Following on the heels of last week's successful House hearing, two major newspapers published our Op-Eds yesterday. The first piece, featured in the Boston Globe, was written by two of our Chairs, former Senators Warren Rudman (R-NH) and Bob Kerrey (D-NE). They discuss Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearings and the false choice between free speech and meaningful campaign reform like public funding. Read it below.

We're seeing millions of dollars pour into Congress every day this summer, shattering previous records and compounding the American people's lack of trust in their government. So last Thursday's hearing on the Fair Elections Now Act was an ideal time to have a conversation about what can be done to fix our broken system, where the interests with the most money win the most policy battles.

Passing legislation is a long, arduous journey. But we've reached a major milestone: the House Administration Committee will hear the Fair Elections Now Act TOMORROW, Thursday, July 30th.

The Fair Elections Now Act was introduced in the Senate and House in March and has garnered 73 co-sponsors in just a few months since it was introduced. Two of these co-sponsors actually sit on the committee that will hear the bill.

UPDATE: Here's a recording of the show.

If anybody gets the need for real reform of our campaign finance system, it's Nicole Sandler of Air America radio.

A new podcast from NPR says that the line is so blurred that there's no real answer to that quesiton. And that should scare us.

NPR's new audio series, Dollar Politics, was launched just last month to look at the millions upon millions of dollars being poured into Congress this summer. Pete Overby and Andrea Seabrook think that all of this money might have something to do with the major policy decisions taking place right now on healthcare and energy issues.

Stop me if you've heard this one before.

Two employees of the House of Representatives Appropriations committee put in their time, then cashed out to start their own lobbying shop called PMA Group. Then they lavished their old friends in Congress with $40 million in campaign contributions, achieving amazing returns for their clients. It turns out that the Senators they gave to were in charge of doling out defense funding, and they returned the favor with $300 million in earmarks benefiting PMA's clients.

While the nation's media and punditocracy speed-read through Sotomayor's body of work for key excerpts on various issues, here's what we know about her on the campaign reform front:

1. The Court needs a friend of reform.

The current Supreme Court, under Bush appointees Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, has established a clear distaste for reform. Legal experts wonder whether the Roberts Court will continue on a course of "death by a thousand cuts." At a recent campaign reform conference, Monica Youn, a counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, described the stance of the Roberts Court on campaign reform:

Senator Durbin was on Bill Moyers recently and laid bare the reason Congress routinely helps banks, credit card companies, and other "financially articulate" interests at the expense of the vast majority of Americans:

A couple of weeks ago, the Kennebec Journal, Maine's oldest newspaper, published a story highlighting the Fair Elections Now Act and Maine's important role as a successful model for the rest of the nation.

A great piece, but unless you're an avid reader of the Kennebec Journal, you may have missed this gem from Representative Chellie Pingree, an original co-sponsor of the bill:

Protect planet by strengthening democracy
April 22, 2009
By James Gustave Speth