The Accidental Deregulation of the FEC
Campaign finance laws not crazy enough for you? Check this out.
The Senate left town this week without resolving a deadlock over nominations to the Federal Election Commission. The upshot: Come January, the FEC won't be able to decide anything.
The commission officially has six members. This year it's had five. Thanks to the deadlock, three are going away. That leaves Republican David Mason and Democrat Ellen Weintraub. Both of their terms have expired, by the way. They can keep serving until their replacements arrive.
By law, the commission needs four affirmative votes for any action.
So, at least for now, the FEC can't respond when candidates ask for advice, can't write regulations, can't even enforce the law. The pending enforcement actions date from the 2004 and 2006 campaigns -- yes, that's how long these things take -- but they define the rules for politicians and advocacy groups right now. And the advisory opinions guide requesters and everybody else as to what's permissible.
The FEC may be the least-liked agency in Washington (certainly so on Capitol Hill), but nobody before ever tried to disable it like this.
The irony is that it's probably not deliberate. Rather, it's collateral damage from the upheavals at the Justice Department.
Long before the storm broke over the decision to fire U.S. attorneys, and alleged politicization in DOJ's Voting Rights Section, one appointee from Voting Rights, Hans von Spakovsky, had been installed at the FEC. He was a recess appointee, as were Democrats Robert Lenhard, a labor lawyer, and Steven Walther, a Nevada lawyer and friend of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Salaries for recess appointees run only until the end of the next session of Congress -- i.e., now -- and when President Bush nominated the three for full terms, several Democratic senators objected to von Spakovsky.
Von Spakovsky has a long and aggressive record supporting strict voter identification laws. Civil rights groups call that discriminatory. Reid urged separate votes on the three nominees. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said they should be voted on as a group, the traditional way, and he calculated that Reid wouldn't leave Walther dangling. But Reid did.
And there we are: the most heavily financed presidential campaign in history, money flowing by the millions to House and Senate candidates, advocacy groups pushing the limits on what's regulated or not. And the enforcement agency, well, out of commission.
-- Peter Overby
5:57 PM ET | 12-21-2007 | permalink
