Roy Blunt: “of course I rise in support of the amendment. I do not know why this amendment would derail the bill. The Senate I do…”

“of course I rise in support of the amendment. I do not know why this amendment would derail the bill. The Senate I do not think had it in their bill; it was not in the original Shays-Meehan bill. In fact, under the original bill, the parties had to get rid of all soft money in their accounts beginning 30 days after enactment. This was added, I think, at a later time to really put a big loophole in this bill so that the parties could retain soft money. Now, this does not really affect both parties the same way, because only one party has the money in the account right now to build a building. It has already been pointed out that if this money is, in fact, corrupting, it would seem it would be corrupting for all purposes. Money that was bad to use for voter registration, money that was bad to use for party-building, money that was bad to use to turn out the vote, one would think that same money would be bad to use to build a building for one of the parties. Now, I hope that the plan, and we have talked about this a lot today, but I hope the plan is not to take this building fund and use it to pay off hard money that might be borrowed during the campaign, the campaign we are in right now. Certainly it would be nice collateral for a loan that then one could turn around and pay off that loan. That is what at least two Commissioners of the FEC say that could be done with this building fund. Why not eliminate this building fund controversy?”