Campaign Legal Center & Democracy 21 File FEC Comments Supporting Request for Rulemaking to Revise Flawed Disclosure and Coordination Regulations

The Campaign Legal Center joined Democracy 21 in filing 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 Paul S. Ryan, Campaign Legal Center Senior Counsel, “The current disclosure and coordination regulations are deeply flawed but this has been the case for a number of years and the FEC’s Republican Commissioners have been perfectly content to leave them that way resulting in widespread abuses.  Sadly there is little reason to believe that those Commissioners will make even a token effort this time around to fix these grossly inadequate rules and reign in the abuses but we nonetheless encourage them to do so.” 

To read the comments click here.