Date: 1997-09-26
Speaker: ADAM SMITH (democrat)
Chamber: H
State: Washington

Mr. Speaker. I rise today to echo the comments of my colleagues and urge that this body bring up campaign finance reform and pass meaningful campaign finance reform in this session. I think the biggest reason I want to see this happen is because of the lack. of confidence that the public has in this body. There is a crisis in our democracy that I think too few people have noticed. that is. the majority of the citizens of this democracy do not have trust and confidence in their government. That is essential in a democracy. The people are the government. If they do not trust us. we have a crisis that blocks our ability to stand up to almost any meaningful issue. I have said before that it is impossible to lead if no one is willing to follow. We cannot step up to problems like health care. Social Security and Medicare reform. balancing the budget. or education. A lot of meaningful issues have taken longer and longer to deal with because the public does not trust its leaders. There are a lot of reasons for that. Some of them are justified and some of them are not. admittedly. One reason for the distrust is the system by which we elect our Representatives. the system by which we finance campaigns. There is a perception and a reality out there that the campaigns are funded almost exclusively by people with a lot of money. If you do not have a lot of money to bring to the process. you have no access to the process. and that has turned people off. We are seeing lower and lower numbers of people participating in the system. We need to show them that we can change this system in order to get their -confidence back. so we can govern again. Ironically. I have heard a lot of my colleagues tell me that. gosh. when we go home for town meetings. when we talk to people. no one is talking about campaign finance reform. It is not really an issue they care about. It is not a socalled pocketbook issue. It does not directly affect their ability to get a job or feed their family or educate their children. so therefore. they really do not care about it. But what I have heard when I go home on the weekend. and go out and talk to the people in my district. is the reason they do not care about it is because they do not think we are going to do anything about it. We sort of have a selffulfilling prophecy with Members of Congress saying. gosh. the public does not care. and not doing anything about it. so yes. the public does not care because they do not think ankthing is going to happen. They do not believe this body is ever going to step up to the plate and change it. because they think we are comfortable in the current system. If we want them to care about it. we have to show them -we are serious about it. That is the first point. The second point is. they do care about it on a deeper level. They care about it in the sense that they do not trust the system of government. We do not want a democracy where the people do not care about their system of government. We cannot say we do not need to step up to an issue because apathy has overtaken it. We need an active and involved electorate in a democracy. if we are truly going to be able to represent the people. That means we need to pass campaign finance reform. I rise specifically in support of House bill 1776. which is the updated version of the ShaysMeehan bill. I do that because there are two very important aspects to that bill. First of all. it bans soft money. I do not believe that there is anything wrong with people participating in our election system. I. for one. do not believe that we should go to an exclusively publicly financed system. I think it is very important that the members of a community are personally involved in campaigns. that they support the candidates that they like and get involved in the process so they are more involved in it down the road. It is important that people contribute. The only time we have a problem is when those contributions are so large from certain people as to drown out the rest. When someone has the ability to give $100.000. $200.000. $300.000 to a sys-. tem. I can readily understand how one of my constituents says. gosh. all I can do is afford to give $50. and what difference does it make. if the politicians are going to get $100.000. $200.000. $300.000 from somebody else? Back in the 1970s we came up with a reform proposal to deal with this. We placed limits on the amount people could contribute: $1.000 for an individual. $5.000 for a group of individuals. what is known as a PAC. I think that is perfectly appropriate. Those are real limits that allow everybody to participate up to a certain point. The problem is. with soft money those limits are meaningless. We see fundraisers every day around here for $5.000. $10.000. as much as $25.000 or $50.000 a person. I remember hearing a story from somebody about how many $100.000 contributors Michael Dukakis had back in 1988. and I was stunned by this notion. I said. but there are limits. $1.000 per person. How could any Presidential candidates have a $100.000 contributor? The answer of course was it was soft money. It was interesting to me. The person who was telling this made no distinction whatsoever between the soft money contribution and the individual contribution. There is a very good reason for that. Around the halls of Washington. DC. there is no distinction. Soft money has rendered limits meaningless. We need to ban soft money in order to make those 1970 reforms have some meaning. I can understand the cynicism of the public in dealing with that Issue. I urge that we support campaign finance reform. The other aspect of the bill that I like is putting some teeth in the Federal Elections Commission and actually enforcing the laws.