[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 67 (Friday, May 22, 1998)]
[House]
[Page H3941]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Everett). Under a previous order of the
House, the gentleman from Kentucky (Mr. Whitfield) is recognized for 5
minutes.
Mr. WHITFIELD. Mr. Speaker, as a result of the 1996 presidential
elections, the Nation's news media and many other people began to focus
upon the way campaigns are financed in America. This focus was
generated because of the Clinton/Gore campaign violating provisions
that said, you cannot receive funds from foreign sources.
The Democratic Party is not the only one guilty of violating campaign
finance laws, whether deliberately or not deliberately, because they
are very complex.
I would like to suggest to my colleagues that when people talk about
campaign finance, they focus on two things. First of all, they talk
about special interests as if it was something horrible. Yet what
special interest means is that any citizen belonging to any group in
America, whether it be a nurse, a labor union member, a doctor, a
tobacco farmer, a teacher, whatever, has a right to speak on issues
that affect them and to join together with others to speak on issues
that affect them.
Those are what you refer to as special interests. That is all that
they are. All of us have some special interest. So I do not see that
there is anything particularly negative about having a special
interest.
The second thing that people talk about in a very negative way is
this term ``soft money.'' Now, what is soft money? Soft money is money
spent by any organization in America, any individual in America, any
political party in America, regardless of their philosophy, to take
time on television or in the newspapers or on the radio to educate the
American people about issues that affect them. And they pay for that
with their money. And when they run these ads, they are required to put
at the bottom of the television the group that paid for it. But we all
talk about soft money, and those who are advocating the Shays-Meehan
bill and others are talking about, we have got to get rid of soft
money.
Now, what is hard money? Hard money is money that candidates
themselves and their committees spend to expressly ask that you defeat
or elect a particular candidate. And hard money is regulated by the
Federal Government, and it has been for some time. But reformers, when
they talk about reform, it is interesting to note that they never want
to talk very much about the hard money. That is the money they spend.
They want to talk about the soft money. That is the money that can be
spent by any person in America. And the Supreme Court has repeatedly
said that it is a constitutionally protected right.
So in the Shays-Meehan bill, for example, they talk about any time
within 60 days of an election, they broaden the definition of express
advocacy to include any ad run 60 days prior to the election and they
would stop those ads from being run, if it is paid for by soft money.
It would be stopped.
And when you do that, this is what you end up guaranteeing will
happen. Sixty days before an election, there will be two groups talking
about candidates running for office, the candidates themselves will be
running their ads and then the only other group speaking will be the
news media through editorials. And it is not surprising that the news
media editorialize all the time about we need campaign finance reform,
because the way these bills are designed to eliminate soft money, the
American people's money, the interest groups, the labor unions, the
pro-choice, the environmentalists, the management groups, whatever,
eliminating them spending their money, then you get down to a point
that the news media is the only entity that will be editorializing on
which candidate should be supported.
I hope that as we continue this discussion that we will think deeply
about these terms and what they really mean.
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