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The following is excerpted from three pages of the Congressional Record, Proceedings
and Debates of the 107th Congress, First Session, Washington, Monday,
April 2, 2001, Vol. 147, No. 46: BIPARTISAN CAMPAIGN REFORM ACT OF 2001—Resumed The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Kentucky. Mr. MCCONNELL. Who wins? As I said the other day, who wins are people such as Jerome Kohlberg. This is the billionaire who has decided this is going to be his legacy. This is the full page ad he ran in the Washington Post the other day on behalf of this legislation. I suspect a lot of the lobbyists out in the hall right off the Senate floor are either on his payroll directly or indirectly. People such as Jerome Kohlberg and the big charitable foundations are underwriting the reform movement, hand in hand with the editorialpages of the Washington Post and the New York Times, which have editorialized on this subject an average of once every 6 days over the last 27 months. At least in the Senate, they are going to get their way shortly, but this new world won’t take a penny out of politics, not a penny. It will all be spent. It just won’t be spent by the parties. It will be spent by the Jerome Kohlbergs of the world and all of the interest groups out there. As everyone knows, the restrictions on those interest groups will be struck down in court, if we get that far. Welcome to the brave new world where the voices of parties are quieted, the voices of billionaires are enhanced, the voices of newspapers are enhanced, and the one entity out there in America, the core of the two-party system, that influence is dramatically reduced. I strongly urge our colleagues to vote against this legislation. It clearly moves in the wrong direction.
http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getpage.cgi?dbname=2001_record&page=S3234&position=all http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getpage.cgi?dbname=2001_record&page=S3235&position=all
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