Chris Van Hollen: “What we're saying in this bill is that if we're really trying to save the taxpayers some money, which we should all be…”

“What we're saying in this bill is that if we're really trying to save the taxpayers some money, which we should all be trying to do, we should try to curb the influence of the special interests who spend a lot of money hiring lobbyists to influence us and spend money in campaigns trying to influence the outcome of elections. Now just in the last couple of days, we've had a lot of votes on some issues that could affect Federal Government contractors in a very big way. Just yesterday, we had a vote on something dealing with a big military contract. So here's my question. That contractor, the contractor that got taxpayer money or the one that didn't, could say, Look, I want to reward the folks that supported me. I'm going to run a bunch of TV ads in their campaign supporting them; say thank you, I want to get you reelected. Or they may say to the folks who voted against that Federal Government contract, hey, I want to make sure that person doesn't come back here because they may vote against my contract again, they may want to save the taxpayer some money, but we're going to spend some of our money--a Federal contractor, contractor getting taxpayer dollars--we're going to spend some of our money to try and unelect that person who voted against our contract.”