Marty Meehan

Mr. MEEHAN

Mr. MEEHAN. One of the concerns that the minority would have, Mr. Chairman, is that we get a full list of which amendments people respond to and get it in a timely fashion. In other words, if it is at 1 o'clock tomorrow, that we could have the list at 1:15 or 1:20 so that we are in a position where we have a clear understanding what all the amendments are and who has voiced concern about having their amendment pulled or who really wants to go forward.

Mr. MEEHAN. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. MEEHAN. Mr. Chairman, in our efforts, our bipartisan efforts over a period of the last several years to forge a partnership between Republicans and Democrats and find an agreement to comprehensive campaign finance reform, we have made a number of agreements and concessions along the way. We have a majority of the Members of this body who I believe and many of us believe now favor the McCain- Feingold, Shays-Meehan legislation. The only thing that can defeat the Shays-Meehan legislation is an effort to have an amendment that is harmful to our ability to get it passed. I believe strongly that we should vote on this amendment. If Members are concerned about the specifics of this amendment, we voted and sent the bill over to the United States Senate, we can deal with it that way, or we can deal with it through the Commission as part of the bill that this House passed. We sent a Commission bill, gave them the responsibility to look at what changes there ought to be, other changes, in the campaign finance law. I would suggest that this would be a change that the Commission could make a judgment on. This may well be an unconstitutional provision. The Commission would have an opportunity to talk to constitutional scholars and determine whether or not this should be part of some other amendment at some other time. What we need to do at this point is to move forward, to get through this very cumbersome, difficult process, and have a vote up-or-down on the Shays-Meehan bill. I would urge my colleagues to vote against this amendment.

Mr. MEEHAN. Mr. Chairman, it has been a long night. We debated this for a couple hours before we left on the break, and we also have debated it another couple of hours. There are a lot of Members here, Republican and Democrat, both sides of the aisle, who have worked diligently over a period of years to try to get this bill to the floor. We have before us an amendment that claims to want to do something about voter guides. I have worked on this legislation for years with the gentleman from Connecticut (Mr. Shays) and others who are in this Chamber. We carved an exemption for voter guides. We do not need this particular amendment. We have an exemption in the amendment. There are times this debate has been an outstanding debate. The gentleman from California (Mr. Campbell) in particular I would cite for his lawyerly and scholarly articulation of what the Shays-Meehan bill does with regard to voter guides. But this is not about voter guides. This is about whether or not the other side is going to try to defeat this bill. So let us have an up or down vote now. And I urge my colleagues, if they are for campaign finance reform, vote no on the DeLay-Doolittle Amendment. The amendment is not needed, and all it serves to do is to defeat ultimately campaign finance reform. So I would urge Members to vote no on the DeLay-Doolittle Amendment. I would urge us to move forward on this debate and have a vote.

Mr. MEEHAN. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. MEEHAN. Mr. Chairman, what we are looking to do here is try to find an agreement that gets us to a vote. Nobody rationally believes, given the UC agreement that we got on campaign finance reform before we left, that 25 hours of debate on this UC agreement, in order for us to have any chance at all of getting a vote by August, we would have to have at least three-fifths, four-fifths of the amendments that have been proposed withdrawn. So I will be glad to work all evening to try to find a way to reach an agreement that results in a definite vote, a vote that would take place sometime in the week, the last week we are here, the 3rd through the 7th of August. And I appreciate the gentleman from California's work on this. I would love to work with him further to get an agreement, but to propose four amendments for tonight, given the fact that campaign finance reform is not even scheduled for the rest of the week and is scheduled for possibly 1 day next week and there is only 2 weeks left after that. So no reasonable, rational person really thinks that we are going to get through 250 amendments by August 7.

Mr. MEEHAN. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. MEEHAN. Mr. Chairman, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from Connecticut (Mr. Shays).

Mr. MEEHAN. Mr. Chairman, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from Connecticut (Mr. Shays).

Mr. MEEHAN. Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent that the 20 minutes of time allotted to me be controlled by the gentlewoman from Hawaii, (Mrs. Mink).

Mr. MEEHAN. Will the Chairman be rolling votes per my unanimous consent request earlier?

Mr. MEEHAN. Mr. Chairman, parliamentary inquiry.

Mr. MEEHAN. But I want to know if this is the last vote and if we are going to roll it until tomorrow like I asked, so Members will know. Parliamentary Inquiry

Mr. MEEHAN. Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent to speak out of turn for 30 seconds to clarify the schedule.

Mr. MEEHAN. Yes, the gentleman is correct.

Mr. MEEHAN. I make a unanimous consent request.

Mr. MEEHAN. Yes.

Mr. MEEHAN. Reclaiming my time, what my request of the leadership would be is that I am suggesting we would agree to limit debate, but let us make the last vote the last vote of the night, and then come back tomorrow. It is a reasonable request. It is 8:50 at night. Parliamenary Inquiry

Mr. MEEHAN

Mr. MEEHAN. Mr. Speaker, reserving the right to object, we have been talking, at least before we left for the 2-week break, we were talking about a unanimous consent agreement on campaign finance reform. We had talked about a comprehensive agreement, an agreement that would result in us being able to complete campaign finance reform by the August recess on August 7; and, to that end, many of us met today and we had talked about agreeing to a unanimous consent agreement and making part of the unanimous consent agreement the fact that we would take up in August, the week of August 3 through 7, all of the substitutes that had been made in order, have an hour of debate for each of those, and then vote up or down on those substitutes. I think, Mr. Speaker, if we look at how long it has taken us to get to this point in time and if we consider the fact that, under the rule, we could literally have 250 to 260 amendments, that it makes sense for us to try to come to an agreement on a comprehensive unanimous consent agreement that would result in not only discussing those amendments that we need to discuss but also a definite, definitive time and date, that is August 3 through 7, where we would vote on each of the substitutes. So that is the unanimous consent agreement that I was hoping that we could get. I know that the gentleman from California (Mr. Thomas) had proposed limiting to 34 different amendments before we left. Now that we have a unanimous consent agreement for just one evening, I would point out that they are all Republican amendments, and two of the amendments, the Stearns and the Fossella amendment, are nearly identical or are at least pretty similar. So it does not seem to make any sense to agree to a unanimous consent agreement for one day when, in fact, what we need here is some kind of a commitment and some kind of an agreement in writing that we can have a vote on the substitutes that have been offered here and have that vote before the August recess. I do not think I have to tell my colleagues how long this process has been ongoing over a period of the last several years.

Mr. MEEHAN. Mr. Speaker, reserving the right to object.

Mr. MEEHAN. Mr. Speaker, I object to the reading of the amendments. I object to the original request.

Mr. MEEHAN

Mr. MEEHAN. Reclaiming my time, let me just give an example of what we are trying to provide, why we want to have this provision in. This is what the amendment would allow people to not have to disclose, where money comes from. This is what we are protecting. This is a Senate candidate. Senate candidate Winston Bryant's budget as Attorney General has increased by 71 percent. Bryant has taken taxpayer funded junkets to the Virgin Islands, Alaska and Arizona. And spent about $100,000 on new furniture. Unfortunately, as the state's top law enforcement official, he's never opposed the parole of any convicted criminal, even rapists and murderers. And almost 4,000 Arkansas prisoners have been sent back to prison for crimes committed while they were out on parole. Winston Bryant: government waste, political junkets, soft on crime. Call Winston Bryant and tell him to give the money back. Now should not the person who had that ad and the organization at a minimum have to disclose where that money comes from? And is it not reasonable to assume that the intent of that particular advertisement was to influence that election? Of course. The only thing that we are looking to do in this legislation: when somebody wants to spend millions of dollars in races clear across this country and have that type of a negative ad, at a minimum, at a minimum, the American public has a right to know where the money came from.

Mr. MEEHAN. I yield to the gentleman from Michigan.

Mr. MEEHAN. I yield to the gentleman from Iowa.

Mr. MEEHAN. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. I think, Mr. Chairman, the evidence here is quite clear that the language does, in fact, in the Shays-Meehan bill, does allow this particular voter guide. That is why the amendment needs to be defeated. There has been some arguments here that voter guides are unallowable. I think the evidence is overwhelming that the language does not say at all that they are not allowable. In fact, I would say that the gentleman from California (Mr. Doolittle) was reading from the wrong section. The section says: expressly unmistakable and unambiguous support for our opposition; 2, one or more clearly identified candidates when taken as a whole and with limited reference to external events such as proximity to an election. So it is overwhelmingly clear that this particular provision is nothing more than a smokescreen to try to defeat our bill.