Election officials take stand against agency
In unorthodox tactic, they file petition on campaign financing
Two Federal Election Commission members file petition urging campaign-finance reform.
Two Democratic
WASHINGTON members of the Federal Election Commission, who say they are frustrated by the agency’s failure to rein in campaign-finance abuses ahead of the 2016 presidential race, on Monday made a drastic move in the staid world of federal election law.
Chairwoman Ann Ravel and commissioner Ellen Weintraub filed a formal petition urging their agency to clamp down on unfettered political spending and unmask the anonymous money flooding U.S. elections.
Such FEC petitions typically are made by outside supplicants. No sitting commissioner has ever filed such a petition in the agency’s 40-year history, Ravel said.
The six-member commission is locked in partisan gridlock, however, often deadlocking 3-3 on major cases, ranging from whether foreign interests improperly influenced a California ballot initiative to whether some tax-exempt groups spending heavily in elections should register as political committees and disclose their donors.
“Desperate times call for desperate measures,” Weintraub told USA TODAY. “The normal routes are not working, so we are willing to take unusual paths to fight the inaction.”
Their action will not force the commission to start writing rules, but such petitions typically trigger debate.
“While it’s extremely difficult for the FEC to actually accomplish some of the tasks entrusted with us,” Ravel said, “the public will have an opportunity to raise their concerns.”
The commissioners’ unorthodox tactic comes as some presidential candidates and their allies test the limits of campaign-finance rules in an election that is expected to shatter fundraising records. Former Florida governor Jeb Bush, for instance, has headlined fundraisers for an aligned super PAC, Right to Rise, prompting two campaign-finance watchdogs to request a Department of Justice inquiry into his activity.
Bush and his allies insist he’s not subject to rules barring coordination with outside groups because he’s not a presidential candidate. He is scheduled to declare his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination next Monday.
Outside spending has soared in the wake of recent court decisions, including the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which sanctioned unlimited corporate and union spending to influence candidate elections. Outside groups spent more than $1 billion in the last presidential election in 2012, three times the amount spent in 2008, according to the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics. Nearly a third of the 2012 outside spending came from groups that do not disclose their donors’ identities, Ravel and Weintraub said.
The spread of anonymous spending in federal elections will “continue to diminish public faith in the political process unless the commission acts,” they argued in their petition.
In a statement issued Monday afternoon, the agency’s three Republican commissioners — Matthew Petersen, Lee Goodman and Caroline Hunter — said the FEC already has considered many of the recommendations outlined by Ravel and Weintraub.
They said it would be “more constructive” to focus on “issues that promise bi-partisan progress,” such as revising rules for state and local parties, expanding administrative fines and updating “disclosure forms to enhance reporting compliance.”
“Desperate times call for desperate measures. The normal routes are not working, so we are willing to take unusual paths to fight the inaction.”
Ellen Weintraub, FEC commissioner