[Vision2020] A New Danger to Campaign Law

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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August 16, 2013
A New Danger to Campaign Law By THE EDITORIAL
BOARD<http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/opinion/editorialboard.html>

Republican operatives are charging forward with their efforts to sabotage
the Federal Election Commission in its lawful obligation to police campaign
abuses. The six-member commission is evenly divided between the two
parties, but the Republican vice chairman, Donald McGahn, has spent his
tenure as a partisan obstructionist, adroitly engineering 3-to-3 standoff
votes to block penalties and other recommendations by staff investigators
who uncover abuses by big-money campaigners.

Now Mr. McGahn aims to take advantage of a temporary Democratic vacancy and
3-to-2 Republican edge to push through rules that would make total lackeys
of commission staff members by blocking them from the usual sharing of
information with the Justice Department and other agencies. In his partisan
cunning, Mr. McGahn would even bar them from looking into possible
violations publicly reported in news media and on the Internet.

It is critically important when the commission meets next week that this
attempt to gut investigative procedures be kept off the agenda until a
full, six-member panel is in place. Two nominees — to fill the vacancy and
to replace Mr. McGahn, whose term is up — await approval in the Senate.
Washington’s major watchdog groups have said that the McGahn proposal would
gravely undermine campaign law and that the issue is of such importance
that it should be taken up only by a full panel.

Predictably, Mr. McGahn is muddying things by suggesting darkly that F.E.C.
staff members may have conspired with the Internal Revenue Service in its
investigation into right-wing political groups seeking tax exemption. There
is no evidence that they did, but that has not deterred Darrell Issa, the
chairman of the House oversight committee, from lending loud support to Mr.
McGahn’s crusade.

Mr. Issa, of course, is patently obsessed with wielding the I.R.S.
non-scandal as a Republican campaign cudgel. All of this would be the usual
pathetic hijinks except that a law of the land is at stake — the one that’s
supposed to guard against campaign corruption.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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