Former Republican aides at the Federal Election Commission are the top prospects for replacing their bosses during the Trump administration, according to a source.
They include Melissa Laurenza, an aide to former Commissioner Michael Toner, and Andrew Woodson, a former aide to Commissioner Lee Goodman, a source familiar with the agency told the Washington Examiner. A third, Allen Dickerson, is legal director at the nonprofit Center for Competitive Politics.
Neither Dickerson nor Laurenza, an attorney at Akin Gump, responded to a request for comment. Woodson, an election law partner at Wiley Rein, declined to discuss the matter.
It isn’t clear how many openings will emerge after President-elect Trump takes over in January. The six-member agency is split, by law, between three Republicans and three Democrats. While the president is responsible for making formal appointments, the options for each party are typically presented as recommendations by party leaders in the Senate.
Related Story: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/article/2604600
At least one commissioner, Democrat Ann Ravel, has said she wants to leave the agency. Two more Democrats, Vice Chairman Steven Walther and Commissioner Ellen Weintraub, as well as all three Republicans, Chairman Matthew Petersen and commissioners Lee Goodman and Caroline Hunter, are due to be reappointed or replaced by the president as soon as possible.
Because of the agency’s balanced partisan composition, enforcement decisions will likely remain relatively consistent compared to past years, although the tone of the agency could shift substantially.
The commission has been vilified by Washington Democrats, and particularly by Ravel since her 2013 appointment, who said it was “dysfunctional” that commissioners often split on enforcement decisions.
Ravel, who served a year as the FEC’s chairman, sought to put an aggressive emphasis on the agency’s rule-making authority with efforts to impose new regulations aimed at expanding federal authority over political action committees and political speech on the web.
Those initiatives failed uniformly, leading Ravel and other Democrats to argue that the president’s party should be able to appoint a majority of members on the commission.
