Political Quotes

“I thank the chairman for yielding. I just want to emphasize again, as Justice Stevens pointed out in his dissent, that the Supreme Court decision did open the door to foreign- controlled corporations spending money directly in U.S. elections. If you have a U.S. subsidiary of a foreign corporation that's controlled by that corporation, when the Supreme Court essentially said all corporations could spend money directly in U.S. elections, they opened the door very clearly to that. And it's an area where it's also clear Congress can move to legislate. Number two, it's no surprise that you have lots of organizations on the right and the left--love what they stand for or hate what they stand for--that are opposing this bill because they don't want voters in many instances to know who is funding their ads. That's not a surprise at all. That's why those organizations who are devoted solely to clean campaign elections, like the League of Women Voters and Common Cause, are for this bill while all the others are against it. Let me say something with respect to unions. There is no such thing as a U.S. subsidiary of a foreign union. So this is a red herring issue. Second, under U.S. law, we have never defined collective bargaining agreements as Federal contracts like those contracts that go to the corporations themselves.…”