In the Heat of the Campaign (washingtonpost.com)
AN UNPRECEDENTED criminal enterprise designed to impermissibly affect a presidential election.” That was the heated accusation leveled last week by the Bush campaign and the Republican National Committee against the Kerry campaign, an array of outside Democratic groups working to defeat President Bush and several big donors to those groups. The complaint, filed with the Federal Election Commission, involves groups created by Democratic activists to collect and spend the huge “soft money” contributions now off-limits to political parties.
The Republicans argue that “this illegal conspiracy of donors and shadowy groups” is improperly spending soft money on television ads and other activities to defeat Mr. Bush. They say that the groups are illegally coordinating their activities with Sen. John F. Kerry’s presidential campaign and the Democratic Party. And they say the situation is so dire, and the FEC’s processes so cumbersome and ineffective, that the agency should take the unprecedented step of dismissing the GOP complaint so that the Republicans can obtain an immediate hearing before a federal judge.
We’re glad to see that Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie, Bush campaign chairman Mark Racicot and others have become such staunch advocates of vigorous enforcement of the federal election laws. We’ve long argued that the FEC is a toothless entity whose disciplinary actions come, when they occur at all, far too late to matter — or to deter future campaigns from such wrongdoing. We’d encourage Mr. Bush to listen to Mr. Gillespie and Mr. Racicot and take up the cause of FEC reform.
But the complaint does not provide the slam-dunk evidence of a “massive conspiracy to corrupt the federal campaign finance system” that its proponents contend. It’s far from certain that the groups, known as 527s for the section of the tax code under which they are organized, are violating the law. As the RNC itself argued to the Supreme Court, the McCain-Feingold campaign finance legislation passed last year left interest groups, unlike political parties, “largely unrestricted in raising and spending unlimited, unregulated and undisclosed money from any source.” The Supreme Court ruling changed the legal landscape, yet the contours of the new world remain uncertain. Indeed the FEC is writing rules to govern the operations of 527s. It’s hard to see how a judge could intervene in the matter before those rules are even published.
Nor does the complaint prove illegal coordination. That Jim Jordan, Mr. Kerry’s former campaign manager, is now advising some of the outside groups doesn’t by itself constitute such evidence. The FEC’s coordination rules contemplate, as they should, that campaign workers may end up in different jobs in the course of the election cycle; there is illegal coordination only if they use “material information” gathered while working for a candidate in helping their new employer craft advertising strategy. Likewise, the fact that the outside groups and the Kerry campaign advertised in the same media markets may reflect not coordination but the advantages of modern technology, which makes it easy to identify where swing voters are concentrated and to monitor where other candidates or groups are on the air.
You don’t have to cheer what the Democratic groups are doing to believe that the extraordinary remedy proposed by the Republicans — removing the matter from the agency with expertise in the law and dumping it in the lap of a federal judge — is neither sensible nor warranted.
SO remember that the next time your boss presses you for a contribution so he can bundle it and be a Pion – oops, sorry, wrong party…