Tom Tancredo: “earlier today I was talking to a gentleman from Common Cause. I had called him in regard to a statement that they sent…”

“earlier today I was talking to a gentleman from Common Cause. I had called him in regard to a statement that they sent out asking all Congressmen to sign the statement. One of the points on the statement that they were asking us to sign on to was a commitment to vote for any ban on soft money, banning all soft money going to political organizations coming from corporations, coming from unions, coming from wealthy individuals. We got to talking about this. I had called them and asked them to give me their thoughts on this because, of course, this kind of thing happens often, the kind of thing that they are trying to deal with; and they explained that for a long time there had been a relatively effective ban on the kind of money coming into politics that has a corrupting influence. They use the words ``corrupting influence.'' It started with the Teddy Roosevelt era. But that interestingly in 1992, the Clinton campaign found a way around it and found a way that they could use soft money in the creation of ads attacking their opponents but doing so sort of in a way that separated them from the ad itself. They could set up these dummy little organizations and run ads that were not part of the campaign, and they could use soft money to fund it. So all of a sudden they found this loophole. Now everybody is doing it, essentially. Once they found out how to do it, both parties use it and certainly many, many organizations use it.”