The Supreme Court says that wealthy people have a free speech right to contribute as much as they want to their own campaigns. If we make it even more difficult for normally successful people to raise money for campaigns, middle class candidates will generally lose to rich people with deep pockets. But I think there's a better way. My campaign reform proposal would strengthen the fundraising rules for the more traditional, regular campaigns. So under my proposal, anyone running against such an individual would be able to raise money from individuals and from his or her political party in excess of the normal limits, up to the point of matching what the wealthy candidate is spending of his or her own money.
Modern technology can make a big difference here.
I think we should look seriously at requiring candidates to list their campaign contributions on the World Wide Web within 24, or maybe within 48 hours of receiving the money. And this should go both for contributions from other individuals, special interests, political parties and so on, and also for contributions that a person makes to his or her own campaign. We should make it easy for everybody to find out who's contributing to campaigns, and how much. And we should make the reporting of contributions so quick that it will be difficult for candidates to receive big, last minute donations that nobody knows about until after election. Q. You have a new employee working in your Washington office who should be of interest to people in the Two Rivers area, and also to anybody in Wisconsin's 6th District who needs help dealing with red tape in the federal government.