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Common Ground Common Sense > Issues that Affect Our Lives > Civil Rights and Civil Liberties > Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Archive
EVDebs
The article Prof. Smith Goes to Washington - controversial member of the Federal Election Commission, Bradley A. Smith - Interview
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_..._33/ai_76447017

""The campaign finance reform establishment went absolutely insane in the spring of 2000. That's when Sens. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Trent Lott (R-Miss.) worked a deal to persuade President Bill Clinton to nominate Bradley A. Smith, a professor of law at Capital University in Columbus, Ohio, to the Federal Election Commission. (In exchange for the Smith nomination, the senators guaranteed a vote on 16 Clinton appointees to the federal bench.)

Vice president and presidential candidate Al Gore-remember him?-took time out from scaring senior citizens about losing Medicare to promptly declare Smith "unfit for office," even though his own administration had nominated the guy. The Senate's dynamic duo on campaign finance issues, Sens. John McCain (RAriz.) and Russell Feingold (DWis.), similarly declared its staunch opposition. "Sending Brad Smith to the FEC is akin to confirming a conscientious objector to be secretary of defense," huffed Vietnam vet McCain during a marathon, 10-hour debate over Smith's confirmation. "I stand proudly by Theodore Roosevelt in believing the 1907 [campaign finance] reforms were valid," McCain continued. "Mr. Smith does not." Feingold expressed a similar sentiment, if in a more hackneyed formulation: "Prof. Smith on the FEC would really be a case of the fox guarding the hen house"""

What was Clinton smoking when he nominated this guy ?
searchingforsanity
Everybody is screaming change and reform after this election without looking at the distortion of reality that resulted in not only a fraudulent election, but also one of the most surreal campaigns---from a media standpoint---I've ever witnessed. How can anyone rebuke campaign finance reform based upon the 2004 campaign?
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