The Political Wild West: Campaign Finance Rules Are Lading Elections Back to the Days of Unrestrained Fundraising

Via US News & World Report

Back before the days of campaign finance laws, there was a safe in the office of the Secretary of the Senate.  And there was no secret about what function it served. “Somebody who was a multi-millionaire would come in and give you $20,000 for the boys in the next election. You put it in the safe that was always in the secretary’s office … The contributor didn’t know whether you put $10,000 or $20,000 in that safe. He had no way of knowing it,” recalled Darrell St. Claire, a former assistant secretary of the Senate. “But if he came back with a request, it was up to me to produce: ‘I’ll have some senators together for lunch tomorrow and you can tell them what you want.’ That’s the way it was done,” St. Claire, who worked for the U.S. Senate from 1966-77, told Senate Historian Donald A. Ritchie, who conducts oral histories with Senate figures.

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