A Democratic member of the Federal Election Commission said Monday that the best way to find consensus at the agency might be to get rid of all the commissioners, including herself.
“We have a commission that people expect to be upholding the integrity of our electoral processes, and we are not doing that at all,” Democratic Commissioner Ann Ravel told an audience at the National Press Club on Monday. “It is not happening in this election, and there’s no likelihood that it will.”
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Ravel, who last year held the FEC’s rotating chairmanship and who previously led California’s state-level version of the agency, argued that federal commissioners stalemate on too many votes. By law, the agency is divided evenly between three Democrats and three Republicans, which makes it hard to agree on anything.
Ravel said the solution should be for the commission to be eliminated and replaced by a model allowing for one-party rule. “It seems to me California, the Fair Political Practices Commission, did have five members, and the chair is the only full-time person. That was a really great way to get things done. I’m not certain Congress would consider that as a resolution to this, because reasonably, they’re concerned about the enforcement mechanism to be used against one political party or another, and so the imbalance would create a problem for them.”
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“I think maybe a more rational, reasonable solution would be … if the president actually got rid of all the president’s six commissioners, myself included, happy to go,” Ravel added. “And if the president established some sort of a blue ribbon commission to actually appoint people of both parties, who are of high esteem so that it would be very difficult for the Senate not to confirm them, and it was people committed to obeying the law.”
Ravel has called several times for the commission to be reorganized, but suggested in the past that she remain. She has long lamented the fact that commission Democrats have been unable to pass new regulations for speech online, crack down on media outlets like Fox News, or penalize large political action committees, and decried Republicans for blocking Democratic initiatives, notably telling the New York Times that she viewed her colleagues as “dysfunctional” in May 2015, just months after she had assumed the agency’s chairmanship.
Her activism has led to unusual sparring with Republicans on the commission, such as Caroline C. Hunter and Lee E. Goodman. “Commissioner Ravel is principally responsible for any friction on the commission,” Goodman told the Washington Examiner in response to Ravel’s latest remarks. “The commissioner made dysfunction a self-fulfilling prophecy during her year chairing the agency.
“After all, you cannot tell the New York Times that the agency is dysfunctional four months into your chairmanship and then be proven wrong the remainder of your tenure, so she did everything within her power to disrupt the agency’s functioning and relations between the commissioners,” Goodman added.
