New York Times Editorial: The Election Sabotage Commission

New York Times Editorial: The Election Sabotage Commission
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: December 19, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/opinion/20sun3.html?th&emc=th


No one is in charge these days at the Federal Election Commission, the agency that is supposed to enforce campaign law. Repeated stalemates engineered by Republican members raise the potential for runaway abuses in next year’s Congressional elections.

The six-member commission, shared evenly by the two parties, needs a majority for any enforcement action. For months, Republican members have cynically withheld their votes, rejecting staff investigators’ sound recommendations for citations and fines in current cases of obvious abuse. They seem to have completely forgotten why they are there: they are supposed to be enforcing the law, not sabotaging it.

The F.E.C. was hardly ever a paragon of effective enforcement, weighted as it has been with appointees favoring their party machines’ fondness for easy campaign money. But the latest Republican members are blazing a Paleolithic path of regression.

In the latest example, they neutralized long-standing restrictions on a candidate’s use of funds from family members to keep a campaign afloat. Staff specialists found a “knowing and willful” violation by a candidate boosted with $75,000 of his mother’s money. There is plenty of precedent for the finding, but Republicans contended the regulation was suddenly too unclear to be enforced. Democratic members properly disputed this but were powerless to act without the requisite votes.

Call it the Pax Republicana for the approaching political battleground. Other Republican-engineered stalemates led to the voiding of a conciliatory agreement accepted by an accused offender. Penalties for an admitted campaign-fund bilker were also dropped, and the commission returned the penalty check of another offender.

As the commission shambles toward the 2010 elections, President Obama must fulfill his 2008 campaign commitment and begin filling the panel with new, truly independent experts. He has that power, if he is willing to buck Congress’s historic preference for party hacks.