Mike Thompson: “So we decided that--I think the country decided, after that, that we needed to decide what we wanted to have…”

“So we decided that--I think the country decided, after that, that we needed to decide what we wanted to have corporations and large labor unions do. Clearly, they needed to participate. We set up political action committees and decided how much we wanted them to participate. And we said to corporations, labor unions, ``You can't do any more than that in terms of direct political contribution.'' We said to individuals, ``You can't spend more than $1,000 per election per individual.'' That was not indexed. I think that was a mistake. I think that $1,000, frankly, is ridiculously low nowadays, and if we had a higher hard money limitation that maybe so much money would not go into these independent ads and more money would go into hard money. But we sat down and consciously decided, I think, as a Congress and as a country, how much was appropriate for candidates to get their message out and to communicate with people and in what line did you get to a point where the influence might appear to be too great. These were all conscious decisions. All I am saying to this body now is that we at least need to recognize that we are now addressing whether or not we still adhere to that or not or are we going to a system where there are no limitations.”