Watchdog Groups File FEC Comments Supporting Rulemaking to Revise Flawed Regulations

 

Democracy 21 and the Campaign Legal Center filed comments today in support of a Public Citizen rulemaking petition seeking revisions of the FEC’s flawed disclosure and coordination regulations.

The comments noted that the two organizations also filed comments last January, in a similar rulemaking proceeding, also seeking new disclosure and coordination rules.  The comments filed today noted that over the past eleven months, the Commission has done nothing to advance the other rulemaking.

According to the comments filed today by the watchdog groups:

We are under no illusion that the current rulemaking petitions will yield a different result.  There is no reason to believe that any Republican Commissioner would provide a fourth vote to initiate a rulemaking, either to improve the agency’s patently inadequate disclosure rules or, certainly, to examine (much less, improve) the Commission’s plainly overwhelmed coordination regulations.  The Republican Commissioners have resisted such efforts for years, preferring instead to sit on an inert agency that has lost all purpose, all credibility, and indeed, all relevance.

We wish we thought that the current Notice of Availability was the start of a serious inquiry that poses serious questions about whether the agency should engage in a serious rulemaking.  But that would require believing that the three Republican Commissioners are suddenly going to take seriously the law and their responsibilities as Commissioners.  And there is no serious reason to believe that.

According to Donald Simon, counsel to Democracy 21, “The Commission has had ample opportunity to fix the very obvious problems with its disclosure and coordination regulations.  But the Republican Commissioners have blocked the actions to even consider whether new rules are needed, much less to adopt new rules.  The new rulemaking petition gives them an opportunity to change their minds, but unfortunately, there’s no reason to think they will.”