Dale Bumpers: “The Senator from Alaska has raised some very important issues, and my own feeling is that one of the objections he has…”

“The Senator from Alaska has raised some very important issues, and my own feeling is that one of the objections he has raised is so legitimate, I have sent this modification to the desk so that the Levin substitute covers spouses only and not dependents. So you will not have to worry about your daughter ever coming home from school with a gift. However, I do want to point out, and I want to summarize this and ask the floor managers whether I am correct or incorrect, because I want to draw a comparison between existing law and the Levin substitute. Under existing law, you can take as many $100 gifts, go out to dinner with lobbyists as many times as you want, as long as the dinner is less than $100, and you can do that, as I say, as often as you choose to do it during the year. If the gift is over a $100, it has to be reported. And then there is a limit of $250, above which there is an absolute prohibition. Is that not correct? So right now you have a $100 limit which you do not have to report. You can go out to dinner with somebody and let them spend $100 on you every night, 365 days a year, and you are not violating anything. You can take a gift of $150, but you must report that at the end of the year as a gift in excess of $100. And you must not accept a gift in excess of $250 from anybody. Is that correct?”