https://news.yahoo.com/trump-gop-rush-quietly-pack-000240604.html
By Igor Derysh
November 14, 2020 12:02AM (UTC)
Senate Republicans plan to move forward with three Federal Election Commission (FEC) nominations next week, raising concerns that the party is attempting to pack the panel with "partisans" after blocking it from enforcing election laws for more than a year.
The FEC has been without a quorum for most of the last 14 months, preventing it from holding meetings and enforcing laws throughout nearly the entire presidential campaign. The commission faces a backlog of more than 350 matters, according to Ellen Weintraub, the lone Democratic commissioner.
Shortly ahead of the election, the Senate Rules Committee announced plans to take up the nominations of two Republicans and an independent next week, which a watchdog group warned would stack the panel with "biased" commissioners and result in "gridlock" that would leave key cases undecided.
"For the sake of fair and functional oversight of our campaign finance system, the Senate simply cannot indulge the soon-to-be-ex-President Trump's scheme to quietly pack the FEC with partisans and let bad actors off the hook indefinitely," Kyle Herrig, the president of the progressive watchdog group Accountable.US, told Salon in a statement.
[Since when do republicans want fair and functional oversight of our campaign finance system?]
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The commission is designed to be evenly bipartisan with three Republicans and three Democrats. It currently has one Republican, one Democrat and one independent. The president typically nominates one Republican and one Democrat to fill vacant slots at the same time. But Trump, shortly ahead of the election, nominated two Republicans and one Democratic-backed independent after pushing through the confirmation of another lone Republican last year.
"In addition to the timing of FEC commissioner nominations and confirmation hearings, the administration's disregard for creating a fair and equitable makeup of commissioners for the FEC is cause for grave concern," Herrig wrote to the senators. "The traditional standard has been that two ideologically contrasting nominees are presented for a vote to the FEC at the same time. And yet, earlier this year, the Trump administration and Senate Republicans pushed through the nomination of James Trainor — a former attorney for the Trump campaign itself."
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The refusal of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., to fill the three vacant seats left the commission toothless during the presidential campaign. Brendan Fischer, the director of federal reform at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, alleged earlier this year that McConnell was trying to "neuter the FEC" in hopes that he could get "three ideological opponents of campaign finance on the FEC" so he "can basically undermine the law from within."
The refusal of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., to fill the three vacant seats left the commission toothless during the presidential campaign. Brendan Fischer, the director of federal reform at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, alleged earlier this year that McConnell was trying to "neuter the FEC" in hopes that he could get "three ideological opponents of campaign finance on the FEC" so he "can basically undermine the law from within."
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Another complaint by Rep. Bill Parscale, D-N.J., called on the FEC to investigate whether the Trump campaign had violated campaign finance rules by failing to report unpaid debts stemming from his campaign rallies.
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In September, the president nominated Republican Allen Dickerson without a Democratic counterpart. Dickerson, who has long defended the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision which injected hundreds of millions in dark money into elections, currently serves as the legal director of the Institute for Free Speech, a group funded by Charles Koch and other prominent conservative billionaires.
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"After nearly 80 million Americans voted to elect former Vice President Joe Biden to serve as the next president of the United States and with just 68 days until Inauguration Day," Herrig said in his letter, "it is distressing to see that President Donald Trump and his allies could seat additional biased commissioners to the FEC in just a few short weeks."
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