Bill Scott Quotes

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

You now have six-year campaigns for the Senate - you never stop running. It's not uncommon for a member of the Senate to have a fundraising breakfast, a fundraising lunch and a fundraising dinner, and then when the Senate breaks for the week to go home, more fundraisers. And that's driven by the cost of campaigning.

While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.

The campaign finance law is so intricate that I can’t figure it out.

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

This Court now concludes that independent [political] expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.

We have to talk about the way we finance campaigns.

The decision in McCutcheon v. FEC is a devastating blow in efforts to rein in out-of-control costs of campaigns.

Ultimately, the question of campaign contributions will be decided by the public.

I do not believe wealthy candidates should spend vast resources in their own campaigns.

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.

Nobody wants campaign finance reform more than me. It would save me a fortune.

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

Spending limits not only do not work, they have the perverse effect of making special interests more powerful and more influential.

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.

We have become part-time Senators and full time fund-raisers. Even the schedule of the Senate itself is now arranged around the need to raise money for the next political campaign, rather than around the need to solve the nation's problems and do the people's business.

In Canada we have limits on campaign spending and public funding of campaigns. This makes it easier for people [candidates] who don't have access to huge amounts of money.

The most misguided, naïve, uninformed, egregious decision of the United States Supreme Court … in the 21st century. To somehow view money as not having a corrupting effect on an election flies in the face of reality. I just think that just one of the five had run for county sheriff. I guarantee you … there will be scandals. There is too much money washing around political campaigns today, and it will take scandals and maybe the Supreme Court will go back and revisit this issue

All contributions by corporations to any political committee or for any political purpose should be forbidden by law.

Not since the gilded age has our politics been opened so wide to corporate contribution and donations from secret sources.

If you can deregulate money in politics, then you can buy the policy outcomes you prefer.