Democracy is Strengthened by Casting Light on Spending in Elections Act

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Mr. NADLER of New York. Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of the DISCLOSE Act.

Earlier this year, a majority of the Supreme Court reversed decades of precedent and struck down a whole series of reform laws limiting the influence of corporate money in elections. The court ruled that corporations are people, just like you and me, and have a corresponding absolute constitutional right to pump as much money as they want into our elections. It revived the fears of concentrated corporate powers, distorting our democratic process, fears that have been held by believers in a republican form of government from the days of Jefferson and Madison and Jackson.

The very real danger now is that corporations will be able to use vast sums of concentrated money to further corrupt our political process and drown out the voices of everyone else. Without action, as a result of this latest activist Supreme Court decision, our electoral system will once again be at the mercy of large moneyed interests.

This bill takes several critical steps to reclaim our elections. The most important one is that it would require disclosure by corporations and labor unions of donors providing money for political purposes in certain circumstances, and would mandate that corporate CEOs appear in company political ads to say that they ``approve this message,'' just as candidates would do.

With these and several other provisions, the DISCLOSE Act will constitutionally set some limits on the role of big money in politics, not by limiting the corporate money, unfortunately, but by requiring disclosure of the sources of the corporate money, and thus providing voters with valuable information on which wealthy interests are behind which political advertising so voters can better evaluate that advertising.

I know many people on the other side of the aisle who opposed contribution limits previously, in the McCain-Feingold Act, for instance, always said, Don't limit political expenditures. The solution is disclosure. Let people know who is sponsoring the ads, that will safeguard the integrity of our elections. Well, I don't think disclosure is enough, but it is all the Supreme Court will allow us to do. And to hear all of the people on the other side of the aisle now, people who argued for disclosure for years, now suddenly claim that requiring disclosure is a limit on free speech is very disturbing, to put it mildly.

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Mr. NADLER of New York. It is important that voters know whether the ad sponsored by Citizens for a Clean Environment are really bank-rolled by British Petroleum, or perhaps by the Sierra Club, in order to judge the ad's credibility.

Now, I know there is a great deal of concern by some people about one part of the legislation which would exempt the category of organizations from the obligation to disclose their contributors, not from other obligations of the bill, but from the obligation to disclose their contributors. By limiting the exemption of this one requirement to include only those organizations which have been in existence for at least a decade, have 500,000 dues-paying members, have dues-paying members in each of the 50 States, and receive no more than 15 percent of their funding from corporations and unions, the bill would still require disclosure from the kind of corporations who seek to buy elections secretly and with unlimited cash. We cannot allow the perfect to become the enemy of the good. The DISCLOSE Act would make a vast and substantial difference in protecting the integrity of our elections, and I cannot think of a more important bill if this country is going to remain a democracy with a small ``d'' and not a captive of large corporations.

I urge all of my colleagues to support this bill despite its imperfections.

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