Food and Drug Administration Safety and Innovation Act--Motion to Proceed--Resumed

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, I thank my friend from Kansas for finishing his speech in a timely manner.

I come to the floor to talk a little bit about the DISCLOSE Act and Citizens United. For the last 2 1/2 years, Americans have heard us talk about the need for full disclosure of money donated to campaigns. It is time for Congress to stop stalling and let the American voters find out where the money being spent on elections is coming from once and for all.

All of our predictions in the aftermath of the flawed Citizens United decision unfortunately are coming true. This decision handed a megaphone to the wealthiest voices among us and strapped a muzzle on every other American. Sure, average Americans can talk to one another, but they are not spending $10 million on TV ads, and we know what kind of an effect that has. If anything, the situation is even worse than we could have possibly anticipated because unlimited spending by just a handful of the wealthiest Americans has put true democracy in danger--a true democracy of one person, one vote, of true equality. This is worrisome when we have such huge amounts of money being spent by so few people who seem to speak with one voice and one conservative point of view.

The list of the top donors to super PACs reads like a who's who of the richest people in America. The contributions to super PACs that were released in the most recent disclosure reports are truly astonishing. Six-figure sums seem like pocket change now compared with today's trend of seven- and eight-figure donations.

Let's take Bob Perry, for instance, top donor to Mitt Romney's super PAC, Restore Our Future. People may know him as the former top donor to Swift Vets and POWs for Truth, the group that ran smear ads questioning John Kerry's military service in 2004. When we add up his donations to super PACs this cycle, we have almost $14 million of political influence from just one man. Another example is Harold Simmons. When we combine his personal donations with the corporation he owns with his wife, we get contributions of over $17 million to six different super PACs.

Because disclosures to the FEC are only made publicly available once a month, this paints a mere fraction of the picture of total super PAC spending. The reports don't even address spending through so-called nonprofit organizations. As we all know, 501(c)(4) organizations are able to serve as conduits for huge sums of anonymous funding that are never publicly disclosed. I call them ``so-called'' because they function the same as the super PACs, except they can't say ``vote for'' or ``vote against,'' but their effect on campaigns, obviously intended, is just as real.

It doesn't stop at the Federal level. We are also seeing the concern over corporate spending at the State level through the Montana case, American Tradition Partnership v. Attorney General Bullock. This case hinges on a challenge to Montana's century-old campaign finance law by special interest groups that want to take advantage of the anonymous political spending made possible by Citizens United. In fact, the fundraisers in this case, a group called American Tradition Partnership, solicits contributors by actually bragging about their secrecy. In their promotional literature, they promise potential donors:

We're not required to report the name or the amount of any contribution that we receive. So, if you decide to support this program, no politician, no bureaucrat, no radical environmentalist, will ever know you helped make this program possible.

It is no surprise, given mounting concerns about the corruptive effects of unlimited and often anonymous campaign spending on our democracy, that so many individuals and groups have filed amicus briefs to this case--including Senators Whitehouse and McCain, several House Democrats, and dozens of others--urging the court to uphold Montana's 100-year-old law.

We cannot sit idly by and watch our democracy put up for sale to the highest bidders. Full disclosure--the kind the DISCLOSE Act of 2012 requires--is still necessary to shed light on which groups and individuals are funding our elections, to keep some modicum of faith that the voters at least know what is going on.

In 2010 the original DISCLOSE Act passed the House and had widespread support in the Senate and from the President but failed to gain cloture by one vote because not one Republican was willing to step across the aisle and do what the American people clearly regard as the right thing. Well, now there is no excuse. We have removed the original provisions my Republican colleagues most objected to. All that remains is disclosure and disclaimer, plain and simple.

The time to act on campaign finance reform is now. While America's richest billionaires can afford to keep contributing millions of dollars to super PACs and 501(c)s, America cannot afford to be kept in the dark any longer.

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