Martin Hoke: “I also want to speak about the campaign finance reform bill that we defeated yesterday, as well as just campaign finance…”

“I also want to speak about the campaign finance reform bill that we defeated yesterday, as well as just campaign finance reform generally, because the one thing that has been said repeatedly is that it was a good thing that this bill was defeated because it would do nothing to limit campaign spending. That is simply factually untrue, and I am going to explain why that is untrue. I will preface that by saying that I did not think it was a perfect bill. There were a lot of things about the bill I was not particularly happy with but at least it moved in the right direction, and I did vote for it. As we could see, though, from yesterday's vote, unfortunately it was soundly defeated in this House because apparently when it comes to campaign finance reform, people hide behind perfection being the utter enemy of the good, instead of making the incremental reforms that apparently are the only way that we can get anything accomplished with respect to reforming the institution itself or the way that candidates are supported and their campaigns are financed.”