http://www.publicampaign.org/blog/2007/01/11/sen-durbins-speech-in-support-of-public-financingFor many years on Capitol Hill, I resisted the notion of public financing of campaigns. I had some pretty good arguments against it. Why do I want to see public moneys or taxpayer dollars going to crazy candidates representing outlandish causes who have no business in this political process? Well, those arguments held up for a while, but over time I came to understand that while I was arguing against that lunatic fringe in American politics, I was creating a trap for everyone else who was honest and trying to raise enough money to wage an effective campaign.
The time has come for real change. In this last election cycle, which the Presiding Officer knows full well, more money was spent in that off-year election than in the previous Presidential election year. The amount of money going into our political process is growing geometrically. It means that more and more special interest groups and individuals with an agenda are pouring dollars into the political process. It means that our poor, unsuspecting voters are the victims of these driveby ads that come at them night and day for months before a campaign. It means that candidates, both incumbents and challengers, spend month after weary month on the telephone begging for money.
It is no surprise that the same people we are begging money for are the people who are the subject of this ethics legislation--the lobbyists of the special interest groups. We live in this parallel world.
Today, with the passage of this underlying legislation, we will ban a lobbyist buying me lunch. Tomorrow that same lobbyist can have me over for lunch at his lobbying firm to provide campaign funds for my reelection campaign, and it is perfectly legal. What is the difference? From the viewpoint of the person standing on the street looking through the window, there is none. It is the same lobbyist and the same Member of Congress. The fact that one is a political campaign fundraising event and another is a personal lunch is a distinction which will be lost on most of America.
The reason I raise this is I will support these ethics reforms. They are absolutely essential. They are the product of the scandals we have seen on Capitol Hill in the last several years. But if we stop there, if we do nothing about the financing of our political campaigns, we have still left a trap out there for honest people serving in Congress to fall into as they try to raise money for their political campaigns. In a few weeks I will be introducing public financing legislation to try to move us to a place where some States have already gone--the States of Arizona, for example, and Maine--moving toward clean campaigns, understanding that the voters are so hungry for changes and reforms that will shorten campaigns, make them more substantive, take the special interest money out of those campaigns, make them a real forum and debate of ideas and not a contest of fundraising. Sadly, that is what they have become in many instances.
I urge my colleagues in their zeal for reform not to believe that the passage of S. 1 and its amendments will be the end of the debate. I hope it will only be the beginning and that we can move, even in this session of Congress, to meaningful hearings and the passage of public financing of campaigns that will truly reform the way we elect men and women to office at the Federal level and restore respect to this great institution of the U.S. Congress, both the House and the Senate.
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