Craig Benson Quotes

The usual test under the Federal Election Campaign Act for whether something counts as a campaign expenditure is whether the obligation would have existed but for the campaign. If so, it is not a campaign expenditure.

The way campaign funds are distributed are all a matter of record.

Even though Mr. Trump can give his campaign as much of his own money as he wants to, he can't ask other people to front the money for him and promise to pay them back later without reporting the arrangement in a timely fashion to the Federal Election Commission.

The cost of congressional and presidential campaigns has been leaping every two or four years. I think this year it will be 60 percent more than 1996; well over twice as much as in 1992 in the presidential and congressional races.

The American system of political spending is so unregulated that it might make Adam Smith rethink free markets.

Spending for congressional campaigns is getting to be like the arms race.

History’s pendulum is now swinging back toward the day when political finances were only lightly regulated.

Spending limits have proven a monumental failure at limiting campaign spending in presidential elections, merely diverting the money underground.

We have to talk about the way we finance campaigns.

There probably could be some mileage in running a comparative study about how best to finance electoral campaigns around the world.

We expect elections to have contribution limits, and we expect to follow them.

I've never seen my filings. I've instructed my campaign to review my filings and check and see if any don't comply with state election laws, and return them.

I would do away with super PACs. I think it's a cancer.

It's important not to limit the amount of their own money that candidates can spend, but to give other people access to enough money to run competitive races.

It is essential that there should not only be a limit on campaign spending but it should be required to say where that money is spent and how it is spent. I think there has been more abuse in campaign spending, actually, than in campaign contributors.

People have their constitutional right to contribute to a campaign and if they have discretionary money that they want to contribute to a candidate, whether a Republican or a Democrat, they should be able to do so.

They ended up spending a total, their campaign plus the independent, about 1.3 million. I only ended up spending about - not only, but I spent about 2 million. But I had no intention of doing that until I was attacked with a negative ad by an independent group.

The McCain-Feingold limit on how much you give a candidate didn't really work because people found ways to get around it.

I took and received campaign donations under the existing laws.

Money in politics is a huge issue.

As long as we, in the United States, continue to insist that our politicians have to spend all of their time raising millions of dollars for television ads, it will be corrupt. If we leave it up to the politicians to clean up lobbying and finance reform, nothing is going to change.

We are told there is not enough money for education, but somehow there is enough money for people to raise billions of dollars to defeat somebody in an election? Oh! Okay! Does that make sense?

The goal of limiting campaign contributions is to find that line between contributions that are so high that a candidate feels beholden to a donor and contribution levels that are so low that a non-incumbent candidate has little chance of making an effective race.

Congressman are spending too much time raising money.

Not only the candidate should not be required, he should not be permitted, to incur any but a limited and trifling expense for his election.