Asa Hutchinson: “Mr. Chairman, it is the final hour in this debate on campaign finance reform. In life, if you are in the final hour you…”

“Mr. Chairman, it is the final hour in this debate on campaign finance reform. In life, if you are in the final hour you are all of a sudden seeing the big picture, what is important in life versus what is trivial. In this House, it is the final hour on reform, and we need to take the long look at life, the long look at reform. First of all, take a look back. If we look back at where we started in our freshman task force, we started that task force because the current proposals on campaign finance reform, including the Shays-Meehan proposal, were going nowhere. They were going nowhere. We said, let us have some principles. Let us avoid the extremes. Let us agree upon what we can mutually say both sides will vote on. We said, let us not challenge the Constitution, let us have that which is constitutional and will be upheld. Let us do something which can pass this body, the next body, be signed into law, and be upheld. Those were the principles that we had. The final principle was that we were going to have a commitment to bipartisanship.”