Rep. Karen Shepherd, D-Utah, worries a House-Senate squabble could doom campaign-finance reform, and she is calling for a compromise to save it.
The House and Senate disagree whether special-interest political action committees should be able to donate to campaigns and, if so, how much.The House has passed a bill that would cap the total that candidates could take from PACs. But it would allow individual PACs to give candidates $10,000 per election cycle.
The Senate, meanwhile, passed a bill to ban all PAC donations. But if courts rule that is illegal, it included a back-up provision to allow $1,000 donations from PACs per election cycle.
Shepherd, co-chairwoman of the Democratic Task Force on Reform, called Friday for both sides to compromise to allow PACs to donate $5,000 per race per election cycle.
"It is clear that the House must adopt this compromise position, or a similar kind of compromise, if we are to have campaign-finance reform legislation that will reach the president and warrant his signature," she said in a press conference with other freshmen.
She said they and other Democrats wrote House Speaker Thomas Foley asking him to seek that middle ground.
The letter said, "We must not allow this difference to derail the first comprehensive rewrite of our campaign laws in 20 years."