Federal Election Commissioner Aligns With Campaign Finance Reformers

A sitting Federal Election Commissioner on Thursday joined scholars and activists to declare the nation’s current campaign finance practices in crisis and in need of urgent reform since the proliferation of “dark money” following the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United.

Ann Ravel, a Democratic appointee to the six-member commission who was chairman in 2015, told the audience of hundreds at the Brookings Institution that “the FEC should be a leader in restoring public confidence in institutions, but instead it is broken and ineffective.” 

Expanding on complaints she has written in op-eds, Ravel said, “the vast majority of citizens of every political affiliation are deeply troubled by the state of our campaign finance system and its impact on our country.” Turnout in the last election was the lowest since World War II and those who voted are polarized, she said at a half-day event on campaign finance billed as a “Solutions Summit.”

The FEC played a role in causing the crisis, Ravel said, blasting an “ideological bloc” of three statutorily required Republicans who “claim the FEC has no authorization to require disclosure” of campaign gifts.

“To say the commission was intended to stalemate is absurd” because courts have confirmed the agency’s mandate to investigate and penalize illegal behavior, such as campaign coordination with independent fund-raising groups. “The bloc doesn’t believe in the effectiveness of the FEC or a body of law,” Ravel added. “It’s not the FEC’s job to decide what the Supreme Court will do in the future.”

As evidence of the FEC’s inactivity, Ravel cited “loopholes” the Republican commissioners use to “allow coordination” and delay investigations until after the statute of limitations kicks in. A super Pac “fundraiser” may consist of two people in a room, “a meeting,” she said. Cases from 2012 are just now coming before the commission—an eternity in politics, she noted. In addition, even if a party is found in violation, the average fine has shrunk from $179,499 in 2006 to $12,890 in 2014. 

In closed meetings, Ravel said, some GOP commissioners “act as if they are the attorneys for the [conservative Republican] respondents when asking the career staff questions.”

“That contributes to notoriously low morale at agency,” she said.

The FEC’s five other members include Republicans Matthew Petersen (the current chairman), Caroline Hunter and Lee Goodman; and Democrat Ellen Weintraub and Steven Walther (an independent who caucuses with Democrats, according to the FEC press office).

As to whether interactions are collegial and businesslike, Ravel told Government Executive, the commissioners “are civil in their interactions, but not collegial. There is an underlying lack of willingness to be open to other perspectives, which creates a constant tension.”

The Brookings summit, opened by former Obama White House ethics chief Norm Eisen, featured past FEC members as well as conservative authors who agree that the campaign finance system needs reforming, though they emphasize its unfairness to wealthy individuals and corporations who get “hit up” by lawmakers “who are beggars.”

Trevor Potter, who was on the FEC as member and chair in the 1990s, said, “Congress is completely addicted to money.” In the past, the FEC, which was created by the 1975 post-Watergate reforms, “almost never deadlocked,” he said.

Many at the event embraced the reforms proposed by the nonprofit IssueOne, which recently organized a bipartisan “Reformers Caucus” of 100 former members of Congress and governors who are fed up with the current system of dialing for dollars.

In its video, former Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., said someone “should give the FEC an industrial-strength vitamin B shot in the arm, saying if you don’t do your job, you won’t get paid.”

Ravel said her solutions would include a blue-ribbon commission to pick future commissioners as some states do with judges, a proposal others favor and which might involve staggered terms. New technological means for tracking spending, she added, are important, but it’s more important to do the hard work of increasing and incentivizing public participation in elections.

“If people disassociate from the system, they are more likely to have little respect for the law” and, for example, “adherence to business contracts will break down,” Ravel said. “Some say the system will change only if there’s a scandal. But today’s campaign finance system is a scandal.”