Asa Hutchinson: “the Bipartisan Campaign Integrity Act does the most important thing, it addresses the enormous abuse in our system…”

“the Bipartisan Campaign Integrity Act does the most important thing, it addresses the enormous abuse in our system, which is to ban soft money to our national parties. This is where our Federal candidates, our Federal officers are going out and raising enormous sums of money usually in the chunks of $100,000, $200,000, sometimes $500,000 for the parties, and then it flows into the different campaigns through ads. This has been the abuse in the 1996 election. It continues to be an enormous problem for our political system. So we ban that soft money to the national parties. Then these people raise the objection that, well, how about if the State parties raise the soft money? We do not prohibit that. Well, the State parties try to do get out the vote efforts, some basic things that build the party structure, that help our candidates locally, but it has not been a problem. But to make sure that it does not become a problem, we say that there cannot be any transfer of soft money from the State party that is using it for a get out the vote effort might have some excess cash and will transfer it from the national party. Well, they cannot do that. The national party cannot take any soft money from the State parties or from anyone. It is prohibited.”