Mr. President, let me repeat in response to the Senator from Utah, the argument I make both on my
                  web site and here today is that I believe -I believe - that part of the problem, indeed, a "key
                  ingredient" of wasteful spending and special interest tax breaks is the affect of soft money on the
                  legislative process. Not that every bit of pork a member secures is caused by soft money, but that in
                  the aggregate wasteful spending is caused by, among other things, soft money. 

                  "Mr. President, let me offer my colleagues a definition of corruption from Webster's dictionary:
                  'corruption - the impairment of integrity, virtue or moral principle.' 

                  "Note, Mr. President, this definition does not say that corruption occurs only when laws are broken. I
                  have already cited, as has the Senator from Wisconsin, the large amount of soft money given to both
                  parties by various industries and the aggregate amount of tax breaks those industries received. 

                  I believe, even if some of my colleagues do not, that these amounts have impaired our integrity. I
                  believe that as strongly as I believe anything. Unlimited amounts of money given to political
                  campaigns have impaired our integrity as political parties and as a legislative institution. 

                  "As the Senator from Wisconsin has noted, we are not accusing members of violating federal bribery
                  statutes. No, Mr. President, we are here because there no longer is a law controlling the vast amounts
                  of money that I believe are impairing our integrity. In the immortal words of the Vice
                  President - 'there is no controlling legal authority.' 

                  "I watched very closely as the 1996 Telecommunications Deregulation bill became every thing but
                  deregulatory, and led to far less competition than it was intended to engender, and the consequent
                  increase in cable rates,
                  telephone rates, etc. I believe that soft money played some role in that. 

                  Again, not in a way that fits within a legal definition of bribery, but in the way that the majority -- the
                  vast majority - of Americans believe -- as an impairment of our integrity. And I include myself in that
                  indictment. 

                  "That is the problem I am trying to address with this legislation, and no attack, no amount of
                  head-in-the-sand pretense that soft money doesn't affect legislation will cause me to desist in my
                  efforts. And I would close with one observation - if special interests did not believe that their
                  millions of dollars in donations buy them special
                  consideration in the legislative process, then, Mr. President, those special interests - who have a
                  fiduciary responsibility to their stockholders -- wouldn't give us that money, would they? 

                  "Those interests enjoy greater influence here than the working men and women who cannot afford to
                  buy our attention but who are affected, sometimes adversely, by the laws we pass. For me, Mr.
                  President, that seems to be a
                  good working definition of an impairment of our integrity, which is, as I noted, Webster's definition of
                  corruption.

