Sam Farr: “I, like you, served in a State legislature for 13 years and was very active in campaign finance reform in the State of…”

“I, like you, served in a State legislature for 13 years and was very active in campaign finance reform in the State of California. It is a very complex system. You have 6,000 local governments in the State besides the 58 counties and the State legislature, and your are dealing with an awful lot of campaign filings and technical process. Unfortunately, you cannot reform campaign financing piecemeal because it has so many different versions. It has amounts of money that people can give, whether they can give them to a candidate, whether they can give them to a party, whether they can give them to a PAC, whether they can give them to a national party. So just the individual giving money, how much, how often, whether each of those organizations, a PAC, how much money they can give, what they have to report, in California you still have what we call corporate contributions to campaigns. You can give either an in-kind contribution. You may be a corporation that has a lot of telephones and, therefore, on election night you can give your office for people to come down and make calls. Under Federal laws you cannot do that.”