[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 142 (Monday, September 24, 2007)]
[Senate]
[Pages S11997-S11998]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
[[Page S11997]]
UNANIMOUS CONSENT REQUEST--S. 223
Mrs. FEINSTEIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the
Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 96, S.
223, a bill to require Senate candidates to file designations,
statements, and reports in electronic forms; that the committee-
reported amendment be considered and agreed to; the bill, as amended,
be read three times, passed, and the motion to reconsider be laid upon
the table with no intervening action.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
Mr. ENSIGN. Reserving the right to object, I have no objection to the
underlying bill, but there is an issue that I had an amendment that I
wish to add to the bill, if the Senator from California would agree. We
have a problem going on in the Senate where there are outside groups
that are filing ethics complaints and they are doing it for purely
political reasons.
I think we could fix that, at least having transparency, to where if
someone files an ethics complaint against a Senator from the outside,
they would have to disclose their donors. So if this is being done
purely for political reasons, then we would find that out, because we
could see who the donors are. We need to protect the institution. We
need to protect individual Senators from purely politically motivated
ethics complaints that come against us that sometimes we will have to
run up legal bills and all kinds of other things. If it is done purely
for partisan reasons, we need to know that, and transparency is the
best way to do it. If the Senator from California would modify her
unanimous consent request to reflect and to add this portion, that at a
time to be determined by the majority leader, in consultation with the
Republican leader, the Senate proceed to consideration of Calendar No.
96, S. 223, under the following limitations: that the committee-
reported amendment be agreed to, and that the only other amendment in
order be an Ensign amendment related to transparency and disclosure,
with 1 hour of debate equally divided in the usual form on the bill and
the amendment to run concurrently, and that following the use or
yielding back of the time, the Senate proceed to a vote in relation to
the Ensign amendment, and that the bill, as amended, then be read a
third time, and the Senate proceed to a vote on passage of the bill,
with no intervening action or debate. Would the Senator modify her
request?
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
Mrs. FEINSTEIN. If I may, reserving the right to object, I wish to
make a comment or two, if I might. This proposal would require all
organizations that filed ethics complaints to publicly disclose any
individual or entity that has donated $5,000 or more to that
organization. If the good Senator from Nevada would be willing, I would
be very willing to have this proposal considered in the Rules Committee
in a prompt way. I would not like to hold up passing this commonsense
simple filing bill, and I don't want to debate the merits at this time.
This bill Senator Ensign is proposing is not germane to the basic bill
before us. It would quite likely be a poison pill that would kill any
chance of us getting the electronically filed bill enacted into law at
this time.
I reiterate the offer to hear it in a prompt manner in the Rules
Committee, but I must object to it at this time. I do so object.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard.
Mr. ENSIGN. I object to the original unanimous consent.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard on that as well.
Mrs. FEINSTEIN. I thank the Senator.
Mr. President, on the original bill, which has just been objected to,
twice in April, first on April 17 and then on April 26, I rose to ask
unanimous consent that the Senate take up and pass S. 223. It was
reported out by the Committee on Rules on March 28. In the first case
Senator Alexander objected on behalf of a Republican Senator. In the
second, Senator Bunning rose to object on behalf of the Republican
side. But to this date, no Republican Senator has come forward to
acknowledge placing a hold on this bill and say why the bill should not
become law.
I wrote the minority leader on May 27 asking for his help in learning
who was opposed to the bill and why. But no Members have yet come
forward to identify themselves. This is a simple, direct bill with
respect to transparency. It is an idea whose time has long come.
Everybody else does it, and so it is very hard for me to understand who
could oppose this and what their reason for opposing it could be.
At our hearing on March 14 and at our markup on March 28, it was
clear there was no public opposition to this proposal. I believe it is
time for the Senate to act. The bill is entitled Senate Campaign
Disclosure Parity Act. It is sponsored by Senator Feingold, who sits
behind me in the Chamber, Senator Cochran, and 30 other Senators. It
would require that Senate campaign finance reports be filed
electronically rather than in paper format.
Currently House candidates, Presidential candidates, political action
committees, and party committees are all required to file
electronically. But Senators, Senate candidates, authorized campaign
committees of Senators, and the Democratic and Republican Senate
campaign committees are exempted. So we operate the Senate separately
from everybody else.
Is this practical? The answer is no. It is cumbersome. Paper copies
of disclosure reports are filed with the Senate Office of Public
Records. They scan them. They make an electronic copy, and they send
the copy to the FEC on a dedicated communications line. The FEC then
prints the report, sends it to a vendor in Fredericksburg, VA, where
the information is keyed in by hand and then transferred back to the
FEC database at a cost of approximately $250,000 to the taxpayers. Of
course, during this convoluted period, there is no transparency.
Therefore, the reports are not available for public scrutiny.
It is long past time to bring the Senate into the modern era and to
recognize that transparency is a part of a political process. I urge my
colleagues on both sides of the aisle to join me in ensuring timely
access and disclosure of campaign finance activities to the public. The
sponsor of this bill, Senator Feingold, has joined me today to urge
passage of this bill.
Thanks to the enactment of S. 1, there is a new reason why we are
doing this today. Section 512 of S. 1 now requires Members placing a
hold on a bill to come forward and identify themselves. To the best of
my knowledge, no Member has yet used this section to break through the
anonymity of a Senate hold. I believe it is appropriate that this
provision be asserted now for the first time in connection with a bill
that is all about transparency. I think it might be useful for me to
read it, since it is now the law:
Section 512 (a) In General.--the Majority and Minority
Leaders of the Senate or their designees shall recognize a
notice of intent of a Senator who is a member of their caucus
to object proceeding to a measure or matter only if the
Senator (1) following the objection to a unanimous consent to
proceeding to, and, or passage of, a measure or matter on
their behalf, submits a notice of intent in writing to the
appropriate leader or their designee; and (2) not later than
6 session days after submission under paragraph (1), submits
for inclusion in the Congressional Record and in the
applicable calendar section described in subsection (b) the
following notice: ``I, Senator [whoever it is] intend to
object to proceeding to [name the bill], dated, for the
following reasons.''
So if 6 Senate days from now the hold on this bill will become
evident, it has been a rolling hold up until now, but now, after 6
days, we must know who it is.
I would believe if there are efforts to obfuscate this section of the
law candidly, we should amend the law to prevent that from happening.
This is a simple bill. Everybody is for it. Nobody wants to say who is
against it. I think that should become apparent. I believe Senator
Feingold and I hope Senator Cochran, the cosponsor of the bill--and
they have dozens of cosponsors--would agree.
I wish to acknowledge Senator Feingold, if I may, and I yield the
remainder of my time to him and also thank him for his leadership on
this issue.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Wisconsin.
Mr. FEINGOLD. Mr. President, I, of course, thank the Senator from
California, who is chair of the key committee on this bill, for her
persistence in trying to get this bill through the Senate. We came to
the floor twice this
[[Page S11998]]
spring to try to get consent to pass the Senate Campaign Disclosure
Parity Act. Each time an objection was made on behalf of an
unidentified Republican Senator. Yet no Senator had come to us to let
us know what his or her objection to the bill is. The source of the
objection apparently didn't want to be identified, but when the
President signed the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act last
week, as Senator Feinstein pointed out, S. 1, fortunately, secret holds
become a thing of the past, and I am very proud to have been deeply
involved with passage of that legislation. So if an objection was
lodged today, the objecting Senator would have had to come forward in 6
session days.
As far as I know, this was going to be the first test of the new rule
on secret holds, and I was looking forward to learning who the real
objector was, as the rule requires, if an objection was made on behalf
of an unidentified Senator. But now it appears that the Senator from
Nevada has actually identified himself as the objector to the bill, so
we know what is going on here.
I believe the new provision under the new law is the reason this
individual identified himself. I don't think that would have happened
had it not been for the positive deterrent effect this new legislation
has. Senator Feinstein and I can cite this as the first time this was
successfully forced in the case of a secret hold.
This underlying bill about disclosure, which I authored along with
others, is completely noncontroversial. This simply put Senate
campaigns under the same obligation to file their reports
electronically that the House and Presidential campaigns have been
forced to do for years. There is simply no reason that the information
in Senate campaign finance reports should remain less accessible to the
public than any other campaign finance reports. We are now at 41
bipartisan cosponsors. As the Senator from California pointed out, not
a single concern about the bill was heard in the Rules Committee. The
bill passed by voice vote, and no one has come to us with any concerns
about it at all. So the time has come to get it done. The Senator from
Nevada has made an alternative proposal to bring up the bill but to
make an amendment in order. The amendment he wants to offer, however,
has nothing to do with this bill. Indeed, it is a very controversial
proposal to require groups that file ethics complaints to disclose
their donors. I am sure the charitable and advocacy organizations will
find this amendment quite controversial. It should be referred to the
appropriate committee and given very searching study before it is
offered on the floor. As the Senator from California said, it would
certainly be a poison pill for the underlying bill, which thus far has
had no public opposition whatsoever. So I am pleased the Senator from
California objected. We are happy to make that objection very public.
I thank the chairman of the committee, the Senator from California. I
will say again, it looks as though we made a little bit of progress. No
longer is there a secret hold on the bill. Instead, the Senator from
Nevada has made it plain he is the one holding up the bill by insisting
on offering an unrelated amendment. That is unfortunate, but at least
we know what we are dealing with. I hope in the days ahead we will be
able to prevail on him to change his approach.
There are some bills where it is simply not appropriate to seek to
add extraneous and controversial amendments. The amendment he has
proposed is surely a poison pill for this bill, and we need to get this
bill in place soon so these requirements of disclosure will apply
during the 2008 election season.
Once again, I truly thank the Senator from California, and I look
forward to getting this bill passed in the near future.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Ohio.
Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in
morning business.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
The Senator from Ohio.
____________________