[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 146 (2000), Part 11]
[House]
[Pages 15212-15213]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                    VICTIM OF ``DRIVE-BY'' POLITICS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Brady of Texas). Under a previous order 
of the House, the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Tancredo) is recognized 
for 5 minutes.
  Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, earlier today I was talking to a gentleman 
from Common Cause. I had called him in regard to a statement that they 
sent out asking all Congressmen to sign the statement. One of the 
points on the statement that they were asking us to sign on to was a 
commitment to vote for any ban on soft money, banning all soft money 
going to political organizations coming from corporations, coming from 
unions, coming from wealthy individuals.
  We got to talking about this. I had called them and asked them to 
give me their thoughts on this because, of course, this kind of thing 
happens often, the kind of thing that they are trying to deal with; and 
they explained that for a long time there had been a relatively 
effective ban on the kind of money coming into politics that has a 
corrupting influence. They use the words ``corrupting influence.'' It 
started with the Teddy Roosevelt era. But that interestingly in 1992, 
the Clinton campaign found a way around it and found a way that they 
could use soft money in the creation of ads attacking their opponents 
but doing so sort of in a way that separated them from the ad itself. 
They could set up these dummy little organizations and run ads that 
were not part of the campaign, and they could use soft money to fund 
it. So all of a sudden they found this loophole. Now everybody is doing 
it, essentially. Once they found out how to do it, both parties use it 
and certainly many, many organizations use it.
  Members know the kind of ad that I am talking about. Many people have 
seen these ads run, where the group comes on, they usually have some 
name you have never heard of and they will say something like, gee 
whiz, isn't it horrible that certain Congressmen would do X, Y or Z. 
Why don't you call them and ask them why they did such a terrible 
thing.
  Now, Common Cause says that this kind of thing has a corrupting 
influence on the system, and that is why they would like to try to stop 
it. They want to try to stop these thinly veiled

[[Page 15213]]

partisan attacks called issue ads if they could. At least they want to 
stop the funding that goes into them. They say, as I said, that there 
is a corrupting influence on the system as a result of it.
  I would like to give Members a real-life experience that will point 
out how corrupt organizations can, in fact, help corrupt the system by 
making Americans even more cynical. I refer back to a situation that 
occurred on the floor of this House during the debate on the VA-HUD 
appropriations act.
  There was an amendment to that act offered by the gentleman from New 
York (Mr. Hinchey). The amendment struck certain language in the 
original bill, actually committee language. The committee language was 
not mandatory. The committee language simply was urging EPA to do or 
not do two things, two or three things. It had no force beyond just 
saying we urge the EPA. It did not take any money away from the EPA if 
they did it. It was a sense of the committee that they should not do 
whatever they were planning on doing.
  In this case they were saying, please don't force water companies 
throughout the United States to go through the expense of trying to 
find a standard, a purer standard for water, especially with the 
elimination of arsenic from the water, until you set the standard. Tell 
us what the standard will be. Then of course these companies can try to 
meet it. But if you do not set the standard right away, you will have 
companies spending all the money getting to a certain point, and that 
point might not be the one that you eventually determine to be correct. 
So set the standard. And, by the way, you are suggesting that the 
standard be 5 parts per billion, EPA, and that makes absolutely no 
sense; there is no scientific evidence to support that that is the kind 
of standard we should have, so please look at that.
  It also said, by the way, we should not dredge the Hudson River, as 
you are planning on doing, because when you dredge, the committee said, 
you stir up the sediments and in fact you put a lot of carcinogenic 
material into the water supply. So we strongly urge you not to do that.
  That was the committee language. The amendment that came to this 
floor struck that. It would have essentially said, go ahead to the EPA, 
set the standard at 5, or at least wait as long as you want to do it 
and go ahead and dredge. So a vote against that amendment was a vote 
essentially, especially when you talk about sediments, it was certainly 
a vote for clean water.
  I think, by the way, 216 Members of this House voted against the 
amendment and prevailed. They were in the majority. I was one that 
voted against the amendment. Shortly thereafter, the Sierra Club began 
to run ads in my district against me, essentially saying that I was for 
dirty water. This is the kind of corrupting influence, saying something 
like that which is, by the way, libelous. It is not just wrong, it is 
libelous. But they did it, and this is the kind of thing that Common 
Cause is talking about, and this is the kind of thing that should be 
stopped.

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