Fred Thompson Takes First Step in Presidential Run, Opposes Abortion

Saying Thompson supports the NAU is just a plain lie.

It is impossible to be all about States Rights and then give away our sovereignty.

I’ve always been cynical of my presidential votes. Dole’s chances of winning were always lousy, and I researched Bush enough to know that he wasn’t my first choice for the R nomination. It does suck to be cynical, but it’s also shielding - I’m not as outraged as many other Freepers over the current Republican immigration thing. Bush has always openly talked globalization and open borders, sometimes in Spanish, so I saw it coming.

Fred seems like a good guy, we’ll see how he does. I voted for Dole even though he wasn’t going to win, and I voted for Bush despite his bad record on immigration because he’s pro-life, pro-military, and signed the Texas concealed-carry law. Hopefully, when Fred declares, he’ll rise past Rudy McRomney in the polls, and we’ll have an actual conservative as the R front-runner who has potential appeal to independents and who can shut the McCain-bots up.

Well, I hope that you are right. What has Fred said about all these "free-trade" deals and "Fast-track"? Does he buy into it?

I can't find anything that he has said that is any more than a Paul Harveyesque sound bite.

Don't get me wrong, but I can go to Hunter's website and get a good idea about where he is on the issues. I read an interview with Hunter in the New American and he is all over these problems and has been working on them while Fred has been on TV. I'm not impressed, yet. I want some answers.

You know, maybe you should give Thompson a LITTLE more time to catch up. He’s had four months to get going, and the others have been gearing up for years.

His website is in the works. It should be up within a few weeks, I think.

His record is fairly well known.
He is for strong trade relationships, but would never give up any of the sovereignty of the U.S., as shown by his staunch belief in States’ Rights.

PING!

show me how it is discredited! who proves it is discretided? the candidate? sorry! there are 2 quotes there. are you trying to tell me they are BOTH wrong? i can’t buy it. sorry! call me a skeptic. i want a REAL pro-life candidate with the backbone to say it loudly, always! you are free to choose your candidate your way, by your standards, but please put out all of the information on the table for everyone to see. thanks!

I'm confused. If a candidate says "it's up to the states," then clearly that candidate is pro-choice. A pro-life position would never include such a statement, and would be answered "abortion should be outlawed."

So, is Fred pro-choice or pro-life? Or is he both?

Of course he's pro-life. And in the unlikely event that he could place abortion in the hands of the states, it would be a tremendous victory, and one large step closer to having abortion outlawed completely.

He's a politician and law maker. He has to use his arena to effect change.

We need to be intellectually honest here and give this guy a chance.

Silly, has Fred Thompson ever in his whole life said "Abortion should be outlawed in America." Isn't that the only true pro-life position?

i hope he puts you on his payroll. though i am not convinced and still a skeptic, you certainly are able to defend him.

Now about McCain Feingold.....

Dude, why do you keep bringing up this canard? It's been EXPLAINED a million times already.

Fred gets a mulligan on CFR...he was for it before he was against it, doncha know?

would not trust fred. if he can’t hold the position and stay strong in it

His 100% pro-life voting record negates whatever comments he made beforehand.

Millions of pro-life people say the EXACT SAME THING when they want Roe overturned.

Fred voted 100% pro-life. NARAL hates his guts. He ran as a pro-life senator. He says he is pro-life, even more now than before, due to seeing his daughter’s ultrasound.

A man who is willing to be the lone holdout in several 99-1 Senate votes is a man of conviction, and is eminently trustworthy. I believe him.

Millions of pro-life people also say “Abortion should be outlawed in America.” Got the quote from Fred that says the same thing?

“Give me a candidate, without just lip service, who will fight the war on terror, do his level best to abolish abortion and send the illegals out of this country while securing the borders and he will have my vote. I’m not sure who that man is yet.”

Duncan Hunter on all counts!

Thompson has crusaded against corruption his entire career. It is hardly surprising that he tried to take the corruption out of campaign money practices. He also felt that current practices were unfair to challengers.

******

I agree with you that Thompson’s support for McCain-Feingold is serious. I did some research on it, and found that while he did indeed support campaign finance “reform,” he was not in lockstep with McCain about the details. Below is a list of campaign finance “reform” votes where Thompson’s and McCain’s votes differed. Most significantly, Thompson introduced an amendment that would increase hard money contribution limits. McCain voted to kill discussion of Thompson’s amendment, but Thompson prevailed, and the amendment passed (with McCain ultimately voting for it). In the discussion of this amendment, Thompson specifically noted that individual contributions are free speech.

For me, this doesn’t fully mitigate Thompson’s support for McCain-Feingold, but it does seem to add credence to Thompson’s recent criticisms of the bill.

83 posted on 04/02/2007 3:42:39 PM EDT by ellery

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THOMPSON FLOOR SPEECH ON CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM
March 27, 2001

Mr. THOMPSON. Mr. President, I think it would be appropriate at this time to remind ourselves why we are here and to remind ourselves of the need for changing the current system under which we operate in terms of financing campaigns for Federal elections. It has to do with large amounts of money going to small amounts of people.

We have seen over the centuries problems with large amounts of money going to elected officials or people who would be elected officials. That is the basis behind the effort to ban soft money from our system.

We have gone from basically a small donor system in this country where the average person believed they had a stake, believed they had a voice, to one of extremely large amounts of money, where you are not a player unless you are in the $100,000 or $200,000 range, many contributions in the $500,000 range, occasionally you get a $1 million contribution. That is not what we had in mind when we created this system. It has grown up around us without Congress really doing anything to promote it or to stop it.

I think we are on the eve of maybe doing something to rectify that situation. Many Members are tired of picking up the paper every day and reading about an important issue we are going to be considering, one in which many interests have large sums at stake and then the second part of the story reading about the large amounts of money that are being poured into Washington on one side or the other of the issue—the implication, of course being clear, that money talks and large amounts of money talk the loudest.

Of course, that is a reflection on us. It is a reflection on us as a body. As the money goes up, the cynicism goes up, and the number of people who vote in this country goes down. That is not a system of which we are proud. That is not a system that many want to continue.

I read a few days ago about the problems our friends in France are having with their own big money scandal. I read in the newspaper where the French are saying their politics have become Americanized—meaning it is now a system of tremendously large amounts of money.

We learned in 1996 that the President of the United States can sit in the Oval Office and coordinate these large amounts of money on behalf of his own campaign. So the issue of whether or not making these large contributions of the State party ever reaches the benefit of the candidate is a moot issue. We know certainly that it does.

If we are able to do something about this soft money situation, where is this money that is in the system now going to go? I suggest we have seen the beginning of the phenomenon in electoral politics that will continue unabated, and that is the proliferation of independent groups, nonprofit groups, what have you, buying television ads in our system. I think it is protected almost totally by the first amendment. There are some modest restrictions one can make, but basically it is protected by the first amendment and it will continue and there is nothing we can do about it even if we wanted to. I am not sure we ought to. We ought to be subject to discussion and criticism and robust debate.

Having said that, if we get rid of the soft money, it is going to go somewhere—a good deal of it, anyway. Are we going to fuel that independent sector out there even more or are we going to allow the candidate, himself or herself, to have some voice in their own campaign? It will go to all these outside groups unless we do something about the hard money limits. Of course, we all know what we are talking about, but I hope the American people understand we created a system of so-called hard money, which is the legitimate money that we decided people ought to be able to contribute to Federal candidates for campaigns.

Everybody knows it takes money. It takes large amounts of money, it takes more and more money, and we will see in a few minutes how much it really takes.

We said for an individual in one cycle or in one campaign, $1,000 individual limit. That was back in 1974 when we passed that law. We had other limits for other activities. Individual contributions to parties we capped at $20,000; individual contributions to PACs, $5,000; aggregate individual limit of $25,000 a year. That has been the system we operated under since 1974. The soft money phenomena was very small until the mid-1990s and the system worked pretty well.

It has all changed now. The soft money is there in droves. The independent groups are out there energized on both sides, all sides, and we are still back here at these hard money $1,000 limitations that we created in 1974—a limitation of $1,000 that would be worth $3,500 a day if adjusted for inflation.

That is the nature of the problem. All the other areas have increased exponentially, and these legitimate, the most legitimate, the most disclosed, the most controlled, the area where nobody says there will be any corruption involved because the amounts are so low, has not changed. Inflation has tripled. It has more than tripled since 1974. The costs of campaigns have gone up 10 times.

I have a chart showing the average cost of winning a Senate seat in this country back to 1976. I wish we had 1974 numbers because it would probably be $400,000 or $500,000. We know in 1976 it was $600,000. In 1978, it came up to $1.2 million. The cost in the last election cycle that we had in 2000, the average cost of winning a Senate seat was over $7 million.

That includes one or two very expensive seats and that boosts the number up, but they count, too.

The last cycle, in 1998, was about $4.5 million. So about any way you cut it, you can see the dramatic increase, about a tenfold increase since 1974, of the cost of the election. That is the cost of everything: consultants, television is the biggest part of it, personnel—everything from stamps to the paper that you write on, the material that you send out. Everything has skyrocketed, has increased greatly with regard to campaigns since 1974—10 times. Inflation has increased over 3 times. And we are back at a $1,000 limit pretending we are doing something good by keeping the limit that low.

What has been the effect of that? What has been the effect of everything else running wild and our keeping this low cap on the most legitimate money in politics? It means one thing: incumbents have to spend an awful lot of their time running and raising money in $1,000 increments. In that respect, we get the worst of both worlds because, also, once we get the money, it is an incumbent protection deal because the great majority of Senators who run for reelection win because of inherent advantages that we have.

In the House last time, 98 percent of the sitting House Members to run for reelection won reelection—98 percent—attesting to the fact that by keeping these limits low, you are making it that much more difficult for challengers. You are making it that much more difficult for people who want to get into the system and reach that threshold of credibility by raising enough money to be able to say they are going to buy a few TV ads and such things as that, and tell their supporters: Yes, I am credible; I have that much money in the bank.

It is extremely difficult under our present system to do that now. We have an incumbent protection system in operation now. I do not think that is good for our country. We have been criticized for some of these amendments that have been passed during this debate in the last couple of weeks as, once again, doing something to protect incumbents. One of the things we can do to answer that is to say we are not going to continue to stick with this antiquated hard dollar limitation.

Others have commented upon and made note of the difficulty that challengers have in raising sufficient amounts of money to run. There was an article recently by Mr. Michael Malbin, executive director of the Campaign Finance Institute, a professor of political science in the State University of New York at Albany. In Rollcall last Monday, Mr. Malbin pointed out that the Campaign Finance Institute, affiliated with the George Washington University, analyzed past campaign finance data and reached surprising conclusions about the role that large contributions play in promoting competition in Federal elections. These conclusions are not arguments for or against McCain-Feingold or the Hagel bill.

He points out the $1,000 limitation today would be worth $3,500 if it was just indexed for inflation.

From a competitive standpoint, upping the individual contribution limit would help nonincumbent Senate candidates, while having little impact on the House.

He points out in races in 1996 and 2000, 70 percent of the $1,000 contributions went to nonincumbents. He says nonincumbents rely more on the $1,000 givers. He says:

These data do not point to a single policy conclusion. But they do raise a yellow flag. Large givers and parties are important to non-incumbents.

McCain-Feingold would shut off one source of soft money, the banning of donations, without putting anything in its place.

I suggest we should put something in its place. That is the amendment that Senator Torricelli and Senator Nickles and I have submitted. We take that $1,000 limitation that we have operated under since 1974 and we increase it to $2,500. I, frankly, would prefer to raise it closer to what inflation would bear, which would be $3,500.

I have been talking about rounding it off to $3,000. I do not get the indication that we would have the opportunity to pass that nearly as readily as what I am offering. Frankly, that is my primary motivation. I believe so strongly that we must make some meaningful increase in the hard money limit that I want to pare mine down to something that is substantially less than an inflation increase.

So, in real dollars, if we pass my amendment, we will be dealing with less than the candidate dealt with back in 1974 with his $1,000, not to mention the fact that all of the expenses have skyrocketed.

Individual contributions will go from $20,000 to $40,000; aggregate individual limits would go from $25,000 to $50,000 aggregate individual limits. People say $50,000, that is a lot of money. That is not $50,000 going to one person; that is $50,000 aggregate, going to all candidates.

Look at the tradeoff. Again, what I said in the very beginning about the reason we are here: large amounts of money, hundreds of thousands of dollars going to or on behalf of particular candidates. Here the individual candidate would only get $2,500 for an election. In terms of the aggregate amount, what is wrong with several $2,500 checks being made out to several candidates around the country, if a person wanted to do that? No one candidate is getting enough money to raise the question of corruption. I think the more the merrier. In that sense, more money in politics is a good thing. We have more people reach the threshold of credibility sooner and let them have a decent shot at participating in an election and not have a system where you do not have a chance unless you are a multimillionnaire or a professional politician who has been raising money all of his life and has his Rolodex in shape that he can move on, up, down the line.

So I doubled most of these other categories except for the contributions to PACs. On individual contributions to PACs, we move from the current $5,000 a year to $7,500 a year. On PAC contributions to parties, we move from $15,000 a year to $17,500 a year; PAC contributions to PACs, $5,000 to $7,500.

These are modest increments. I don’t know the exact percentage—less than half increase.

Some would say, I assume, that though we are not even coming close to keeping up with inflation, and even though these prices are skyrocketing for everything that we buy connected with the campaign, that going from $1,000 to $2,500 is too rich for their blood. But I must say for those who read any of the articles, any of the treatments that have been out recently by scholars and thoughtful commentators and others, they have to see a pattern that must convince them that they should take a second look at taking such a position.

There is an article recently by Stuart Taylor in the National Journal, saying that increasing these hard money limits to $2,000 or $3,000 is certainly an appropriate thing to do.

There is no commentator, there is no writer, there is no reporter with more respect in this town and hardly in the country than David Broder. Mr. Broder wrote recently that raising it to $2,000 or even $3,000 would be an appropriate thing to do. There is no corruption issue there. There is no appearance issue there. That is what we need to keep in mind. We are not just talking about money. Money is not the same in one category as it is in the other. And more of it is not necessarily all bad, if you are giving a little bit to various candidates around the country. Let’s not get so carried away in our zeal to think that all money is bad, that it doesn’t take money to run campaigns, when that kind of attitude is going to hurt people who are challengers worse than anybody.

Let’s get the amount up decent enough so it will not be so high as to have a corrupting influence or a bad appearance problem, but high enough to make the candidate credible.

Recently, I got the benefit of some legislative history on this matter with regard to this body and some comments that have been made over the years by former Senators who we all remember and we all respect.

Back in August of 1971, they debated a piece of legislation. If you recall, it was 2 years before Watergate. Senators Mathias and Chiles moved to establish a $5,000 limit on a person’s contribution to a Federal candidate. That amendment was rejected. But Senator Chiles said: ``to restore some public confidence on the part of the people [we need this amendment].’’

He said:

The people cannot understand, today, why a candidate receives $25,000 or $250,000 from one individual, and they cannot understand how a candidate is not going to be influenced by receiving that kind of money.

He said what we need to do is raise the amount so that it is not so high that we have that kind of improper influence appearance, but raise it high enough to give them a decent chance; and to him, at that point, it was $5,000. Well, that is closer to $20,000 today.

Before a subcommittee in March of 1973—on March 8, 1973—there was discussion between Senator Beall and Senator George McGovern, former Presidential candidate. Senator Beall said:

[I]n Maryland, we don’t have any limit on the total amount that you might spend in an election but we do limit contributions to $2,500.

This is, of course, the amount I am suggesting today.

Senator McGovern said:

I favor that, Senator. I think there should be an individual limitation. I have proposed that in no race should it go beyond $3,000 by a single individual.

So Senator McGovern was at $3,000, and in real dollars way above what I am proposing. Again, his $3,000 would be $10,000, $12,000 today.

Coming on further, in the Watergate year, 1973, Senator Bentsen, former Senator from Texas, former Secretary of the Treasury, said:

I believe my $3,000 limit walks that fine line between controlling the pollution of our political system by favor seekers with money to spend and overly limiting campaign contributions to the point that a new man simply does not have a chance.

On the vote to amend the Proxmire amendment with the Bentsen amendment, Senator Mondale voted yes. Senator Mondale and Senator Bentsen voted for a $3,000 individual limit which, again, is—what?—$10,000 or so today. On the vote which carried to adopt the amendment as amended, both Senator Mondale and Senator McGovern voted yes. Senator Cannon summarized the contribution limit provisions, as amended by Bentsen’s amendment, and stated: The maximum of $3,000 individual contributions to congressional and Presidential candidates is what is in the bill, and the overall limit is $100,000. That is 100,000 1974 dollars. This is in the wake of Watergate that they were having this discussion at these amounts.

On March 28, 1974—after Watergate—which is the year that the last significant legislation in this area was passed, Senator Hathaway proposed an amendment to increase the amount from $3,000 to $6,000 that organizations may contribute.

During the debate, Senator Hollings—our own Senator HOLLINGS—said:

I.......support limiting the amount that an individual can contribute to a campaign, and while I personally favor a $1,000 ceiling, I would agree to a compromise that would set $15,000 as the maximum contribution in Presidential races and $3,000 in Senate and House races.

Again, that is substantially above what we are talking about today.

Senator Hathaway said:

[T]he President [President Nixon] advocated a $15,000 limitation. It seems to me the $3,000 for individuals and $6,000 for a group limitation, being considerably below the amount recommended by the President, is realistic.

The Hathaway amendment carried, and, again, Senator McGovern voted in favor. Again, it is substantially above what we are talking about today.

Finally, in June of 1974, the Watergate Committee issued its final report. That is a committee I spent a few days and weeks assisting in the writing. Recommendation No. 5 of the Watergate Committee report:

The committee recommends enactment of a statutory limitation of $3,000 on political contributions by any individuals to the campaign of each Presidential candidate during the prenomination period and a separate $3,000 limitation during the post-nomination period.

And the report also states:

[T]he limit must not be set so low as to make private financing of elections impractical.

That had to do with Presidential elections. The Watergate Committee did recommend substantially above what we wound up with regard to Presidential elections. What would they have recommended 25 years later with inflation—knowing then what we know now, and that expenses were going to go up tenfold? The amounts would be much, much higher.

I say all of this to make one simple point. The increase in the hard money limits is long overdue and very modest. By trying to be holier than thou—and no one has fought for McCain-Feingold harder than I have since I have been here. When I first ran for political office—the first office I ever ran for—it just seemed to me that something was wrong with a system that took that much money, and it was a whole lot easier to raise money once you got in, and once a big bill came down the pike that everybody was interested in.

In private life you get a little uneasy about things such as that. I was not used to it. So I signed on. I became a reformer. And I have gone down to defeat many times because of it. So I take a back seat to no one in wanting to change the system so we can have some pride in it again.

But I am telling you, by keeping this hard money limit so low, we are hurting the system. We are going to wind up with something, if we are not careful, worse than what we have now. That is how important I think the increasing of the hard money limitation is.

There is another question that we should ask ourselves. I heard one of the commentators refer to this last Sunday. I had not thought about it, frankly, but it makes a lot of good sense. It is a good question. And that is, wait a minute, we just passed a so-called rich, wealthy candidate’s amendment. I voted against it. I think it is unconstitutional. But the sentiment is a legitimate one. Everyone is fearful of the prospects of running against a multimillionaire who can put millions of dollars in of their own money. So what was adopted was an amendment that says, if the rich guy puts in money, you can raise your limits to $2,000, $3,000, $4,000, $5,000, I believe $6,000. You can take $6,000 from one person, I believe is what we wound up with. Let me ask you, if the $2,500 that I am proposing is corrupting, what about the $6,000 you are going to be using against the rich guy?

The fact that you are running against a rich guy is not going to make you any more or less susceptible to corruption, if that is the issue. How can we pass an increase for ourselves based on what somebody else is spending against us, if we are concerned about the corruption issue, unless we acknowledge that those levels of dollars are not a corruption problem? It is something considerably lower than that, such as $2,500, I suggest.

The amendment also has the benefit of being clearly constitutional. We have had a constitutional issue with regard to just about every aspect of this bill that has been brought up so far. We will not have a constitutional issue with this amendment. There is no question that we can increase the hard money limits. The constitutional issues have always been whether or not we could reduce the hard money limits.

I urge the Senate not to be so afraid to do something that is long overdue, and to not try to wear the mantle of reform to the extent that we wind up creating more harm, to take a noble purpose and turn it into a terrible result and have a situation where amendments such as mine are defeated and we go ahead and pass McCain-Feingold and do away with soft money and wind up with a hollow victory, indeed, as we see the candidate is unable to fend for himself, candidates who want to run can’t afford to raise the money to run on the one hand and all the independent groups doing whatever they want to do in triplicate from what we have already seen in the future—that would be worse—and inflation continuing to increase and seeing that $1,000 limit continue to dwindle, dwindle down below the $300 that it is today.

I suggest to those who want to come in at some lower limit that we not simply nibble away at this problem, that we face up to it, do what we need to do, index these dollars, do what we need to do so we don’t have to revisit this thing every couple of years, so that we can get on with our business. In a practical sense, look how long it has taken us to get here. It has taken us since 1974 to get here for these 2 weeks. A lot of blood has been spilt on the floor just to get here and get this debate. It may be another 25 years before we have another debate such as this. Let’s come up with some reasonable amount, index it for inflation, so we don’t have to go through this again because, in fact, we probably won’t go through this again and nothing will be done about the proliferation of the independent ads and the independent outside groups as that goes on and on and on, and our puny little hard money limitation, the most legitimate, the most disclosed, the most limited part of our whole system continues to dwindle and dwindle and dwindle. That would be a bad result and a hollow victory indeed.

Mr. President, I urge the adoption of the amendment and yield the floor.
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Fred gets a mulligan on CFR...he was for it before he was against it, doncha know?

Posting lies about conservative candidates is against the rules here.

It's been pointed out on this thread, and on dozens of other Thompson threads, that he conceded it didn't work out as planned and should be scrapped. Of course, that doesn't matter to you hand-wringers who want to tear down perhaps the most electable conservative Republican we have.

Has “your guy”, serial adulterer/deadbeat Dad Newt Gingrich said that?

No, it isn’t. You want to come live in the real world, fine, come over and we’ll talk. You want to talk about a dream land where everything is perfect, wait until Jesus gets back.

I’m happy to have an adult discussion about this. But politics is about chipping away gradually at an issue in order to get to a long-term goal.

By the way, if you have a magic wand that will fix the immigration problem, let me know — I want to see you wave it.