Sylvester Turner: “the effort in the House of Representatives to reform campaign finance laws in this country has died today without a…”

“the effort in the House of Representatives to reform campaign finance laws in this country has died today without a single word of debate being spoken. It died by a procedural move on the part of the Republican leadership to place this very critical issue on a suspension calendar, a calendar normally reserved for bills that are not of great controversy, that require two-thirds vote for passage, bills that normally would be heard in an uncontested manner. Yet, the most important issue of campaign finance reform was placed on that calendar for this next Monday before the House of Representatives. It is a tragedy that with hundreds of thousands of hours of effort being put in in the last 15 months in this Congress to study the abuses of campaign finance, committee hearings that have taken place in the committee I serve on, the Committee on Government Reform and Oversight, hearings in the Committee on House Oversight, and the pledge by the Republican leadership to allow this House to have an open and bipartisan debate, that has been denied by a procedural move that will not allow this House to completely debate that bill.”