Ed Whitfield: “as a result of the 1996 presidential elections, the Nation's news media and many other people began to focus upon the…”

“as a result of the 1996 presidential elections, the Nation's news media and many other people began to focus upon the way campaigns are financed in America. This focus was generated because of the Clinton/Gore campaign violating provisions that said, you cannot receive funds from foreign sources. The Democratic Party is not the only one guilty of violating campaign finance laws, whether deliberately or not deliberately, because they are very complex. I would like to suggest to my colleagues that when people talk about campaign finance, they focus on two things. First of all, they talk about special interests as if it was something horrible. Yet what special interest means is that any citizen belonging to any group in America, whether it be a nurse, a labor union member, a doctor, a tobacco farmer, a teacher, whatever, has a right to speak on issues that affect them and to join together with others to speak on issues that affect them. Those are what you refer to as special interests. That is all that they are. All of us have some special interest. So I do not see that there is anything particularly negative about having a special interest.”