Thomas Woods likes to say, “Don’t just do something — stand there!” One suspects Woods might derive some pleasure in reading Bloomberg Businessweek‘s description of the dysfunctional Federal Election Commission.
To say the FEC is broken is a parody of understatement. The agency’s structure—three Democratic commissioners and three Republicans, serving single six-year terms—means it often deadlocks along party lines. That’s what happened when it tried to update its own regulations in the aftermath of the 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United, the case that helped open the door to unlimited political spending. The commission’s three Democrats wanted to consider tightening disclosure requirements; the Republicans insisted on reviewing only those rules that conflicted with the court’s ruling. That put the commissioners on the sidelines when spending by independent groups tripled to $1 billion in 2012, up from $300 million in 2008, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a research group that tracks campaign spending.
The FEC’s inability to do its job has emboldened some groups to test legal boundaries, says former Senator Russ Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat who introduced legislation to replace the FEC with a stronger regulator (it went nowhere). “This is about the core issue, the credibility of our elections,” Feingold says. “You have people willing to push the envelope because they know the FEC is a feckless institution.”
