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Show Mi Inside Washington with Senator Jake Garn Senator Jake Garn is opposed op-posed to legislation to authorize public financing of Congressional campaigns and that he is prepared to participate in a filibuster to block the bill now being considered con-sidered by the Senate. Senator Sen-ator Garn said his major objection, to the legislation lies in the fact that it is an incumbents bill. "An incumbent already has an incredible advantage in retaining his seat, simply because he is in office," said Senator Garn. "In the last Congressional election, 95 of the incumbents were re-elected. We are not getting get-ting the turn -over in office that I think the founding fathers fath-ers intended. I think the main reason for this is the the Incumbent In-cumbent has the advantage of being known, he has constant media coverage, he is in demand de-mand to make speeches all over his State. If you add to these advantages the additional addi-tional benefit of public fi nancing so that the incumbent incum-bent does not have to solicit funds, any challenger would be hard-pressed to defeat him." "If we were going to have public financing, I feel the challenger should be given considerably more money than the incumbent to help counteract the advantages inherent In the office." "Obviously, this legislation legisla-tion was drafted in response to abuses in campaign funding. fund-ing. There is no doubt that abuses have occurred in the past and that some of them have been gross violations; these abuses must be corrected." cor-rected." "But the present election law, which limits the size of a contribution from an individual indi-vidual to $1,000 and from an organization to $5,000 and which requires' full disclosure dis-closure of the source of those funds, is the way to solve the abuse problem." "In addition, public financ -ing takes away a person's incentive to participate actively ac-tively in the, political process. pro-cess. If he can say he donated do-nated to a campaign with his tax dollars, I fear he will have no desire to do more, and the apathy which is plaguing pla-guing our political system will Increase." |
