Russ Feingold: “when major and hard-fought legislation nears enactment, the rhetoric on this floor can get a little overheated.…”

“when major and hard-fought legislation nears enactment, the rhetoric on this floor can get a little overheated. Supporters of the measure sometimes overstate the importance of the legislation or exaggerate its benefits. Opponents make doomsday predictions of what will happen if the bill becomes law. Only the passage of time can answer those arguments, but by the time that answers are available, the Senate has often has moved on to other battles. Today, I want to take a few minutes on the floor to call the attention of my colleagues and the American people to some promising indications that the doomsday predictions of opponents of the McCain-Feingold bill have not come to pass. As we told the Senate at the time, McCain-Feingold will not solve every problem in our campaign finance system, and it hasn't. Lately, there has been significant controversy over so-called ``527 organizations,'' which the FEC has permitted to operate in violation, I believe, of the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1974. Nonetheless, McCain-Feingold is working as it was intended to work. It closed the political party soft money loophole, and it has restored some sanity to a system that had truly spun out of control over the last several elections. While it is still too early to reach a final conclusion, it appears that the cynics and the doubters were wrong. And that is good news for the American people.”