Wertheimer: No. The limit for shyness is a lot lower than ten-thousand dollars. The disclosure laws on the books that no one challenges requires contributions of two hundred dollars or more to be disclosed. So, no shyness, when it comes to the fundamental integrity of our political system, to the ability of the American people to believe their interests are being represented by our democracy, that they are not second-class citizens because political donors have become the first class citizens in our society.

Q: Some of this money is what could be called ideological money. People here who are very wealthy individuals believe in a conservative ideology and probably that's the primary reason they're giving.

Wertheimer: Let me comment on that. Because when you deal with huge sums of money, lots of it comes for purposes of influence. Sometimes it comes because of ideology and philosophy. Sometimes it comes just to support a particular candidate.

The problem is huge sums of money are dangerous. And there is no way to distinguish and say, well, this hundred thousand dollars is fine because this individual doesn't want anything. But this hundred thousand dollars, no, that's no good, because we know they want to change public policy in Medicare. That is why you have rules that say not a dollar of corporate money in federal elections and that's why you limit individual contributions to a thousand dollars for a campaign. And when you go around those rules and start bringing those huge contributions in, you are opening the door to corruption and the appearance of corruption and most importantly, you are contributing to the cynicism of the America people. You're not helping to restore their sense that the government is in balance and working for them. You're just increasing their sense that this is a rigged, fixed system operating at their expense.

Big money is dangerous, corrupt money. Big money operates at the expense of the average citizen, the average tax payer in this country. That is most people. Big money separates politicians from the citizens who elect them for representation. They don't elect them to disproportionately represent big money.

Q: Do you remember when you first became aware of Newt Gingrich?

Wertheimer: Well, I remember his campaigns against Flynt. I remember him raising ethics questions. And they became central questions in the campaign. So you start off saying, 'Here's someone who's interested in issues that Common Cause believes are of central importance to the people's ability to have confidence in their government.'

Q: He goes after Speaker Wright. At one point, he solicits support from Common Cause. What was your response?

Wertheimer: Our response was that we would not in any way become involved with him in his efforts. That our practice was to look at ethics questions in Congress independently. We had a long history even at that time of being an ethics watchdog and raising questions with the ethics committee. He by then had developed a pattern and practice which very much made us want to stay away from him and that was the practice of using ethics and corruption issues as partisan tools. And that didn't necessarily mean that there wasn't an ethics problem. But it didn't necessarily mean there was when he was involved because we were concerned that there was a very large partisan overtone to what he was doing. So we basically informed them that we would in no way be involved with him.

But that was our practice as a general rule. We never got involved with any member of Congress when we were looking at an ethics matter. We also made clear, I believe at the time, that we would monitor and were monitoring what was going on in the Wright case.

You constantly face partisan swirls going on in these ethics questions. Common Cause chose the role to stay separate from them, not to get involved if there was nothing there. But also on our own terms, through our own independent work, if we saw an ethics problem, we were gonna get involved and raise questions, regardless of what else was going on.

Q: So whatever nervousness or suspicion you had about this being partisan, in fact, Common Cause does go and file a complaint against the Speaker Wright.

Wertheimer: Well, we were looking at this at the time that he asked us about it. We weren't interested in partisan. We were interested in ethics. We conducted a very careful examination of this. Archibald Cox, who was the chairman of Common Cause, the former Watergate special prosecutor, worked with me on this. The assistant Attorney General of the Criminal Division under President Carter, was our outside counsel and worked with me on this. And we finally concluded that a ethics investigation should take place and I wrote a letter to the ethics committee asking for an investigation of Speaker Wright and asking that an outside counsel be appointed.