In a bid to push federal contributor regulations on to local ballot initiatives, the Democratic chairwoman of the Federal Election Commission Thursday suggested that without new rules Russian President Vladimir Putin and drug cartels could buy elections.
“Do we want Vladimir Putin or drug cartels to be influencing American elections? The commission shouldn’t,” said Ann Ravel in her losing effort to expand federal campaign financing rules to state and local ballot elections.
Foreign money shouldn’t influence local & state ballot measures.Read my Memo to @FECupdates & other supporting docs http://t.co/xjPkSUzirO
— Ann Ravel (@AnnMRavel) October 1, 2015
“Foreign governments, foreign businesses, and foreign oligarchs should have no say,” she said in a public hearing. “The Federal Election Committee was established to protect the integrity of elections. Part of doing so is ensuring that our elections are free from foreign influence.”
At the hearing, Ravel was pushing to open a rulemaking process to ban foreign contributions to local ballot elections. They are already banned in candidate elections. She said that federal law suggests that it is a FEC issue. The Republicans on the FEC disagree.
Even before Republicans balked, however, Ravel inferred that they stand against banning foreign election influence, a charge that sparked some of the harshest reaction in recent memory.
GOP Commissioner Matthew Peterson fired first. “The chair began her statement by questioning the motives of I and a couple of my colleagues saying we don’t think it’s a problem that foreign nationals may be involved in ballot measure initiatives and I think that’s ludicrous,” he said. “We don’t have some sort of a moral warrant to promote the good and stamp out the bad. We are the Federal Election Committee that has a limited jurisdiction.”
Then Caroline Hunter took the mic. “These same tired phrases, they are just so old and so trite and so unsupported by anything that I keep hearing from the other side of the dias,” she said.
“We have never said this isn’t a serious problem,” Hunter added. “We don’t think this is a part of our jurisdiction.”
Democratic Commissioner Ellen Weintraub slapped back, “I’m sorry that we’re tiring you out, commissioner.”
The issue is a case of deja vu for Ravel, a former California elections official. While chairwoman, that commission turned away concerns about foreign financial influences on ballot measures and instead focused on attacking the financial influence of the Koch brothers.
In the end Thursday, the commission shot down Ravel’s plan 3-3, but that didn’t stop her from continuing to make her case on Twitter, where she wrote, “Foreign money shouldn’t influence local & state ballot measures.”
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected].
