Lincoln Chafee: “the Senate has the opportunity to improve the system by which we finance our elections. Yesterday, the Senate had before…”

“the Senate has the opportunity to improve the system by which we finance our elections. Yesterday, the Senate had before it two proposals: one sponsored by Majority Leader Lott and Senator Nickles; the other sponsored by Senators McCain and Feingold. Much of the discussion of these proposals, both here in the Senate and in the media, characterized them as mutually exclusive. For the most part, Republicans were expected to support the Lott proposal, and all 45 Democrats and a handful of Republicans were committed to voting for McCain-Feingold. The paramount goals of any true effort to reform the system of financing elections for Federal office must be to reduce the influence of special interest money on elected officials and to level the playing field between incumbents and challengers. The partisan division that has created the procedural situation in which the Senate found itself yesterday suggests that these goals are not yet at hand. Although the proposals before us are not the final resolution to the problems that afflict the current system of campaign fundraising, they do provide a good starting point. I voted for cloture on both the Lott proposal and on the underlying McCain-Feingold bill. Do I think that the majority leader's proposal is flawless? Of course I don't, no more than I think the McCain-Feingold bill provides all of the solutions to the outrages of the 1996 elections.”