[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 70 (Wednesday, June 3, 1998)]
[House]
[Pages H4044-H4047]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 7, 1997, the gentleman from Connecticut (Mr. Shays) is 
recognized for 60 minutes.
  Mr. SHAYS. Mr. Speaker, I want to address the Chamber on campaign 
finance reform and to just base some brief remarks about that.
  First, I wish to express tremendous gratitude to the 104th Congress 
for the work it did on a bipartisan basis to pass Congressional 
accountability. Getting Congress under all the laws that we impose on 
the rest of the Nation was the first bill that the 104th Congress, the 
Congress of the last term, presented to President Clinton to sign, and 
it puts Congress under all the laws it exempted itself from, the civil 
rights laws, OSHA, fair pay provisions, a 40 hour workweek and so on.
  Now, some Members of Congress may not like all those laws, but the 
fact is that we imposed those laws on the rest

[[Page H4045]]

of the Nation, and we need to make sure we abide by them ourselves. We 
will write better laws if we have to live by the laws that we impose on 
the rest of the Nation. That was the first bill we passed, and I think 
it is a major reform.
  Another reform was the gift ban. We were going to model what was in 
the Senate side to limit gifts. In fact, we actually outlawed any gift, 
unless it was inconsequential. A hat or a T-shirt would still be 
allowed under our rules, but we got rid of all those free meals that 
were quite expensive and being abused, and that was a reform that 
passed on a bipartisan basis.
  We also passed a lobby disclosure bill in the last term. The 
significance of that was it had not been amended since 1947, and in 
1954 the Supreme Court basically gutted the provisions, so we had a 
very weak lobby disclosure law. The 104th Congress passed lobby 
disclosure.
  Congressional accountability, getting us under all the laws we impose 
on the rest of the Nation, gift ban, lobby disclosure, passed in the 
last Congress on a bipartisan basis, and they are reforms I am very 
proud we passed.
  The one area we left really unanswered was campaign finance reform. 
We have had votes during the 11 years I have been here, but we have 
never really coalesced on a bipartisan basis around a bill that we 
could pass. There was one bill presented to President Bush, but when 
that bill had the opportunity to be presented to President Clinton, it 
never got there.
  Right now we have an historic opportunity to take up 11 substitute 
bills on campaign finance reform. We have a complete and open rule. We 
will have nongermane amendments made in order. There are important 
amendments, but the technicality of not being germane will be 
disallowed by the Committee on Rules. In other words, they will make in 
order these nongermane amendments that some perceive will improve the 
very substitutes that will be offered.
  I would like to address one of those substitutes. I would like to 
address the McCain-Feingold bill in the Senate and a bill that my 
colleague, the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Meehan) and I and so 
many other Members on the Republican and Democrat sides of the aisle 
have offered.
  One of the substitutes, referred to as either Meehan-Shays or Shays-
Meehan or McCain-Feingold or Feingold-McCain, is a bipartisan amendment 
that bans soft money. Now, soft money is the unlimited sums that 
individuals, corporations, labor unions and other interest groups give 
to the political parties, supposedly for party building and 
registration, but they get right back down to the candidates and have 
circumvented our campaign laws. We seek to ban soft money on both the 
Federal and State level for Federal candidates.
  We also want to call the sham issue ads what they are, campaign ads. 
We want to make sure that these issue ads that really are campaign ads 
are called what they are, campaign ads. Therefore, they come under the 
campaign laws.
  We do this by adding to the ``magic word test'' that moves an issue 
ad to a campaign ad. Right now an issue ad that says ``vote for'' or 
``vote against,'' ``reelect,'' ``defeat'', that trips from an issue ad 
into a campaign ad and then comes under campaign laws.

                              {time}  2015

  It does not mean people's freedom of speech has been deprived, it 
just means they come under the same rules that everyone else comes 
under who has to abide by the campaign laws.
  We do this by adding another provision to the magic word test. If you 
use the candidate's name or an image of that candidate, it becomes a 
campaign ad 60 days prior to an election. When it becomes a campaign 
ad, it means that the expenditures have to be reported and the limits 
of contributions have to be adhered to. It means that no corporate 
money can be used in those ads, and no union dues money can be used in 
those ads.
  We also codify Beck. The Beck decision is a decision by the Supreme 
Court that says if you are not a union worker, your agency fee, does 
not have to include money going for political purposes. It means you 
will pay less.
  We codify the Beck decision and require that unions notify nonunion 
members covered by union contracts that they do not have to participate 
in the political process through their union dues.
  We also improve the, Federal Election Commission's, disclosure and 
enforcement requirements. Disclosure will be done by filing 
electronically within 4 hours after receiving a major contribution in 
the last 20 days of an election; and then 48 hours later it will be 
made public and be available on the Internet for anyone who is 
interested.
  We also say that wealthy candidates can contribute up to $50,000 to 
their own campaigns and still have the $62,000 contribution from their 
political party. But anything more than $50,000 means that then the 
political parties cannot contribute to a wealthy candidate who is using 
his or her own money.
  We ban unsolicited mass mailings using the frank 6 months prior to 
the election. That means, by May no franked mail can be sent that is 
district-wide, the kind that would be a newsletter or questionnaire.
  Then we also make sure that it is clear that foreign money and money 
raised on government property is illegal. We would intuitively think it 
is illegal. But if it is soft money, it is basically viewed by most as 
not being illegal.
  In other words, it is not illegal to call from the White House or 
from Congress for a soft money donation, because soft money, the 
unlimited sums that individuals, corporations, and labor unions give to 
the political parties, is not deemed campaign money. It is deemed soft 
money for party building. We know now it is used as campaign money; but 
technically, under the law, someone who seeks foreign money 
contributions or raises money from a government building is not 
breaking the law.
  Now, I believe strongly that we need to hold every executive branch 
employee accountable for his or her actions, and every President. One 
of my concerns has been that my own party is very eager to hold 
President Clinton accountable for wrongdoing, and that part I 
acknowledge is important, but then there is a big disconnect because 
too many of my own party do not want to do the other part of that 
process. The other part of the process is to reform the law where it 
needs to be reformed.
  When this Congress investigated President Nixon, a Democrat Congress, 
they did two things. They held President Nixon accountable for the 
misdeeds he did and his administration did, and they reformed the law, 
the 1974 campaign finance law reforms. They did both. They held the 
President accountable and they reformed the system. In my view, that 
gave them credibility to look at what the President had done.
  Unfortunately, in this Chamber too many of my colleagues, I think, on 
the other side of the aisle do not want to hold the President 
accountable where he needs to be held accountable but want to reform 
the system, which I am grateful for. Too many on my side of the aisle 
want to hold the President accountable but do not want to reform the 
system. We have to do both. That is our job. Our job is to do both.
  In the next few weeks we will be debating a constitutional amendment 
presented by the gentleman from Texas (Mr. DeLay), and then we will be 
debating 11 substitutes. One of them is a commission bill. The 
commission bill has merit, if it was not being compared to a bill that 
bans soft money and takes the sham issue ads and calls them what they 
are, campaign ads, codifies Beck, improves the FEC disclosure and 
enforcement, deals with franking, and makes illegal the foreign money 
and fund-raising on government property. You might need a commission 
bill if you did not have this bill to choose.
  But we are going to deal with 11 substitutes and we have a fair and 
open rule. Any amendments can be offered. It means we are going to have 
extensive debate on the floor. It means it is going to be protracted. 
It is going to be a very long process.
  But I do think, if Members on both sides of the aisle just do what 
they think is right, if they try not to be partisan in the process, 
that this will be a good education for us and the American people.
  My hope is the commission bill will not pass, at least not get as 
many votes as the Shays-Meehan or Meehan-Shays

[[Page H4046]]

bill, because we structured the debate so that 11 substitutes are being 
offered, and each substitute can have unlimited amendments.
  So we are going to take each substitute, we are going to debate it, 
offer amendments, and then we are going to vote it up or down. It is 
conceivable that the commission bill could get 230 votes. If it did, 
and Meehan-Shays or Shays-Meehan got 225, even though the Shays-Meehan 
bill got more than 218 votes it is trumped by one that did better.
  My hope is that while the commission bill, under certain 
circumstances, on a certain day and at a certain time would have made 
sense, it does not make sense now. I am hoping that my colleagues will 
choose not to vote for that bill and trump the Meehan-Shays bill.
  I am also hopeful that the bill offered by the freshmen, which is a 
bipartisan bill and has many meritorious parts to it, it bans soft 
money on the Federal level, not the State, and we think while we have 
an honest disagreement with our colleagues, mostly freshmen, that we 
just think it really relocates a lot of the soft money to the States' 
political parties for them to spend for the candidates.
  We feel that you have to deal with the sham issue ads. I mean, we 
have an extraordinary problem that these ads have become more and more 
blatant and more and more dishonest. They are dishonest in not 
disclosing who is paying for them allowing unlimited sums by some 
individuals. They also allow groups that may represent a particular 
interest that do not want to disclose their interest, to spend money 
and campaign against an opponent without disclosing that their real 
interest is something else.
  For example, the NRA, the National Rifle Association, may campaign 
against someone, never bringing up the issue that they really oppose 
them on, that person supported the assault weapon ban, and making it 
sound like that candidate is bad for other reasons. We want the NRA to 
just be up front and say it is their ad, and we want them to have to 
abide by all the rules that anyone else has to disclose where they get 
their money, and raise their money under the requirements of the 
campaign law.

  You will have pro-choice groups and pro-life groups that want to do 
the same thing. And you have pro-assault weapon ban groups as well as 
the NRA that opposes the assault weapon ban. So it is going to apply to 
everyone, and it should.
  The bottom line is that we are going to have extensive debate on 
campaign finance reform in the next few weeks. I am very hopeful that 
it will do credit to this Congress to debate this issue. That is why I 
ran for public office, not to deal with this issue behind closed doors 
but to do it in the light of day.
  I conclude by pointing out that some on my side of the aisle, in 
particular, will say behind closed doors that the American people do 
not care about campaign finance reform. I challenge them to say it 
publicly. I submit that the American people do care about campaign 
finance reform. They are not apathetic, they are just frustrated. I 
think we sometimes confuse their frustrations with apathy.
  I send out a questionnaire in the fall of the first year; and then in 
the winter of the second year, I sent out the results. I also send out 
every vote that I have made in the first year. This document will tell 
people how I voted on every issue, besides also pointing out where I 
had 38 community meetings that people could come to.
  But in the questionnaire results, I asked the question, which is the 
most important issue for Congress to address? That was question A. 
There were about 30 choices, or close to that. The last choice was 
``other'', in case they had something other than the choices I offered. 
The balanced budget came up as the first concern, the most important 
issue. Tax is the second. Campaign finance reform came third. Some 
could say, well, it was only their third choice. It beat education, 
health care and crime.
  Admittedly, it was a mutually exclusive list, so only 8.3 percent of 
my constituents chose that as the most important issue. I would not 
have even been one of them. As much as I believe campaign finance 
reform is important, I would have chosen the balanced budget as the 
most important issue to deal with, getting our country's financial 
house in order.
  It does not mean that I think taxes or campaign finance reform or 
education or health care are unimportant, they are just not my first 
choice. But it showed up as the third choice in the question, what is 
the most important issue? It showed up as the seventh choice as what is 
the second most important issue.
  Then I made this very biased statement and asked my constituents 
whether or not they agreed with it: Our democracy is threatened by the 
influence of unlimited campaign contributions by individuals, 
corporations, labor unions, and other interest groups. Our democracy is 
threatened.
  I asked people whether they strongly agreed, agreed, no opinion, 
disagreed, strongly disagreed. The response was the following: 51.7 
percent of my constituents believed that our democracy is threatened by 
the influence of unlimited campaign contributions by individuals, 
corporations, labor unions, and other interest groups.
  The unlimited contributions, that is soft money. That is what we are 
banning. And 32.5 percent of my constituents agreed with that 
statement. In other words, 84.2 percent of my constituents believe our 
democracy is threatened by soft money, the unlimited campaign 
contributions by individuals, corporations, labor unions, and other 
interest groups.
  I realize that every district is different. I realize that I 
represent a district of very informed voters, in many cases well-to-do, 
although I have a lot of poor people who live in my urban areas of 
Stamford and Norwalk and Bridgeport. But when 84.2 percent of my 
constituents believe their democracy is threatened, it certainly is a 
message to me.
  I wager if other Members ask the same question, they would get the 
same result. They could have chosen that they had no opinion or they 
disagreed or they strongly disagreed with the statement, but 84 percent 
of my constituents strongly agree or agree.
  I am hopeful, almost prayerful, that we will be able to look back at 
the end of this month and say we did our job, we responded to the 
wishes of our constituency, and we also responded to our own intuitive 
sense.
  I do not think there is a Member in this Chamber who does not 
recognize that soft money is polluting the system. It has become a 
narcotic that both political parties are getting addicted to.
  My hat is off to my colleagues on the other side of the aisle who 
have taken a disproportionate share of support for the Meehan-Shays or 
Shays-Meehan bill, and I am respectfully appreciative of my colleagues 
on this side of the aisle who are taking a strong stand for this bill, 
even though they still constitute a minority of those who are 
supporting Shays-Meehan or Meehan-Shays.
  I thank my colleagues on both sides of the aisle and particularly, if 
I could, my colleagues on this side of the aisle for kind of bucking 
the trend. I think you are doing the right thing. I am convinced of it. 
I believe if we do the right thing, if we ban soft money, if we call 
sham issue ads what they are, campaign ads, and have them come under 
the campaign laws, and have everyone have their freedom of voice under 
the same rules that everyone else has to deal with, codify Beck, 
improve FEC disclosure and enforcement, make sure that wealthy 
candidates cannot buy an election by getting support from the political 
parties when they are already putting so much of their own money in, 
banning unsolicited franked mass mailings 6 months to an election, and 
making sure that foreign money and raising money on government property 
is illegal, making sure that that is illegal, passing that bill without 
amendment, without amendment, and sending it on back to the Senate, I 
think that you will see an amazing response from our Senators.

                              {time}  2030

  I think they will know that this House had the courage to do what was 
right, and there will be extraordinary pressure, and maybe even a bit 
of conscience taking on the part of our Senators, saying, ``We know 
only 53 voted for it last time,'' which is a majority in the Senate, 
``we need to pick up 7 more votes.''

[[Page H4047]]

  But I feel pretty confident that if we do our job, the Senate will do 
its job and pass their bill, McCain-Feingold, which is the compatible 
piece to Shays-Meehan.

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