Campaign Finance Reform

Floor Speech

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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.

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 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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