H.R. 1

Floor Speech

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Mr. McCONNELL. Madam President, on one final matter, last week the House began the hearing process on Speaker Pelosi's signature bill, H.R. 1, the Democrat Politician Protection Act. I have already touched on several of its outlandish and problematic provisions. What I want to do today is focus on one corner of the craziness. It is the wild idea that what American politics today is really missing is a big taxpayer bailout of political campaigns, attack-ad makers, and campaign consultants.

For everyone who is now convinced they must have misheard what I just said, let me say five of those words again: taxpayer bailout for political campaigns.

It is really something. Democrats have spent months, if not years, crafting this sprawling, 500-plus page Federal takeover of our political speech and our elections. They had all the time in the world to carefully choose each provision and tailor their political strategy, but even after all that, my colleagues in the House Democratic conference are so Washington-centric in their thinking and so happy to tax and spend other people's money that it never occurred to anyone that maybe the American people wouldn't love the idea of their own tax dollars being redistributed to political campaign consultants. It never occurred to them that the American people might not like to have their tax money redistributed to political consultants. This is how out of touch with taxpayers the modern Democratic Party has become.

They saw all these proposals to take the American people's tax dollars and funnel them into more attack ads, yard signs, and telephone calls, and thought, what a great idea. We will put that in. The Democrat Political Protection Act would do this in several different ways. There would be a new Washington, DC-run voucher program so that would-be political donors could simply ask for chunks of taxpayer money and then hand it out to the campaigns they favor. There would also be a brandnew, sixfold matching program for certain donations. The Federal Government would literally come in--sort of the way some businesses match their workers' charitable contributions--and use the American people's money to match certain campaign contributions sixfold. In other words, millions of dollars would be available for each candidate who comes along asking for his or her share of the taxpayer loot.

Keep in mind--this would put each taxpayer on the hook for financing the candidates and campaigns they personally disagree with. They will take our money and give it to people we are not for. If Democrats have their way, citizens won't just have to sit through television commercials railing against the candidate they plan to vote for; now they would also have the pleasure of bankrolling the ads. You can sit there in front of the TV screen and watch your tax dollars at work supporting a person you are going to vote against. People are going to love that.

When you ask Democrats why exactly they would propose something as absolutely ludicrous as a massive, new, taxpayer-funded bailout of the permanent political class, sometimes they make vague claims that problems in American politics would go away if only we took more power out of the people's hands and shipped it here to the Nation's Capital. The evidence suggests they are dead wrong on this. Research suggests that jurisdictions--and there are a few of them--that have matching- fund systems in many cases also have rampant corruption, misappropriation, and waste. There are numerous examples that there is still plenty of corruption and wrongdoing in those systems--not exactly a surprise outcome when you centralize more money and power through government channels.

Public financing doesn't appear to change the playing field between challengers and incumbents in any way either. Here is how one University of Wisconsin political scientist summed it up: ``The people who propose these systems often oversell them.''

There are no apparent benefits, significant new costs, and they want to stick taxpayers with the bill. This is just another one of the Democrat Politician Protection Act's greatest hits. I will have more in the future.

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