[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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