by Frank R. Lautenberg

About the author: Frank R. Lautenberg has served as a Democratic U.S. senator from New Jersey since 1983.

Editor’s note: The following viewpoint is from an October 7, 1994, speech in the U.S. Senate supporting passage of the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1993, a bill subsequently defeated by the Senate.

As Members of Congress, we are often frustrated by our inability to solve problems. Some of us decided that a major reason for that inability was the structure of our own institution. So we decided to fix our own house, clean up our own act, and regain some of the public faith and support that government has lost.

We may have made the problem worse. We hoped to reform the campaign finance system. We did not. We hoped to simplify...