Russ Feingold: “I rise today, with my friend and colleague, Senator Wellstone, and others to start up the conversation again about the…”

“I rise today, with my friend and colleague, Senator Wellstone, and others to start up the conversation again about the need to clean up our election system and pass meaningful, bipartisan campaign finance reform. I am pleased to announce that as of yesterday the so-called McCain-Feingold legislation now has reached a milestone of having 30 cosponsors in the Senate, with the addition of the distinguished senior Senator from West Virginia, Senator Robert Byrd, as a cosponsor. One of the things that really highlights the importance of this issue is the type of work that was recently done by Public Citizen in releasing a report that lays out the fact that the McCain-Feingold bill, and I am sure other alternatives as well, really would make a difference, that had we done the job last July the elections of 1996 would have looked very different. They have analyzed three components of the legislation. One is the voluntary limits on overall spending that candidates would agree to in order to get the benefits of the bill. They analyzed the fact that the McCain-Feingold bill would ban soft money completely, as any good reform proposal must do.”