Here ya go. This one's free. Ask for any more, and it'll cost you real money, LOL!
BILL BENNETT: Do you regret your vote for campaign finance reform?
FRED THOMPSON: Well, Bill, you know, part of that is good law, and part of it is not. We were saying, "Let's raise the hard money limit up to some higher level - it's still not high enough. I did quite a bit on that and got it up to $2,000 plus inflation. It's unrealistically low. From a thousand to two is progress, but you get rid of the soft money. I came to Washington promising to try to change the way Washington did business. The way Washington wound up doing business, especially after the Clinton guys proved that you could do some things differently and not go to jail, was trading the tradtional limitations for huge sums of money. Instead of a thousand, you know, it was a hundred thousand.
Giving large sums of money to politicians that you have business before is not a good idea. I stand by that and feel like that was good.
This business of trying to regulate television ads and so forth has not worked out, was not a good idea, shouldn't have been done. As I look at it now and see these cases come before the Supreme Court, they're parsing the words. "Is this an issue ad or not?" And so forth, and so on. I thought it would be evident... self-evident, the answer to that. But it's not, and the Supreme Court can't handle all of these cases. We can't afford the bureaucracy necessary to monitor all of these cases. So, I split down the middle on that.
BILL BENNETT: You know, I agree with George Will - unlimited money, no foreign money, but you've got to report it all, no cash. The money's going to get though anyway - 527s - I do think there are First Amendment issues. You should be able to support the candidate that you want. As long as it's public information, I don't have a problem with it.
FRED THOMPSON: Well, you can make a case for that, and I said in a Wall Street Journal article several months ago that might be what we come to.
- Bill Bennett, Morning in America, June 6, 2007
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