Rep. McDermott's Statement on Voting for the DISCLOSE Act

Statement

Today, Rep. Jim McDermott issued the following statement after voting in favor of passing the DISCLOSE Act, legislation designed to increase the disclosure and transparency of corporate and special interest donations to federal election campaigns.

"The DISCLOSE Act is far from a perfect bill, and I was deeply disappointed by the inclusion of provisions that exempted certain organizations from parts of the law. But without action, corporations would have been able to pump endless amounts of money into campaigns starting this year.

"While I believe it was highly inappropriate to give exemptions to any organizations, I'm glad they are narrow and only exempt those organizations from disclosing their donors. These organizations still must disclose their campaign-related spending, put their CEOs in campaign-related ads run by the group and take responsibility for the ads just like candidates must do, and cannot use corporate money to finance the ads."I've long been an advocate of public financing of campaigns, and believe that the surest way to have fair elections is to eliminate the presence of private money altogether. But in light of the recent Supreme Court decision that would have permitted an endless flow of corporate and special interest money into elections, I also knew that we needed to act quickly.

"Without this bill, companies like BP would have been able to form front organizations with fake names like "Citizens for Clean Wetlands' and purchase millions of dollars worth of ads to help elect candidates that would favor them. No one would ever know where the money was coming from. This legislation will bring transparency to the process and prevent that from happening."

Source