[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 161 (2015), Part 7]
[House]
[Pages 9605-9606]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                        CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
California (Mr. McNerney) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. McNERNEY. Mr. Speaker, this afternoon, I am going to talk about 
campaign finance reform.
  First of all, though, I want to say that the United States of America 
is the greatest country in the world. You can see by our economic 
dominance, by our cultural dominance, and by our military power. But we 
face some very big challenges. Unless we are able to tackle those 
challenges, our dominance may be in peril.
  Some of those challenges are climate change, global competitiveness. 
We need to make sure our manufacturing is up to par and can compete 
with any country on Earth. We have a vanishing middle class, which is 
very devastating to our country. We have a crumbling infrastructure. We 
also need to work on our educational system. But I can tell you, it is 
very difficult to attack any of these problems in a serious way with 
the current system of campaign financing.
  So let me go over some of the problems with campaign financing in our 
current system:
  First of all, you can see on the list here, campaign financing makes 
elected officials less effective because of the amount of time that we 
must spend raising money for the next election, which leaves less time 
to work on the issues that need to move our country forward.
  The campaign money fuels negative campaign ads that turn off voters 
and suppress vote turnout.
  Campaign financing causes wasteful government spending on programs 
that big donors want to see out there.
  The threat of negative campaign adds--and this is very corrosive--
causes elected officials to avoid taking stands and leadership on 
important issues, and this reduces the effectiveness of our government 
institutions.

                              {time}  1215

  Nowadays, even our judicial races are becoming expensive and tainted 
by the influence of money.
  Next, people have become cynical about the government and 
disillusioned about the United States of America because, in part, of 
negative advertising.
  Next, the super-PACs and dark money coming into campaigns are no 
longer controlled by the candidates on the ballot.
  Lastly--and I think this is very important--excessive election 
spending drowns out free speech. If you look at campaign ads, what is 
happening is that the Big Money comes in, buys all the campaign ad time 
on TV, and floods our mailboxes with literature.
  People are only going to listen to so much campaign rhetoric, so they 
turn it off. The people with the most money are the ones who are 
listened to, and the ideas of the folks without much money are never 
heard. They don't ever get very far. I think this is a very critical 
issue.
  We see the problems that we have with the current system; but how do 
we change it? There are some very big challenges that we face in terms 
of changing the current campaign financing system.
  First of all, the Supreme Court of the United States of America has 
shown a very strong bias in the last decade or so toward putting more 
money in politics. That is right. The Supreme Court has made it so that 
more money is coming into politics and election campaigns every single 
year.
  The Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court ruled that 
corporations have the same free speech rights as people, allowing 
corporations to use their treasuries to finance campaigns. I can't 
think of anything that would be more corrosive to campaigns than to see 
a plethora of corporate and union money coming in with no controls and 
controlling the message.
  In fact, just this year, the Republicans in the House and the Senate 
passed legislation that increases the total that an individual American 
citizen can contribute to political parties almost by a factor of 10, 
going from $35,000 to $300,000, so an individual can donate $300,000 to 
a political campaign; yet there is significant public support for 
taking money out of politics.
  According to a June 2015 New York Times-CBS poll, 84 percent of 
Americans say money has too much influence in politics, and 85 percent 
of those surveyed said that the campaign financing system should be 
either completely rebuilt or fundamentally changed.
  The growth of money in politics represents a threat to our cherished 
democratic institutions that were built by our Founding Fathers. This 
is not what the American people want for our democracy. It is critical 
to inform the American public about what is happening and what can be 
done about the problem. There are reform options of two kinds.
  The first kind is legislative reform actions, and there are three or 
four

[[Page 9606]]

types of those. The first and most important is disclosure and 
transparency, and then there are constitutional amendments. 
Constitutional amendments are very hard to pass, but they are not 
subject to be overturned by the Supreme Court. I have a proposed 
constitutional amendment, H.J. Res. 31, which will do away with PACs 
and super-PACs.
  I hope the American public will examine those alternatives and decide 
what they want to see because our system is in desperate need of 
change.

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