raised the amount of money individuals can contribute from 
$25,000 to $30,000 a year. I would not raise individual contributions 
at all. I think that just intensifies the problem of those people who 
have the big bucks being able to contribute more. Most people in North 
Carolina or Kansas or Minnesota cannot afford to contribute $100 a year 
much less collectively $30,000 a year.
  But we are now down to, as I said, an extra mild version. It doesn't 
have enough zing in it, from my point of view. But I understand it 
would represent a step forward if we keep it intact. Part of that deals 
with the unregulated money, the soft money, that goes to parties. I 
think it is terribly important to prohibit that because obscene amounts 
of money have been spent. We really saw that in the Presidential 
election. It essentially has become such a loophole that it has made 
people utterly disgusted with the system. A lot of what people have 
read about and heard about on TV has to do with soft money.
  There's a second part which my colleague was talking about, 
independent expenditures. It's the issue advocacy ads, which are 
terribly important to talk about because this is a huge loophole. If 
this gets stripped out of this piece of legislation, we will be making 
a huge mistake. I don't need to tell the people in Minnesota who 
followed the last election because there was about a million dollars 
spent on issue ads. They essentially run these ads on television and 
they bash you if you are a Democrat or a Republican--it depends who is 
doing it. They just don't say vote against you. There is no spending 
limits at all. So a huge problem, again, is with the unregulated money, 
which can be the soft money, which means that people can be 
contributing huge amounts of money to this, obscene amounts, which is 
used to buy elections.

  What this piece of legislation says is you can't do those ads. It 
becomes express advocacy if you do it in a 60-day period prior to the 
election and you use the name of the candidate. This is the bright-line 
test, which makes a whole lot of sense. You can't have perfection here. 
But if you drop that provision--and I know a lot of colleagues want to 
drop that provision--then what you will do is stop the soft money to 
the parties; it is just like Jello, you push in and it will all shift 
over to these issue advocacy ads. You will have all sorts of groups and 
organizations, and some you might like and some the Chair might like, 
some the Senator from North Carolina might like, some I would not like, 
but that is beside the point. You are going to have the same 
unregulated, obscene amount of money, no accountability, being spent in 
these elections, adding to the disillusionment of the people and used, 
by the way, for these attack ads, where they have been raising millions 
of dollars figuring out how to rip their opponent to shreds or how to 
prevent themselves from being ripped up into shreds. Hundreds of 
millions of dollars are spent like this, and it does not add one bit of 
information for one citizen in the United States. No wonder people hate 
this system. We ought to really try to build a little bit more 
accountability into this.
  Well, Mr. President, these are important provisions that we are 
talking about here. I think that this represents a huge step forward. 
Mr. President, what I would worry about--and I will sort of finish up 
this way--is these three scenarios, and when we get into the debate, I 
can go into all of them in more specifics. One scenario is that we have 
the majority leader's amendment. It really is, as my colleague said, 
extraneous to this legislation. We can have a separate debate on it 
later on. It is really essentially a union gag, worker gag amendment. 
It is harsh. It should not be on this bill. If it passes--and I think 
we can have the votes to defeat it--then we reach a huge impasse. I 
suppose that people can think we have a clever strategy here. But most 
people in the country know this is nothing more than an effort to 
waylay the whole reform effort. It won't work. We are only a vote or 
two away from defeating it. I think we can have Republicans and 
Democrats join together to do that.
  The second scenario I worry about as well, which is an already 
stripped-down version of McCain-Feingold, you will have the 60-day 
accountability on the issue ads taken out. You will raise campaign 
contributions and you will wind up with a piece of legislation that 
will have a fine-sounding acronym, that made-for-Congress look, but as 
a matter of fact, it will just shift the amount of money, spent in a 
different way. It will be an obscene amount of money. It will still 
undercut democracy. You will still have all of this money spent, and 
when people in the country find out that not much really has changed, 
they will be furious, discouraged, disengaged, and none of us benefit. 
I hope that doesn't happen.
  The third thing that could happen is that the McCain-Feingold, what I 
called extra mild, the new formulation,

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will pass. Again, there is not enough zing in it, from my point of 
view, but I think it would represent a step forward. I mean, the 
provisions in the McCain-Feingold extra mild would be a step forward. 
It would be a reform effort. It would build some more accountability 
into the system. It would lessen some of the money that was spent, and 
I think it would give people some confidence that we are serious in 
this Congress about trying to change this system, this mix of money and 
politics, which so severely undercuts democracy.
  Now, a final point, if I have 2 minutes left. There is a whole lot of 
energy around the country at the State level. I mean, Vermont just 
passed a clean money election option. Maine passed it. I know that 
Massachusetts is going to deal with this question. This is an effort 
that I love. I have introduced a bill with Senators Kerry, Biden, and 
Glenn which basically says we are going to get all of the private money 
out, the big dollars out, and I think ultimately this is the direction 
we have to go in. I will tell you something. People around the country 
at the State level are saying yes to that.
  So, colleagues, people are serious about reform. This is one of those 
moments in time. As the Senator from Minnesota, I am very discouraged 
that we are not out here debating this. Let's finish this 
appropriations bill that my colleagues from North Carolina and 
California are managing, the D.C. appropriations bill, and let's have 
the debate on campaign finance reform. Let's not have amendments out 
here that are nothing less than an effort to destroy this reform 
effort. Let's debate the stripped-down McCain-Feingold measure and get 
on and pass the reform bill.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The time of the Senator has expired.

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