Political Quotes

“I wanted to come to the floor and kick off the process that will culminate tomorrow with our vote on the DISCLOSE Act. The DISCLOSE Act will get rid of dark money in our politics. President Biden gave a good speech about it yesterday to help stir interests and progress in this area. There are problems with dark money in and of itself. It contributes to what has been called the tsunami of slime in our politics, because when the slimy ad has a fake, phony front group's name on it and no actual real entity or company or association is accountable for that, well, then you can lie to your heart's content, you can smear to your heart's content, and there is no accountability. So there are reasons for getting dark money out of our elections on their own: just giving disproportionate power to special interests, sliming up our elections, allowing a lot of bad actors powers that they don't deserve, and putting enormous power in the hands of people who are, A, politically active enough to be willing to spend that kind of money and have a motive in legislative outcomes to spend that kind of money that regular citizens can't begin to match. But there is a lot more to it than that. There is a lot more to it than that, because, like corruption, dark money is used to achieve other goals. And those other goals have had very important policy effects in our country.…”