Indianz.Com > News > Sen. Durbin Floor Statement on Lobbying Reforms

printer friendly version
Sen. Durbin Floor Statement on Lobbying Reforms
Monday, December 19, 2005

The following is the text of a statement by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) on S.2128, a bill to reform lobbying practices. December 16, 2005.

Mr. President, I join in echoing the comments of the Senator from Connecticut about what we just heard from the Senator from Arizona. He has really touched an important issue. There is no doubt in my mind there is a crisis in confidence in terms of the integrity of Congress. Unless and until we deal with that directly, little else we might do will be noticed or believed. I believe he is on the right track.

But I would suggest to him there is something more to the story. It is not just a question of lobbyists larding Members of Congress with gifts, trips to Scotland for golf outings or lavish meals or whatever it happens to be. There is more to the story, and it really goes to the heart of the issue about how we get to Congress and how we get to the Senate.

It is no longer ``Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,'' if it ever was. It is no longer a matter of putting your candidacy before the people of the State and asking that they consider you and wait for the consequence. It is a money chase. It is a huge money chase. And unless you happen to be one of the fortunate few and independently wealthy, you have to spend an awful lot of time chasing it, an awful lot of time raising money.

If you come from a State, as I do, like Illinois, you know an ordinary Senate campaign in my State is going to cost anywhere from $5 million to $20 million to $40 million. Now, imagine, if you will, for a moment that you had to raise that sum of money, and the largest contribution was in the range of $4,000. It takes a lot of time, and it takes a lot of contacts, and it takes a lot of commitment. So what you find is that as people of the Senate are running for reelection, for example, they are spending more and more and more time on the road raising money. They are finding precious little time to dedicate to their constituents or to the work of Congress because they are out raising huge sums of money.

That is part of the reality of the relationship between Members of Congress and lobbyists. Many of these lobbyists also are fundraisers, so to have them on your side is to guarantee they will not only buy you diner, if that is what you are looking for, but also help you in this fundraising effort. I think real, ethical reform, which gets to the heart of the issue, has to get to the issue of how we finance these campaigns.

Unless and until we bring campaigns for election and reelection to the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives to a level where they are affordable for common people, I am afraid we are going to continue to be enslaved by the current system, which requires us to raise so much money from so many people.

I can recall when the Republican leader TOM DELAY announced he was starting something called the K Street project. He was a House leader, and he said he was going to set out to make sure that the lobbyists who came to see him were all loyal Republicans, loyal contributors. He didn't want to see Democratic lobbyists. He prevailed on major associations and organizations not to hire anybody other than a Republican who had met with his approval.

For those of us who have been around this Hill for a while, it was pretty clear what he was creating. He was creating a very generous network of people, who would lobby him on legislation, whom he would possibly reward and then find their support in his campaign. It had built into it some very perilous opportunities. I won't talk about his situation in Texas. Let that be decided in Texas. But unless and until we get to the heart of the issue, the financing of campaigns, I am afraid we are not going to be able to deal forthrightly with the charges of corruption against Congress.

Let me add why campaigns cost so much money. Certainly in Illinois and most other States, it is all about television. It is all about millions of dollars which I have to raise to then give to television stations in my State. It troubles me because what those television stations are selling to me is something I own, something all Americans own--the airwaves. So we are paying premium dollars to television stations to run our ads for election and reelection. We are raising millions of dollars to make sure that we transfer this money as if it were a trust fund from our contributors directly to TV stations. It is about time we change the fundamentals in America. In changing the fundamentals, we can bring real reform.

I supported McCain-Feingold. Senators MCCAIN and FEINGOLD talked about limiting soft money. That is the tip of the iceberg. It is insidious, the soft money that came into campaigns, but the real problem is the cost of campaigns and the millions you have to raise to pay for television. If we said basically that in our country incumbents and challengers will have access to a certain amount of television to deliver their message at an affordable rate, we would dramatically drop the cost of campaigns, dramatically reduce the need to fund raise, and dramatically reduce our dependence on the sources of funds, whether they are generous individuals, special interest groups, or lobbyists.

We have to get to the heart of the issue. It isn't an appetite for golfing in Scotland; it is an appetite for money you need to run your campaign.