Rick Allen: “I want to talk about campaign finance reform this morning. I want to say that campaign finance reform does not have to…”

“I want to talk about campaign finance reform this morning. I want to say that campaign finance reform does not have to be a partisan issue. It is becoming a partisan issue, but it does not have to be. The question before this Congress is whether we are going to spend millions of dollars and months of time investigating and never get to the step of actually doing some legislating. I believe that we came here to legislate reform and that we ought to do it. Investigations, millions of dollars and months of hearings, are not enough. I said that campaign finance reform does not have to be a partisan issue. The freshmen have proved that. The gentleman from Arkansas [Mr. Hutchinson], a Republican freshman, and I from Maine, have been cochairing a bipartisan freshman task force composed of six Republicans and six Democrats. After 5 months of hearings, after 5 months of negotiations, after 5 months of consultations with experts from outside this Congress, with people who represented organizations, who participated in the 1996 election in one way or another, with advocates ranging from those who want to take all limits off campaign spending to those who want to put more limits on candidate spending, after all of that activity, we came up with a proposal, with a bill. It is H.R. 2183. It is the bipartisan Campaign Integrity Act of 1997. It is truly bipartisan. What does this act do? Well, quite simply, it takes the biggest of the big money out of politics.…”