James Hill: “Many people refer to the freshman bill as the Shays-Meehan light bill. Frankly, that is not fair to the Shays-Meehan…”

“Many people refer to the freshman bill as the Shays-Meehan light bill. Frankly, that is not fair to the Shays-Meehan bill or to the freshman bill, because these two bills have a different underlying philosophy to them. They do have one thing in common. They both seek to ban soft money. But the real question is, how and why are we trying to reform campaign finance? Again, we agree that we should ban soft money and the soft money abuses of labor unions and corporations. And the argument for the Shays bill is that we should 'level the playing field,' that is, level the playing field between incumbents and outside groups. They would limit these outside groups by determining how they get money and how they spend it and when they spend it. Is that constitutional? Probably not. Even the advocates for Shays-Meehan believe it may not meet constitutional muster. More important, is it a good thing to do? I do not think it is. I think it is a bad idea. Shays basically says incumbents should control, that others should play on the same playing field as incumbents, and so they seek to limit these outside groups. I do not think we should level the playing field by limiting the political speech. And so the freshman took a fresh approach. Probably because we were not incumbents allowed us to take that fresh approach.”