Russell Feingold

Mr. FEINGOLD

Mr. FEINGOLD. It is interesting that the Senator makes that comment because a few years ago, for example, there was no question that Philip Morris could not write out a million-dollar check and run ads like that, but somehow now it is almost standard practice. Somehow the law has been moved away from almost a century-long prohibition on corporate spending in connection with Federal elections to the ability to have unlimited spending on Federal elections through the ruse of pretending that an issue ad is an issue ad when it actually does everything but say the words, of course, ``vote for'' or ``vote against'' a certain candidate. Isn't that just, in effect, eliminating the whole corporate prohibition that has existed for such----

Mr. FEINGOLD. That is exactly the point. To continue, is that not a reason that a majority of this body, as expressed in the Snowe-Jeffords amendment, believes that this is a very simple and logical extension on the ban of corporate and union campaigning by saying that a corporation and union cannot directly fund issue ads that directly mention a candidate's name in the last 60 days? Is that not simply an extension of, in effect, what has always been the law?

Mr. FEINGOLD. If the corporation or union simply ran campaign ads, the prohibition would apply as well, would it not?

Mr. FEINGOLD. Is the Senator aware that since 1904 corporations have not been able to make contributions directly, and since 1943 labor unions cannot? That is current law.

Mr. FEINGOLD. I was wondering if the Senator would briefly be willing to continue the discussion of the constitutional issues. Mr. President, I appreciated the Senator's candid responses on the relationship of the Buckley v. Valeo decision to the issues of contributions. He also talked a little bit about corporate and union spending and what should be done there. Does the Senator have a constitutional problem with the current law's ban on corporate union spending in connection with Federal elections?

Mr. FEINGOLD. Will the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. FEINGOLD. I think the Senator has been--if I can continue, Mr. President--has been very candid on the floor as to whether it would be constitutional to prohibit soft money contributions. I think you have spoken to that. Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe you have indicated you believe that, under Buckley v. Valeo, it would be constitutional to do that although it may not be wise to do so. Is that a fair statement of the Senator's position?

Mr. FEINGOLD. Mr. President, again, we are down to 8 votes out of 535 Members of Congress. After a clear demonstration that a bipartisan majority in both Houses support this bill, we are just down to eight votes, eight votes to break the filibuster that is holding up this important reform bill. This isn't one of those situations where we haven't had votes to see if there might be a majority. We have. We had the votes in March, in February, and it was clear that a bipartisan majority of this body supports McCain-Feingold. So it is only the filibusterers, a minority of this body, who are standing against the majority of this body and the other body. We will soon see whether eight more Senators are ready to do what so desperately needs to be done. Time and time again the senior Senator from Arizona and I have said we are more than willing to entertain changes to our bill that will allow us to get those eight votes, as long as the basic integrity of the bill remains intact. We reached that kind of agreement with Senators Snowe, Jeffords and Chafee, and it led to our proving that a clear majority in this body supports McCain-Feingold. I say to all of my colleagues, but especially the 48 who have not yet joined the majority, if you are one of the potential eight votes, if before the end of this year you want to show that you do care about the corrupting influence of money in our political process, and if you have a particular concern or problem with the amendment that is on the floor now, please come talk with us. I have had several fruitful conversations with some of these potential Senators and I look forward to more of them. Let's try to come to some agreement that will allow us to give the American people what they so desperately want from this Congress--a campaign finance reform bill that will make the first election of the next century one of which we can all be proud. I yield the floor and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. FEINGOLD. Mr. President, I very much look forward to the remarks of the Senator from West Virginia and appreciate his courtesy in allowing me to speak.

Mr. FEINGOLD. None of the provisions that were specifically cited with regard to those cases has anything to do with the legislation before us. I will make the point now and continue to make the point throughout this debate that when case law is cited, it ought to have something to do with the matter before the Senate, or that clouds the issue of constitutionality in a way that is a disservice. If the Senator from Kentucky is going to make his arguments based on court cases, he should at least recognize and acknowledge that this version of the bill does not include many of the red herrings that he keeps presenting before the Senate. As we say in the law, these cases are readily distinguishable from the matter before us. With that, Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to add as cosponsors to the McCain-Feingold amendment, in addition to Senators Thompson, Snowe, Collins, and Jeffords, Senators Levin, Glenn, Lieberman, and Wellstone, who are long-time and vigorous supporters of this bill.

Mr. FEINGOLD. I will yield for a question, yes.

Mr. FEINGOLD. Mr. President, I repeatedly asked the Senator from Kentucky if he would yield for a question about his statements about the case law, and he refused on several occasions. That is regrettable because I hope we will have a debate here, but I do appreciate his review of the case law. I think it is helpful, and I do want to hear Senator Byrd's remarks very shortly. Let me quickly point out that I heard the Senator from Kentucky discussing a Nevada case regarding restriction on spending on issue advocacy. But the bill before the Senate has no such restriction. So that case is not applicable to what is before the Senate. The Senator referred to the Cincinnati spending limits case. The problem is, our bill before the Senate does not have any spending limits in it. The Senator is arguing case law that has absolutely nothing to do with what we are debating here today. I think that is regrettable because this is supposed to be a debate about the amendment before the Senate. The Senator discussed a case involving in-state contributions. But there are no in-state limits included in this bill. And the same for the California case involving small donor----

Mr. FEINGOLD. Mr. President, let me indicate, if I may, I will not object to this Senator's request. But let me say that after this address I do intend to object to any other discussions about other matters that do not have to do with the issue before us, before the scheduled cloture vote. But in this instance I will not object.

Mr. FEINGOLD. Reserving the right to object, I wonder if the Senator has any notion about approximately how much time he would consume?

Mr. FEINGOLD. Mr. President, would the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. FEINGOLD. Mr. President, will the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. FEINGOLD. Let me first express my admiration for the Senator from Washington's interest in first amendment and free speech issues, and his very careful presentation. I would just like to ask, in light of his earlier comments, if he believes the Buckley v. Valeo decision was correctly decided?

Mr. FEINGOLD. Mr. President, will the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. FEINGOLD. This arms race of soft money spending on issue ads has to stop. And the way to do that is to ban soft money and bring these types of ads within the election laws in a fair and reasonable way that respects the constitutional rights of all citizens. That is what we have done in the McCain-Feingold bill. Contrary to the completely inaccurate and sometimes dishonest advertisements that have been run across the country saying that we use a different approach, we, in fact, maintain a clear respect for free speech, which both Senator McCain and I strongly adhere to. We have addressed in our bill, which is in the form of the amendment before us today, the two biggest problems in our campaign finance system--soft money and phony issue ads. Mr. President, if we do not act on this bill, the exploitation of the loopholes will continue to spiral out of control. In the year 2000, we will see both Presidential candidates promising to limit their private fundraising in order to receive public funds while their parties pursue parallel or even intertwined campaigns with issue ads funded by as much as $600 million in soft money. Is that the kind of campaign we want to see in the first Presidential election of the next century? I do not think so. We need to make the next campaign a cleaner, less corrupt, less out of control Presidential campaign. We do not want more of the same of what we saw in 1996. Mr. President, all across the country the American people are telling us that they do, in fact, overwhelmingly support the McCain-Feingold bill. Recent polls conducted in eight States during the month of August by the Mellman Group for the advocacy group Public Campaign showed that strong majorities, ranging from 58 percent in Mississippi to 75 percent in New Hampshire, are in favor of the McCain-Feingold bill. And this support is constant --it is constant, Mr. President--across demographic groups and across party lines. In fact, in seven of the eight States polled, believe it or not, Republican voters were more likely to support the bill than Democrat voters. Editorial boards across the country are constantly calling on us to act. And it is not just the Washington Post and the New York Times, although they have been wonderful advocates for this much-needed change; it is also the Hartford Courant, the Kansas City Star, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Tennessean, and the Charleston Gazette. The message from each of these editorial boards is that this body, the Senate, has one last chance to salvage some semblance of respect on the issue of campaign finance reform. After all the investigations, all the allegations, and all the finger-pointing of the last 2 years, this is the chance to show that we care, that we think there is something wrong with such a corrupt system. This is the chance. Now, these writers know that McCain-Feingold is not perfect, and I agree with that. But they think it will make a difference and that it should be passed and that it should be sent to the President. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent recent editorials from each of the fine newspapers I just mentioned be printed in the Record.

Mr. FEINGOLD. Mr. President, the McCain-Feingold bill was first introduced in the fall of 1995, just about 3 years ago. To date, thanks to the truly extraordinary efforts of our colleagues in the other House, we are as close as we have ever been to passing that bill and making a start on cleaning up the corrupt campaign finance system that has seemed so intractable for so long. As we stand here today, only eight votes stand between this bill and the President's desk--just eight votes. Only eight Senators out of all Members of the Congress are preventing this body from joining the other body in passing campaign finance reform. Eight Senators are blocking the Senate from banning soft money. Mr. President, the time for excuses is over. It is time to finish the job. It is time to pass campaign finance reform and send it on to the President. Let me first take a moment to remind my colleagues of what happened in the other body the week after we in the Senate left for the August recess. This campaign finance reform bill that all the pundits thought was dead and constantly claimed as dead actually passed the other body by a very strong vote. The vote was 252 to 179. That is right, Mr. President, 252 to 179 in the House. It wasn't even close. By any measure, the passage in the House of the Shays-Meehan version of the McCain-Feingold bill was a landslide. Sixty-one Republicans, over one- quarter of the Republican caucus in the entire House, voted for this bill. Mr. President, I think that should answer once and for all the allegation that the McCain-Feingold bill is a partisan piece of legislation. It is not. Sixty-one Republicans would not vote for a bill that is a Trojan horse for the Democratic Party. No, this bill has now been shown in both Houses to be a bipartisan solution to a bipartisan problem. The House vote was the culmination of literally months of debate on campaign finance reform. The debate actually started, if you can believe this, on May 21 and did not conclude until August 6. There were 72 amendments offered to the House version of the Shays-Meehan bill. There were a total of 41 rollcall votes on those amendments. The House spent over 50 hours debating campaign finance reform, an amount of time that is almost unprecedented to spend on one bill over there. I think we do it fairly frequently here, but it is almost unprecedented in the House. The opponents of reform tried to take a page from the Senate playbook and openly proclaimed that they were going to try to kill the bill with amendments. Just like here, they offered poison pills and they tried to overwhelm the reformers with just the sheer number of amendments. They tried to drown them in amendments, but they failed, and they failed miserably. In the end, a reform bill emerged and passed the House that retained all of the essential features of the McCain-Feingold bill--a ban on soft money, improved disclosure of campaign contributions, codification of the Supreme Court Beck decision, and provisions designed to deal with campaign advertising that is dressed up as issue advertising. After many months of debate in the House, the bill has come back to the Senate. It is now on the calendar and is awaiting action. The majority leader objected to bringing up the House-passed version of McCain-Feingold, but, fortunately, that was not the end of the matter. Because we have the right as Senators to offer amendments to pending legislation, we were able to bring it up on this bill, and that is exactly what Senator McCain and I have done. We would have been delighted if the majority leader had agreed to bring up the House- passed version of the bill, and some comments that he made on ``Meet the Press'' this weekend suggested that he was going to do just that. But by offering our amendment, we will assure that the Senate will again vote on this issue, which is what the people of this country want. Once again, I want to say that I am very proud of the solid, 100- percent support of the Democratic Senators for this bill. I am grateful for the efforts of the minority leader, Senator Daschle, to keep this issue on the agenda and line up our caucus in support of the McCain- Feingold bill. But we are not doing this for partisan reasons. We are doing this because it is the right thing to do for our country. This campaign finance system is sapping the confidence of the American people in their Government. People have seen time and time again that these huge soft money contributions do influence the congressional agenda. They understand that we cannot act in the interest of average people if we are spending too much time trying to woo the big contributors. They know that soft money must be eliminated before it just totally swamps our elections and our legislature. It is absolutely critical that we finish the job now; that we finish the job now before the end of this Congress, otherwise, we will undoubtedly see an explosion of soft money fundraising as the parties get ready for the next big show, and that is the next Presidential election in the year 2000. If we go home and allow this soft money system to continue into the next Presidential election cycle, we will reap scandals that will make the scandals of 1996 look pale by comparison. Look at what has happened in this cycle already will give you a clue as to what is going to happen. Already in this cycle, according to Common Cause, the parties have raised a total of $116 million, and that is the most ever in a non-Presidential cycle. Soft money fundraising more than tripled from 1992 to 1996--from an already troubling amount of $86 million to the now staggering amount of $262 million. Based on that growth, some estimate that the parties could raise $600 million in soft money in the year 2000 cycle--$600 million. Over half a billion dollars in soft money is likely to be the consequence and the disgusting display in the year 2000. Mr. President, we already have a majority in this body, and with just eight more votes in the Senate we can stop this escalation of soft money. We can say to the political parties, Enough is enough. Go back to raising money under the limits established in the Federal Election Campaign Act. And then if somebody says, ``Well, we need more money,'' then start raising money from more people; get more people involved. Don't just extort more and more money from the major corporations and labor unions that are eager to curry favor with the Congress or the President. Mr. President, the American people are sick of tales of big money fundraisers. It is a terrible turnoff for a citizen of average means to read that people give $100,000, or $250,000 to sit at the head table with the President, or have a special meeting with the majority leader of the U.S. Senate. They do not want more stories like the story of Roger Tamraz who gave $300,000 to the Democratic National Committee hoping for the special access he needed to promote his pipeline project. Tamraz told the Governmental Affairs Committee that as he thought about it, the next time he would give $600,000 if he thought this would help his business and that getting special access was not just one of the reasons he gave to the DNC, he said it was the only reason he gave the $300,000 and would give $600,000--for special access. But these kinds of scandals are bound to come back again and again because our political parties, Mr. President, are addicted to soft money. They cannot get enough of it. And the reason is that they have found a way to make soft money work directly for them in Federal elections. This is an incredible twist of a loophole that was established by the FEC in 1978. Remember that prior to 1996, most of the parties' soft money went into what were called party building activities--get out the vote drives, voter registration efforts, and the like. But then in 1996, the parties discovered the issue ad, and it was off to the races. Both Presidential campaigns directly benefited from these kinds of ads--you know, the ones that do not explicitly say ``vote for'' or ``vote against'' a candidate, but they are nonetheless obviously aimed at directly influencing an election, obviously intentionally intended to cause someone to vote specifically for one candidate or another. And they used party soft money to pay for the ads. Now, here is an irony, Mr. President. Just yesterday, Attorney General Reno announced yet another 90-day inquiry into the campaign finance scandals of the 1996 campaign. It has to do with issue ads run by the DNC, a portion of which were paid for with soft money. The allegation is that it was improper for the President to have participated in the development of that ad campaign. The McCain- Feingold amendment that is before us makes it very clear that such ads cannot be paid for with soft money and cannot be coordinated by the parties with their candidates. Yet some of the very people who are calling on the Attorney General to appoint this independent counsel are staunchly opposed to this amendment anyway. We also already have seen the parties and outside groups preparing to exploit the phony issue ad loophole in this election. Over the next month, more and more election ads will begin appearing around the country, but because of that loophole, in many cases there will be no disclosure either of the spending itself or of the identity of the donors who are really behind the ads. These issue ad campaigns, Mr. President, are blatantly targeted at specific elections, but again their creators intentionally avoid the elections law, but avoiding the so-called magic words of ``vote for'' or ``vote against.'' Here is an example. The Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call reported in July that the Republican Party is planning a $37 million issue advocacy campaign to begin running after Labor Day designed to help Republicans pick up seats in the House in November. Roll Call described the campaign as follows: Republican leaders are calling the plan ``Operation Break- Out:'' a comprehensive strategy to blanket as many as 50 to 60 battleground districts with ``issue advocacy'' television ads touting the GOP's success in balancing the budget, cutting taxes and reforming welfare. The story then states that Republican officials predict that if Members help raise the $37 million, then the party will pick up as many as 25 additional seats. So they are candid. They are very upfront about the fact that this issue ad campaign is designed specifically to help elect more Republicans to the House, not just to talk about issues. So here you have the leaders of a national political party designing a huge media plan specifically to elect candidates from that party, and specifically planning to take advantage of the phony issue ad loophole so they can at least partially pay for the campaign with soft money. This is what the twin loopholes--soft money and phony issue ads--have led us to. And, of course, Mr. President, neither party is exempt. I have consistently maintained a bipartisan approach to this issue in my work with the senior Senator from Arizona and in my other work on this issue. And I will do so today. A Democratic Party source is quoted in that same Roll Call story as saying that the Democratic Party is budgeting $6 million for issue ads and possibly a lot more. And, of course, the Republican Party justifies its plan as a preemptive strike against the labor unions that spent about $25 million on issue ads in the 1996 elections. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the entire Roll Call story be printed in the Record.

Mr. FEINGOLD. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to make brief remarks before the Senator from West Virginia begins.

Mr. FEINGOLD. Will the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. FEINGOLD. Mr. President, I recognize the point that in Buckley v. Valeo the Court did suggest that there was some magnitude of contribution that might be needed to constitute a corrupting influence on the political process. But the Senator apparently accepts the notion that it is constitutional to have some kind of limitation on what a person can give to a candidate.

Russell Feingold

Speeches

Manage analytics