Matthew Petersen, Federal Election Commission Vice Chairman, Republican, and advocate of unregulated dark money in elections, resigns.
(Petersen was the guy who was so inept and out-of-his-league as a federal judge nominee that he withdrew from consideration after a humiliating Q&A with the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2017).
[The FEC] was created after president Richard Nixon resigned in 1974. It was one of a slew of reforms designed to increase public confidence in US democracy, which had been badly shaken after his impeachment over the Watergate affair. Candidates for federal office must register with the FEC and report campaign donations to it, giving voters a way to see who is supporting them.
What the FEC is supposed to do:
While the FBI investigates criminal violations of election laws which could result in jail time, the FEC’s role is essentially to act as a traffic cop for elections, monitoring candidates and handing out fines for infractions.
Petersen’s resignation leaves the Commission without a four-person quorum, which shuts down the Commission’s ability to function.
Federal Election Commission Vice Chairman Matthew Petersen announced his resignation today.
This means the agency that enforces and regulates the nation’s campaign finance laws will effectively shut down — something that hasn’t happened since 2008 — because it won’t have the legal minimum of four commissioners to make high-level decisions.
Petersen’s resignation, first reported by the Washington Examiner, will throw the FEC into turmoil for weeks — and perhaps months — as the nation enters the teeth of 2020 presidential and congressional elections.
For now, the FEC can’t conduct meetings.
It can’t slap political scofflaws with fines.
It can’t make rules.
It can’t conduct audits.
It can’t vote on the outcome of investigations.
And while staff will continue to post campaign finance reports and attend to day-to-day functions, the commission itself can’t offer official advice to politicians and political committees who seek it.
The Federal Elections Commission is a bi-partisan group of what should be six appointees, but until Petersen resigned, had only four serving appointees, some of whom continue to serve despite their terms expiring years ago...because the last three Presidents have not appointed new Commissioners.
Petersen:
Petersen has served as FEC commissioner since President George W. Bush appointed him in 2008, beyond his six-year tenure. After serving as chairman in 2010 and 2016, he almost left the panel when Trump nominated him to the federal judiciary in 2017….
...Without Petersen, the six-member panel is left with just three commissioners — one Republican, one Democrat and one independent — who are all serving expired terms. The seats formerly held by Democratic appointee Ann Ravel and Republican appointee Lee Goodman have remained vacant for years.
Four votes are required to take official action, such as enforcing regulations, issuing advisory opinions or approving audit reports. By law, no more than three of the commissioners can belong to the same political party.
The FEC has been embroiled in factious bickering for several years, particularly due to Democratic Commissioners trying to protect election integrity, and Republican Commissioners trying to allow more hoops for dark money to jump through to influence elections.
The Republicans on the Commission have accused the Democratic Commissioners of not adhering to “the rule of law” (i.e., their view that Citizens United deregulates dark money entirely and that corporations should be allowed to exercise “First Amendment rights” as people), but Democrats see it differently:
(Ex) Chairwoman Ellen Weintraub, a Democrat, took the opposite view, arguing the FEC has been “severely challenged from the inside by a group of commissioners who harbor ideological opposition to the very nature of the agency and the law we are charged with enforcing.”
Remember this story of then (D) Chairwoman Ann Ravel resigning and publishing her resignation letter to Donald Trump? (Please read it and the 25-page tutorial on how the FEC is being destroyed by Republicans—it’s excellent). She is an election integrity firebrand. Here is why she received so much press:
Ravel rarely missed an opportunity to accuse fellow Republican commissioners of disregarding election laws — a recent FEC deadlock involving a conservative nonprofit’s TV advertising practices proved particularly vexing to Ravel.
Her parting shot? A 25-page missive (see below*) entitled, “Dysfunction and Deadlock: The Enforcement Crisis at the Federal Election Commission Reveals the Unlikelihood of Draining the Swamp,” in which she derides her GOP colleagues as “a bloc of three commissioners [that] routinely thwarts, obstructs and delays action on the very campaign finance laws its members were appointed to administer.”
Both Ravel’s style and substance frequently agitated her Republican counterparts on the six-member, bipartisan commission and even led to death threats.
(Bold mine)
* (You can find the link to “Dysfunction and Deadlock...” here on the FEC website—scroll down to “Statements and Reports” and it is the second report listed.)
You might be surprised who is credited for helping destroy the once-lofty Commission: Don McGhan, President Trump’s former top White House attorney.
Before McGahn joined the Trump White House in January 2017—after serving as Trump’s campaign lawyer—he was appointed by George W. Bush to the Federal Election Commission from 2008 to 2013. While there, critics say McGahn single-handedly presided over the destruction of one of the two US agencies responsible for insuring that the US’s elections remain truly democratic.
Snip:
The by-now infamous meeting between Donald Trump Jr and a Russian lawyer in June 2016 has become a focus for the FBI’s probe into last year’s US election campaign. The agency has assembled a grand jury (paywall) and issued subpoenas to examine evidence related to the meeting, which the president’s son, along with other senior campaign members, took after being promised incriminating material on his father’s political rival, Hillary Clinton. He may have broken a federal law prohibiting foreign participation in elections.
But another US government agency, the Federal Election Commission (FEC), should be involved too. The commission’s job is to investigate civil violations of the Federal Election Campaign Act, including the ban Trump Jr may have broken. However, the FEC is so profoundly dysfunctional that both current and former employees tell Quartz they doubt it will even launch a probe over Trump Jr’s meeting, much less hand out any punishment.
(Bold mine).
Ravel excoriated McGahn in her resignation letter:
Ravel also cites former FEC commissioner Donald McGahn’s campaign to limit the agency’s efficiency, which included persuading the other Republican commissioners to vote with him to block investigations and alienating the Democratic commissioners. “The decimation of the FEC started when McGahn was appointed” in 2008, she said. McGahn is now Trump’s chief White House counsel, so the FEC is “probably newly emboldened to do absolutely nothing,” she said. McGahn’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
(Bold mine)
Candidates are now only beholden to their donors without the FEC as a watchdog:
One of the FEC’s more serious failings is its inability to police the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision, which allowed corporations and unions to contribute without limit to election campaigns as long as they don’t coordinate their activities (such as campaign ads) with candidates. That rule only works if there is a true firewall between donors and candidates, as Supreme Court judge Anthony Kennedy wrote in his majority opinion. Without the FEC ensuring that firewall exists, politicians are “responsive to the people who bankrolled them and that is terrible for democracy,” Noti says.
(Bold mine)
Do you see a pattern? Trump is merely the “blunt instrument” that Bannon mentioned. The true enemies of our democracy are behind the scenes advising Trump, destroying checks and balances, and corrupting the democratic process.
