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[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 79 (Friday, May 12, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6583-S6584]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

                         THE BUDGET RESOLUTION

  Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, last night the Budget Committee, in the wee 
hours, passed the budget resolution for the U.S. Senate on which we 
will shortly go to work. There are many, many questionable choices 
within that resolution. There will be a time, a very fixed time 
obviously, a minimum number of hours that we have to debate it here on 
the floor, with a finality for that debate, and it is predetermined. 
But I would like to just talk for a moment, if I can, about a couple of 
aspects of that budget as we frame the debate about where we are going 
in this country.
  First, I would like to call the attention of my colleagues to one 
provision that is in this budget that this Senator finds profoundly 
disturbing, and that I hope other colleagues will think hard about 
before we ratify it in the course of the budget process.
  A lot of things are being proposed in America today under the banner 
of deficit reduction. I think there is a unanimity here that we 
obviously have to reduce the deficit. We are going to be bankrupt if we 
do not. We cannot continue down the road that we are going on. But 
there also ought to be an application of common sense to the choices 
that we make as we do that. Reducing the deficit does not predicate 
that we simply come in with a machete or a pickax and chop away at 
things that make sense, while simultaneously leaving out there the 
things that do not make sense.
  One of the items that has fallen under the budget committee's 
ideological approach to this issue is the Presidential campaign fund. 
For whatever reasons--I can give you the descriptions that are given, 
but I think the agenda is considerably different--the committee has 
chosen to eliminate the mechanism by which Americans for the years 
since Watergate have funded Presidential elections. That method is to 
have a checkoff on your tax form with which you decide to give money to 
the Presidential election fund. It is a voluntary mechanism in America. 
But it has been a most important mechanism by which we have freed 
Presidential politics from the demeaning process of requiring our 
candidates to raise hundreds of millions of dollars from special 
interests all across this country.
  It has worked, Mr. President. The system has worked. President Ronald 
Reagan used it. President George Bush used it. I believe President Bush 
in the course of his career as a Vice President and as a President, 
used something in the order of $200 million in order to run for the 
highest Federal office in this land.
  The majority leader, Robert Dole, has used it in the past. Other 
Presidential candidates in this Senate have used it, Republican and 
Democrat alike. No one has suggested that system is wrong, corrupt, not 
working, or not freeing the Presidential process from the rather 
terrifying money chase that we in the U.S. Senate have to go through. 
Yet, this Budget Committee, in an effort to try to whack away at the 
deficit, is going to do away with this campaign financing mechanism.
  Mr. President, for the life of me I don't understand why--but I 
understand the argument that will be made. The argument will be the 
soft, easy, political sloganeering arguments that, ``Gee, politicians 
should not be getting welfare.'' It sounds really catchy.
 And the American taxpayer should not necessarily be paying. That is 
the argument you are going to hear. But I will bet you that four 
members of the Republican caucus who are running for President are 
prepared, in a matter of weeks, to ask for that money and will take it 
and will use it.

  Now, it seems to me, Mr. President, if we cannot remember the lessons 
of Watergate and remember the degree to which this country felt a 
revulsion at what happened during that period of time, when stacks of 
cash and enormous sums of money were changing hands in an effort to try 
to curry favor and votes in America, if we do not remember that lesson, 
then we have not learned much about what was wrong with American 
politics in the course of the last years.
  So I hope that before we just accept what the Budget Committee has 
done, Members will think hard about what is really good for this 
country in the context of political campaign finance reform. This 
Senate has twice passed campaign finance reform in the last years. We 
passed it in 1992, and the House passed it, but President Bush vetoed 
it. We then passed it again in 1994, but it died mostly because the 
House of Representatives did not want to take it up.
  The bottom line, I think all colleagues will agree, is that we saw a 
period of scandal in America that brought reform, and it would be 
irrational now in the face of the extraordinary impact of money in 
American 
 [[Page S6584]] politics to suddenly take away our capacity to free 
both of our candidates, or any major party candidate, from having to go 
out and raise these extraordinary sums of money which most Americans 
have come to agree distort the American political process.
  That is not the only issue raised in this budget, and we will have 
ample time in the days ahead to discuss it.
  Mr. President, I see that the majority leader is in the Chamber. I do 
not know if he had an announcement or a procedure.
  Mr. DOLE. Announcement. I would like to get back on the bill.
  Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, let me just say to the majority leader, I 
had asked if there were any amendments. There were no amendments, and I 
allowed whatever amendments were there to be done before speaking. If 
there is an amendment that is ready to go forward, I am not trying to 
delay the process or hold up the Senate, but I thought I would call 
attention to this issue in the absence of that.
  Mr. DOLE. I do not have any problem with that.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader.
  Mr. DOLE. If the Senator will yield.
  Mr. KERRY. I would like to retain the right to the floor, but I will 
yield.

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