John Doolittle: “Mr. Chairman, this is a corollary to the last amendment that we took up. This is the aggregate for what large donors can…”

“Mr. Chairman, this is a corollary to the last amendment that we took up. This is the aggregate for what large donors can give, adjusting it for inflation, as the last amendment adjusted the individual limit. This is important. I hear people get up and say, well, gee, there is no problem raising the $1.8 million at $1,000 a pop. Well, that is not what most people say. In fact, good candidates have thrown up their hands in despair. We just had a couple, a Republican in New Jersey for the U.S. Senate and a Democrat in Nevada, they both just pulled out in part because of this problem of the limits. In fact, I will see if I can find quickly the quote here. I am not going to find it, so I will have to use it later. She just basically felt like the present limits were just demanding so much consumption of time. This was the Democrat from Nevada who decided not to run for the Senate, that it was not worth making the effort. Mr. Chairman, this is what we are increasingly seeing. Why are we creating the system and tolerating the system that allows only the wealthy or in a sense only the wealthy to run.”