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With the McCain-Feingold bill at a stand-still, Senator Robert Bennett (R-UTAH) and Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-CONN) discuss campaign finance reform.

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KWAME HOLMAN: For now at least McCain-Feingold, the primary vehicle for driving campaign finance reform through the Senate, is stuck in parliamentary gridlock. On one hand, the majority of senators, all forty-five Democrats and seven Republicans, say they're ready and willing to vote for the bill.

SEN. MC CAIN: My friends, this is a long twilight struggle. I do not believe that it's easy to ask incumbents to vote to change a system that keeps incumbents in office.

KWAME HOLMAN: On the other hand, McCain-Feingold is short of the 60 votes needed under Senate rules to end debate and bring the legislation up for a final vote. As a result, supporters of McCain-Feingold have been frustrated.

SEN. JOHN KERRY, (D) Massachusetts: It is very, very clear as of today there are a majority of the United States Senate prepared to vote for campaign finance reform. There is a minority that is trying to stop it.

KWAME HOLMAN: And leading the minority is Kentucky Republican Mitch McConnell.

SEN. MITCH McCONNELL, (R) Kentucky: Forty-eight Senators are not in favor of this measure. And in the Senate, as we know, in recent years every issue of any controversy requires sixty votes. So it is not at all unusual when an issue cannot achieve 60 votes for it not to go forward. That's the norm around here.

KWAME HOLMAN: As it's currently written, the McCain-Feingold bill would ban the use of soft money, unrestricted contributions meant to build political parties but which, in practice, are used to support specific candidates. It also would restrict spending on issue advocacy ads, which highlight issues as a means of targeting particular candidates for defeat. No one in the Senate has endorsed the use of negative political advertising, but there is disagreement on how and whether it should be regulated.

SEN. TOM DASCHLE, Minority Leader: Negative advertising is the crack cocaine of politics. We're hooked on it because it works. We're hooked on it because we win elections using it. There's no accountability, no reporting. It's publicly not tied to any candidates. How many times have I heard the candidates actually say I couldn't keep track of who was on my side? I'd watch television. And I'd hear my name used pro and con, and I didn't have anything to do with those ads.

SEN. ROBERT BENNETT, (R) Utah: We don't like independent expenditure ads. We want to control them. They make us mad many times from our friends, many times from our opponents, but they are part of the price we pay for a free press and free speech in this country, and I, for one, am not willing in the name of shutting down that kind of an ad to damage the First Amendment right that everyone has, including the First Amendment right to be stupid, the First Amendment right to be outrageous, the First Amendment right to say inflammatory kinds of things.

KWAME HOLMAN: Maine's Olympia Snowe and Vermont's Jim Jeffords, both Republicans, have offered an amendment to McCain-Feingold. It would require organizations sponsoring political ads in the weeks before an election to disclose their contributors. And labor unions and corporations would be prohibited from sponsoring such ads during that period.

SEN. OLYMPIA SNOWE, (R) Maine: This amendment would pass constitutional muster. And I think that that's what causes some anxiety for some people because they're opposed to this amendment because it will require disclosure of major donors. Since when has disclosure been antithetical to big government?

KWAME HOLMAN: This evening on the Senate floor supporters of the Snowe-Jeffords Amendment were expected to withstand an effort to table or defeat the measure, but the critical test for Snowe-Jeffords and McCain-Feingold will come tomorrow when the Senate votes on whether to end debate and allow the campaign reform measures to proceed to a final vote. Again, to get there, each bill will need 60 votes, more votes than supporters so far have been able to muster.

JIM LEHRER: Phil Ponce takes it from there.

PHIL PONCE: Now, whither campaign finance reform? We pick up the debate with Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut and Republican Senator Robert Bennett of Utah, graciously substituting for Senator Mitch McConnell, who was unable to leave the Senate floor. And, gentlemen, welcome. Sen. Bennett, we just heard you say that you oppose this compromise bill on campaign finance reform because of your concerns about the First Amendment. How does it counter, run counter to the First Amendment, sir?

SEN. ROBERT BENNETT, (R) Utah: Well, the Supreme Court has been very clear on its definition of political speech, what is free speech, and it has declared huge chunks of McCain-Feingold to be unconstitutional in a variety of related cases. Frankly, I don't know whether Snowe-Jeffords falls into the same category as the McCain-Feingold but in this particular battle we've reached the point where both sides have built their lines, armed their artillery, drawn the line in the sand, and started firing, and I think the best course of action is to defeat everything this year, let the tempers cool down, and come back and take another shot at it next year. So that's why I'm opposing this amendment and all others.

PHIL PONCE: Sen. Lieberman, you are one of the co-sponsors of a bill that's being described as a compromise that has the best chance of the different incarnations out there to pass tomorrow. You're not expected to have the 60 votes necessary to keep this bill moving forward. Will that, in fact be it for campaign finance reform?

SEN. JOSEPH LIEBERMAN, (D) Connecticut: Well, I hope not. I spent the better part of last year, along with my friend from Utah and the Government Affairs Committee investigation of the 1996 campaign, and I think my conclusion certainly was that there's no more campaign finance regulatory system. The limits that were established in the law--individuals can give only up to $2,000 to a campaign. Unions and corporations can't give anything, and those limits, incidentally, have been upheld as constitutional. They've been totally circumvented by soft money and candidate ads that pose a so-called issue ads, and that's exactly what McCain-Feingold would prohibit. I'm confident, incidentally, it would be constitutional because the court has said over and over again you can regulate contributions to campaigns that are not the total amount of spending on it. So I hope we don't give up. I think we're in one of those situations in the Senate where the rules are stopping a majority, a bipartisan majority, from responding to a crisis. The filibuster was supposedly put into the rules of the Senate to stop irrational passions from sweeping too quickly into law. The Senate tends not to do anything too quickly these days--and this is not an irrational passion--this is a rational response to a terrible problem we have, where money is dominating our political system.

PHIL PONCE: How about that, Sen. Bennett, is a minority in the Senate basically holding up what the--granted, a small majority, but nonetheless a majority wants to do?

SEN. ROBERT BENNETT: Well, I liked Sen. Lieberman's comment about the purpose of majorities of filibuster rules to try to hold up irrational passions, and, in my view, this is exactly that. I don't think this will clean up the problems that we have in the campaigns at all. I think it will be unworkable and unenforceable. I think it would make things much more difficult for challengers. We incumbents would really, really thrive under the kinds of rules that are being passed here. It clearly would encourage more of the issue advocacy ads that it seeks to hold down and clearly the Supreme Court would uphold that. So yes, I think this qualifies for the use of the filibuster because I think it is very, very much in the interest of the republic to slow this one down and do it right, rather than react to the hysteria that's been generated.

PHIL PONCE: So, Sen. Bennett, you're saying that one is better off with the status quo than some of these options that are being presented at this moment?

SEN. ROBERT BENNETT: I really think we would be--we are better off with the status quo than McCain-Feingold. I believe McCain-Feingold falls on two bases--one that I've already outlined--it's clearly unconstitutional--and, No. 2, it's unworkable. It creates a whole series of bureaucracies and rules and requirements that would make life absolutely impossible, except for those that are willing to do as was done in 1996, find ways to skirt the law, find ways to go around it. And new challengers are not experienced enough to do that, and incumbents are. This is clearly an incumbent protection act, no matter how much John McCain says incumbents are against it because they want to keep the present system. This would make incumbents even safer.

PHIL PONCE: Sen. Lieberman, how much heat do you think you will--you and your colleagues will feel from the--will get from the public if a campaign finance reform act is not passed?

SEN. JOSEPH LIEBERMAN: I'm afraid my honest answer to that is not enough heat. And I think it's because though the public in every poll we see feels that money matters more than their votes in American politics--in that sense, therefore, they should be crying out to us to cut down the influence of big money, take the "for sale" sign off of American politics that we put up in the ‘96 election--I think they're pessimistic, they're cynical; they don't think we have the ability to break this habit, and the only thing that's going to get us from the 52 votes we have now in the Senate, a majority up to the 60 to break a filibuster, is the American people, Republicans and Democrats and independents getting on the phone, calling the Senators and saying, hey, cut it out, you know, this democracy was supposed to be about one person, one vote, equal access to government, instead of the kind of circus we had in ‘96, were people giving hundreds of thousands of dollars, millions of dollars, obviously buying access to influence our government, unequal access. And as long as that goes on, our democracy is not going to be what the founders of this great country wanted it to be.

PHIL PONCE: So, Sen. Lieberman, are you saying that the hearings--last year's hearings about the alleged abuses during the 1996 campaign--basically were insufficient to light a fire under the public of the kind that you'd like to see?

SEN. JOSEPH LIEBERMAN: Well, I'm afraid so. And it seems to me, having sat there and listened to all the evidence, that it certainly lit a fire under me because I was embarrassed for what I saw. When you begin to break the limits on campaign contributions and you accept hundreds of thousands of dollars and you invite people into the White House, into the capitol for special access to the people with the most power in this government, you're going to have a lot of hustlers and con artists and special interest purchasers paying that money. And the effect is to distort the system. And basically, leave that aside for a moment, we've got some laws in this country. They say individuals can give a limited amount. Corporations and unions can't give anything. Those laws were grossly evaded in 1996, and I don't know how we go on and continue to let that happen. I mean, the lawmakers, in some sense, have become the law breakers, and it's no wonder that the public is cynical. I just wish they would have enough confidence we can change that they demand change by their Senators here in Washington. It may not be McCain-Feingold. Maybe we have to get together and massage that a bit, but I can't believe we're going to walk away from this 105th session of Congress after all that we know about what happened in 1996, without some kind of campaign finance reform.

PHIL PONCE: Sen. Bennett, how about that, what kind of changes--in the short time we have left--what kinds of changes do you think are in the offing in the future?

SEN. ROBERT BENNETT: Well, I view this a little like the health care debate, where there was enormous need for major reform, a great deal of effort put into it, but ultimately we got a vehicle that was totally unworkable and died of its own weight. We came back when the passions were lower in the next Congress, and we passed the Kassebaum-Kennedy bill, which we probably should have passed two years earlier, but the political situation didn't allow it. And I'd be perfectly willing to work with Sen. Lieberman and any other fair-minded member of the Senate--and he certainly is one--to craft some solutions in the next Congress when these passions have died down a little and we've gotten a little more sober to get us in the direction that I think we should go. I agree with him that there are excesses in the system and that they need to be fixed. It's just that the vehicles that we've been offered on the floor of the Senate are so clearly not the answer that I'm willing to take the stand that I've taken.

PHIL PONCE: Senators both, thank you very much.

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