[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.

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