Robert Torricelli: “2 weeks ago, all of our hopes for campaign finance reform in this session of the Congress were once again frustrated. A…”

“2 weeks ago, all of our hopes for campaign finance reform in this session of the Congress were once again frustrated. A year of investigations, legislative proposals, and public debate were met with a filibuster led by the Republican leadership. Perhaps it really should not have come as much of a surprise to any of us. In the last decade, this Senate has considered 321 different pieces of legislation for campaign finance reform, which filled 6,742 pages of the Congressional Record--and all of this with no change. So now, for the 117th time in 10 years, the Senate has voted on an element of campaign finance reform to absolutely no avail. It is a problem of near-crisis proportions, not simply because of the burden it places on candidates for public office, not simply because of the compromises it seems to make in public policy. There is a problem far more fundamental. As evidenced in the confidence of our own people in their system of Government, the United States remains perhaps the only developed democracy in the world where its leadership is chosen by a minority of its citizens. Americans are expressing themselves in our system of Government not with their voices but with their feet, because they choose not to walk into a voting booth. If it was bad enough that this Congress would not act, now this frustration with reform is in an entirely different form.…”