John Doolittle: “legislating for partisan gain is all that campaign finance regulation has ever been about. Who are we kidding? Let us go…”

“legislating for partisan gain is all that campaign finance regulation has ever been about. Who are we kidding? Let us go back to 1974. Watergate, Republicans are under heavy fire. Democrats took advantage of that, demanded reform, and one of their reforms was the Federal Election Commission Act amendments. Those amendments were quite far-reaching, and many of them became the law, and when it went to the Supreme Court, the Court finally struck out many of them. What was left was the campaign finance law until we passed BCRA in 2002. It is interesting, though, to talk about that because eventually the Republicans made up for their disadvantage, and actually the Republicans were the leaders with soft money in 2002. This is very upsetting to the Democrats, who developed votes off soft money. It was a wonderful tool they could take advantage of, and they were a little behind. So they came up with BCRA in 2002. BCRA, of course, was going to take the money out of politics. Now, going back to 1974 for a minute, let us remember that President Nixon was much criticized by the Democrats when he took a campaign contribution from one wealthy individual of $2 million. Fast forward to 2004, after BCRA is passed, and at that point, having taken the big money out of politics, you will note with interest that one man, George Soros, gave $27 million to efforts to elect John Kerry President of the United States.…”