A member of the Federal Election Commission is calling for all of her colleagues to leave the agency, saying on Thursday that it would be a “simple fix” for eliminating stalemates in voting. She also proposed an ideological litmus test that would prevent disagreements among future commissioners.
“To say that the FEC was intended to stalemate is absurd,” Commissioner Ann Ravel said in a speech at the Brookings Institution. “Congress established the FEC in the wake of the biggest scandal and constitutional crisis in this country since the Civil War,” she said, referring to its 1975 formation in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal.
“There’s … a simple fix,” Ravel said. “The term of every other commissioner has expired,” she said, insinuating that they should quit or get fired.
Members of the commission are appointed by the president to six-year terms, subject to approval by Congress. In the event the president and Congress cannot agree on appointees, incumbent commissioners retain their positions, something has happened under Presidents Obama and Bush. By law, no more than half of the commission’s members may come from one party.
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Ravel has objected to the rule dividing the commission, saying it allows half of the members to “vote as a bloc,” and argued that Congress should reconstitute the commission by firing her colleagues and building it back up in a manner that allows one party to dominate. She expanded that line of reasoning on Thursday, suggesting that those who are on the commission in the future should hold a strong pro-regulatory perspective and be made to truly enjoy their work.
“The FEC commissioners who routinely vote as a bloc don’t believe in either the purpose of the FEC or the governing law,” Ravel said. “I want to make it clear that while the bloc that I mentioned manifests itself by party, the divide on the commission is not partisan. It’s ideological.
“I actually think the problem is … people used to actually come to conclusions at the FEC. I really do believe the problem now is that there is ‘agency capture,’ because of the way that commissioners are appointed,” she said. “It would be so much better if there was a different process for appointing, to get people who truly believed in the mission and believed in the law.”
She did not describe any alternative methods of appointment that could be used.
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Ravel, who was appointed to the commission in 2013 by Obama, served as the agency’s chairwoman last year. During her tenure, she argued adamantly that the agency was “dysfunctional” because it often deadlocked on enforcement votes. She also proposed that the agency take on a number of new functions, such as regulating paid political content on the Internet. Most of those measures failed to pass, fueling the commission’s gridlock.
