Protect Public Financing of Campaigns

You know, it's rather ironic that we're having this debate today because it is almost exactly one year from the date the Supreme Court decided the Citizens United case. That decision opened the flood gates for unanimous special interests and for corporations to dump unlimited amounts of cash into our political system. Predictably the result of this awful judgment was to set loose a torrent of secret money to influence the midterm elections this past November. Now my Republican colleagues propose to further erode whatever protections our government has left against the state of democracy for the highest bidder, by attempting to undo our system of presidential public financing.

Let's remember where this system came from. It was a direct response to the wild west, unregulated, free-wheeling campaigns that led up to the Watergate scandal. The atmosphere of that time was described by campaign finance expert Fred Wertheimer as so bad that contributors to Richard Nixon's re-election campaign were, quote, "literally flying into Washington with satchels of cash", end quote. Hidden, unregulated, private money ruled.

In response to that, Congress acted as much to clean up that system and we have done fairly well with that. Our democracy will not be able to afford a return to that corruption. But that is what we start today, with this bill. This bill will result in even more corporate and special interest money in our campaigns than we have today and that's really saying something. We don't even know how much money comes in from foreign money.

The Presidential Election Campaign Fund is the one place in the electoral system that we take some of the pressure off of candidates who otherwise have to raise bushels of private money. For the life of me, I can't see how this bill does anything other than add insult to the injury of the terrible Citizens United decision last year.

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• Public Election Campaign Fund
• Citizens United
• Campaign Contributions
• Rep. Louise Slaughter