Date: 2010-06-24
Speaker: DANIEL E. LUNGREN (republican)
Chamber: H
State: Cali

fornia. Madam Speaker. I am sorry the Speaker is no longer here because she. frankly. hopefully inadvertently. misstated the law. She said that with the decision by the Supreme Court. it would allow companies. even those that are controlled by foreign countries or foreign governments. to affect our elections. That is absolutely dead wrong. It did nothing with the prohibition that remains that does not allow and has not allowed for decades foreign governments or foreign nationals to affect our campaigns. This decision by the Supreme Court does not. The problem with this is I havent found a single person on the other side of the aisle that read the opinion. If they did. they would know what they are saying is absolutely wrong. They call it the DISCLOSE Act. It is. in fact. the disguise act. It was designed in secret. No effort to bring those of us on the committee on the Republican side into it. I asked for copies of it. They refused to give it to us. We. in fact. got their last managers amendment 2 hours. yesterday. before we had to go to the Rules Committee to talk about our amendments. They disallow. in this rule. a single amendment brought forward by any of us on the committee that held the hearings. I had five amendments I asked to present. Several of them would require the unions to be treated the same as corporations. That was denied. They dont want you to have a chance to level the playing field. Look. in "Alice in Wonderland." it is said. "If I had a world of my own. everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is. because everything would be what it isnt. And contrarywise. what is. it wouldnt be. And what it wouldnt be. it would. You see?" That basically sums up the Speakers statement. If I had the chance under the House rules to speak to the public. this is what I would say. This is your First Amendment. Its not my First Amendment. Its not the Democratic leaderships First Amendment. And yet they are auctioning off parts of this First Amendment by this bill. Why do I say that? Some people are more equal than others. If you happen to be a special interest thats existed for 10 years. if you happen to have a certain amount of money in your coffers that come from corporations. if you happen to have a certain number of membersit was a million. but some special interest said. We dont have a million. lets bring it down to 500.000. Okay. Now its 500.000. So those people. those interests are exempted from all of the disclosure requirements in here. And here is the other thing they do under this rule. This bill allows the law to go into effect within 30 days without any regulations being promulgated. In fact. its impossible for regulations to be promulgated. So those who have a true exemption dont have to worry about the law. Those who are trying to figure out how to comply with the law have to worry about if they make a mistake because. if they do. what happens? They are subject to criminal penalties. Were talking about the First Amendment to the Constitution. the First Amendment. Thats talking about robust political speech. and you heard what my friends on the other side said: oh. my God. weve had these ads against us. oh. we dont like that. oh. my gosh. weve got to do something about it. There is nothing this bill does about the suppression ads that were run against me in the last campaign 3 hours before we closed. "robocalls" to my district. including to my house. in which they say. this is a news alert. news alert. President Obamas won the election. It doesnt matter what happens in California. Its already decided. This has been a news alert. Now. no one specified an individual. No one specified a party. Very. very clever. The idea was to suppress those who were supporting the Republicans from coming out. It does nothing with that. I mean. people ought to understand this is a precious gift given to us by God. then recognized by our Founding Fathers. and were fooling around with it here. Let me just tell you this. This bill allows us 1 hour to talk about this. 1 hour. Guess what we have spent 10 hours doing in this Congress. Naming post offices. Weve named 61 post offices in this Congress. We are ridding the world of unnamed post offices. We can spend 10 hours on post offices. but we cant spend more than an hour talking about the Constitution. talking about the First Amendment. And theyre auctioning pieces of the First Amendment in this bill. If you happen to be one of those lucky enough to win the auction. you dont have these disclosure rules. and you can continue to talk and you can continue to make your political statement. but if you didnt win the lottery-