Disclose Act
Floor Speech
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Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I thank my neighbor, the Senator from New Mexico, for his kind words and his leadership on this issue. I have been privileged to have the chance to cosponsor a constitutional amendment that I think responds very nicely to what he hears from his constituents, as I hear from mine, whether they are Republicans, Democrats, or Independent voters. I also want to thank the Senator from Rhode Island, Mr. Whitehouse, for organizing this time tonight and for his leadership over these many months.
It is 8:45 p.m. tonight in Washington, DC, as we debate this bill. We are not actually debating the bill because we weren't even allowed to move to a debate on the bill. I can't tell you the number of times we haven't been able to do that.
I am often struck by the fact that I think the Founding Fathers would have wanted us to debate all these bills and to vote up or down on each one and then to go home and explain to our constituents why we voted one way or why we voted another way. But here we are, not technically debating a bill, once again, because we haven't even been able to move onto a piece of legislation that historically has been and I hope will again become bipartisan.
As I mentioned, it is 8:45 here. At home in Colorado, it is 6:45. It is dinnertime. Families are sitting around having dinner with their loved ones, much as I did when I was a boy. I can remember my parents, who followed public affairs closely, turned on the evening news every night about this time, and Walter Cronkite would be on the television. I remember that the ads, as probably does the Senator from New Mexico, were things like Geritol, things that cleaned your dentures. I remember one ad in particular--I never could believe they could get the cherry stains out of those pearls, but every single night they were able to do it. And if there was a political ad on television, the candidate had to get on at the end and say: My name is Michael Bennet, my name is Jeff Merkley, my name is Tom Udall or Dick Durbin or Harry Reid or Sheldon Whitehouse, and I approve this message. That is what we saw when I was a child.
Tonight, families all over my State, which is a swing State, are going to have to endure advertisement after advertisement that is not advertising those consumer products I described but are advocating for candidates and political ideas. And many of them will have phony names. The Committee for a Strong America or Tall Children or Strong Teeth is what they are going to see. Now, because of what the Supreme Court ruling did, they can't even find out, if they wanted to, who is donating to those in many cases fake committees.
I wish to start out tonight by making clear what is not at issue with this bill. This is not a constitutional question we are debating here tonight. There is not a question that disclosure and disclaimer--which this bill doesn't even do--is constitutional. Eight of nine Supreme Court Justices have not only said it is constitutional but some have said that is a desired result.
Justice Scalia said:
Requiring people to stand up in public for their political acts fosters civic courage, without which democracy is doomed.
For my part, I do not look forward to a society that, thanks to the Supreme Court, campaigns anonymously and even exercises the direct democracy of initiative and referendum hidden from public scrutiny and protected from the accountability of criticism. This does not resemble the home of the brave. It takes courage to put your name on something, to stand for something that is unpopular. It doesn't take a lot of courage to let somebody use your money in a way that keeps you completely anonymous and imposes something on families in our States who are trying to make a fundamental American decision to vote in a democracy. That doesn't take courage. That is the point Justice Scalia was making because Justice Scalia, I believe, thought Congress would do its job and enact what is constitutional, require disclosure, require disclaimer.
This issue is one that has been well understood in this country since its founding. Here is Patrick Henry in 1788:
The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them.
Accountability and transparency--that is what this legislation is about, and it is emphatically constitutional. So if somebody comes and tells you this is about the Constitution, tell them that eight of nine Supreme Court Justices have already ruled on this question. They have already ruled that what is in the content of this act is constitutional.
What is happening out there as a consequence of a decision that was made by the Supreme Court on the one hand and the failure of the Congress to act in a timely manner on the other? Well, these super PACs have come into being, these anonymous folks who have been able to give money.
There is an owner of a casino in Las Vegas, and he has actually given more
money to super PACs in 2012 than anybody else in the country--at least that is my understanding--but to him this is chump change. So far he has given $35 million, and he says he is going to give more than that. That is a lot of money to most people, but it is not a lot of money to this guy because he has a net worth of $23.9 billion.
We did some math at home, and what we figured out is that in Colorado and in America, the average family's net worth is roughly $77,000. So if they were to spend the same percentage of their net worth that this one casino owner in Las Vegas has spent of his net worth, that would be about $108, which is about what people spend a week on groceries who are making this kind of money. To them, that would be a little bit of a sacrifice, $108, but if they knew they could control the outcome of elections in State after State, if they could influence the election of the very President of the United States by spending .0001 of their net worth, $108, they might do it.
This is pocket change for him. These numbers get so big it is hard sometimes to think about what it means. This one person's net worth is 332,000 times the net worth of our average family.
Think about it this way: The median household income in Colorado is roughly $56,000. A family earning $56,000 in Colorado every year, year in and year out, who never paid any taxes--and is probably paying a higher rate, by the way, than this guy in Las Vegas--but who never paid any taxes, who never spent one penny of their salary--$56,000 a year, year in and year out and didn't spend a nickel of it--would have to do that for 441,000 years before it added up to what this guy has. Just to give you a sense of perspective, human beings made their appearance on this planet 200,000 years ago--less than half of what it would take for this diligent and prudent family to raise what this fellow is worth. It gives you a sense of the order of magnitude.
As some of my colleagues have said, one aspect that is really interesting about this super PAC phenomenon is it is a very small group of very wealthy people who are contributing to it. It is not most corporations. It is not some people who have some means. This is a tiny, tiny group of people who are committed to a set of political outcomes in their economic interests that I am not sure are in the same interests of most of the folks who live in my State.
Again, we are not saying they can't do it. This bill doesn't say they can't do it. This bill just says: If you are going to do it, you need to tell us who you are. We want to know who you are. Step up and say why it is you are doing what you are doing.
It is not surprising, by the way, that this problem has become enormous since this decision was made. In 2006, 1 percent of donors were undisclosed; that was it. Ninety-nine percent were disclosed, and 1 percent was not disclosed. It is even worse today.
This is 2010, the year I was running and a year when Colorado saw more outside money on television than anybody should deserve to see, more outside money than any State in the United States of America, and 44 percent of the money that was spent was not disclosed. The identity of the people who gave the money was not disclosed. That is virtually half of what was spent, and it is going to be worse this year.
I have three daughters who are 12, 11, and 7, and everybody who has been a parent would know this intuitively. Not surprisingly, as the spending has become more anonymous, the advertising has become more negative. If one of my kids thinks they can get away with doing something negative to one of their sisters--which is not often, but it happens--if they think they can get away with it without anybody catching them, they are a lot more likely to do it than if they know somebody is watching.
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Mr. BENNET. I thank the Presiding Officer.
So you can see that the portion of positive advertising here is much, much higher than the negative.
Today it is almost entirely negative. And between the hours of 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. tonight in the State of Colorado and across the United States of America, those graphs are going to be borne out by negative ad after negative ad.
We face enormous structural issues in the economy in this country. We faced them for a while, and we are facing them again because, as you can see from this chart, GDP growth, our economic output, has decoupled from wage growth and job growth. That is what has happened in the United States. And the job of this Congress and the job of this administration and our generation's job is to recouple this so that we have a rising middle class. And that is what we should be spending our time on as we think about reforming our Tax Code and our regulatory code and our statute books. But there are some folks around who aren't necessarily all that interested in that because the current system works pretty well for them.
I can't tell you the number of times I have heard people say in this Chamber that the government shouldn't pick winners and losers. That is really easy to say when you are on the winning side. We ought to have a set of rules that are responsive to the needs of the vast majority of American people--whether Republicans, Democrats, or Independents--who together, no matter where they are in the economic spectrum, all want essentially the same thing, which is to make sure we are not the first generation of Americans to leave less opportunity, not more, to the people who are coming afterwards. I believe that anybody who wants to come to that debate, anybody who wants to play in that game is welcome, but they ought to tell us who they are.
Mr. President, I yield the floor. I see the Senator from Illinois is here, and I look forward to his remarks.
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Mr. BENNET. I wish to thank the Senator from Rhode Island for his leadership and my other colleagues who are out here tonight.
I wish to be clear again about what this bill is. First of all, it is very clear it is constitutional. In the Supreme Court, eight of nine Justices have said that. As I listen to the debate tonight, I also think people at home should know this is about a few actors in the country who have been allowed to spend wild amounts of money without saying who they are. This doesn't prevent them from spending the money. It simply says they need to say who they are.
My sense, having spent time with people who are often asked to contribute to these campaigns, is that people who have the means to spend $10,000 on political activity, by and large, would actually like this disclosure requirement. The reason they would like this disclosure requirement is so they can say to people who are trying to list them and distorting our politics and having them pay for negative attack ads they don't agree with and they don't think are true, could say no because they know they could say to the people: I am not going to sign up for that because I don't want to put my name on that.
There is an enforcement mechanism I think virtually everybody in America would support and certainly at home would support. I would argue the only place in America that anybody would think that spending vast amounts of money by a small group of people without having to tell us who they are makes sense, and that is right here in Washington, DC. Maybe some people will benefit from making the ads or those who are paid to place the ads on television. But otherwise, it is hard to find anybody who would think this wasn't in their interest and certainly not in their children's interest.
I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record Senator Coburn's column in the op-ed page of the New York Times where he lays out in a very succinct and compelling view some of the things that are wrong with this place.
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Mr. BENNET. It also calls for the kind of principled leadership we are going to apply in order to solve the challenges we face with respect to our debt and deficit to get this economy moving again. It includes recoupling rising wages and job growth to our economic growth, energy policy, educating our kids in the 21st century. It is all the things people at home want us to be working on.
In a State such as mine that is one-third Republican, one-third Democratic, and one-third Independent, there is not that much difference in opinion about what the solutions ought to be.
The reason I support the DISCLOSE Act is that I think it is one important step. It is certainly not the only step, but it is one important step toward recoupling the conversation we are having in Washington and to recoupling the priorities that are in Washington. Maybe it is better to say it this way: to recouple the priorities the people have at home to the work being done or not done in Washington, DC.
We should pass this bill and get on with the people's business.
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Mr. BENNET. I thank the Senator for his question. I think it is going to be made much more difficult. There are plenty of people I know at home who watch the stuff going on, on TV, and they don't recognize themselves and the cartoon that is playing. Sometimes they don't recognize their priorities playing out on the Senate floor. They don't recognize the convictions they have or the aspirations they have for the communities or the debate they are having. It is a natural reaction for people to say: I don't want any part of that.
As Dick Durbin was saying, somehow this is a knife fight that has nothing to do with me, and I am not going to pay attention to it. The problem is, as with any fight such as that, what we end up doing is ducking and covering because that is what we have to do in order to stay out of the way. That isn't going to put us in the position of being able to deliver on the promise of generation after generation of Americans to make sure the folks coming after us actually have more opportunity, not less, than we had.
Remember, this is a tiny proposal. This is simply requiring disclosure. It is not even requiring a disclaimer. Frankly, if it were up to me, I would want people who funded these committees to have to stand up at the end of the ads to say: I am John Smith or I am Mary Jones, and I paid for this ad. But this bill doesn't even do that. All it says is they have to say who they are. I think poll after poll shows that 90 percent of Americans, Democrats, Republicans, Independents, agree with that.
This is one issue where the sort of optical issues that happened somehow on the beltway ought to not lead us to a place where we obscure the vision of the American people, which on this issue is as clear as can be. We have to get this done and get on to the rest of the business at hand.
I yield the floor.
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