Christopher Shays: “I am going to hope the gentleman will be patient with one aspect of this. Congress last year passed in early September…”

“I am going to hope the gentleman will be patient with one aspect of this. Congress last year passed in early September campaign finance reform. It was a bipartisan effort. It dealt with four basic issues. First, it banned soft money, thereby getting rid of the loophole that allowed corporations, labor unions, and foreign money to filter itself into campaigns because soft money was not defined as campaign money even though you have clearly illustrated it is. Second, we called the sham issue ads what they are, campaign ads. We do not ban them. We call them campaign ads. As soon as you do that, out goes the corporate money, the union dues money, and foreign money. And really what you were faced with in a technical term, soft money goes to the political parties, and it goes to the leadership PACs. You were faced with the unions taking, frankly, union dues money, and spending it on a sham issue ad, but because it was not called a campaign ad. The 1947 Taft-Hartley law did not come into effect. You were basically faced with this almost unlimited sum of money that kept coming in. The third thing that we did is we required FEC enforcement, Federal Elections Commission enforcement, right away, and we had disclosure on the Internet right away, filing on the Internet and disclosure on the Internet, so the FEC could hold you accountable before the election, rather than 6 years after.”