In shutting down the government, the nation's lawmakers also guaranteed a little less surveillance on themselves.
Among the many agencies that will not be open for business as long as the political and budgetary stalemate continues is the Federal Election Commission, an agency created after the Watergate scandal. The idea was to reduce the possibilities of corruption in politics by making campaign donations more transparent.
For the foreseeable future at least, those donations will be taking place under a cloak of darkness.
Because the FEC's electronic filing system won't necessarily be available during the shutdown, the public will not be able to view the latest filings and filers will be free to ignore existing deadlines. Candidates will have until 24 hours after the government reopens to file campaign finance reports due during the shutdown. That could mean an extension for just about every candidate for federal office--there are two major filing deadlines fall this month. It also raises the possibility that some voters may not know the whole story about who's trying to influence their vote until after they go to the polls.
FEC deadlocks on and delays key decisions
In a session marked more by delay than by decision, the Federal Election Commission did not approve a request by the Democratic Governors Association to use soft money to fund a new group that would participate in federal get-out-the-vote efforts, a matter it put off voting on at its last meeting in August.
By forming a separate organization, the group of state governors was seeking to get around a legal ban on groups of state lawmakers from playing in federal elections with unlimited funds.
The two Democrat-appointed commissioners voted against approval, disappointing the three GOP commissioners who believed the DGA ...
Continue readingNew FEC nominees stress compromise but also nod to their camps
After a Senate committee hearing questioning the two new nominees to the Federal Election Commission Wednesday, both nominees emphasized their willingness to compromise with the other, which would be a far cry from the partisan rancor that has increased at the commission in recent years.
Continue readingCan two new FEC nominees fix a ‘mired’ agency?
Five years after the Senate last approved new members to the nation's election watchdog agency, President Barack Obama's two nominees face their first test Wednesday at a confirmation hearing before the Senate Rules and Administration Committee. And while no opposition has surfaced so far, there remain plenty of questions about whether new members can change an agency that's taking on one-tenth the number of enforcement actions that it did a decade ago.
Obama's two picks for the Federal Election Commission are California regulator Ann Ravel and Virginia lawyer Lee Goodman. Ravel would fill an open Democratic ...
Continue readingWhy does the IRS regulate political groups? A look at the complex world of campaign finance
The controversy over the Internal Revenue Service's handling of applications for non-profit status from Tea Party groups has put a spotlight on a subject with which we at the Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group are all too painfully familiar: The migraine-producing complexity of the nation's campaign finance system. To shed some light on the ongoing debate, we've decided to share what we know.
As often is the case with systems worthy of Rube Goldberg, it's easier to draw than to describe.
How ex-Det. Guy Bowers became the biggest campaign donor of all
One of the most prolific donors to political candidates running for federal office has no idea that’s his status.
Guy Bowers, a 66-year-old ex-detective who says he owes his fortune to an inheritance and some savvy investing, is not your typical corporate executive often associated with fattening politicians’ campaign accounts.
Yet Bowers was such an enthusiastic donor that he tops a list of perhaps hundreds who appear to have broken a campaign finance law that caps the total amount of money individuals can give federal political candidates and committees in the course of a two-year election cycle. For 2011 ...
Did almost 600 donors break campaign finance law in 2012?
As many as 600 individuals appear to have exceeded the $117,000 that they were legally allowed to give directly to federal candidates, political parties and political committees in the last election cycle, records examined by the Sunlight Foundation suggest. But our most troubling finding may how difficult it is determine with legal certainty exactly how many campaign scofflaws there are, or how much over the limit they gave. Like our former Sunlight colleagues, Paul Blumenthal and Aaron Bycoffe of the Huffington Post, we have been curious about the number of donors who appear to have exceeded campaign spending limits, in an era when the Supreme Court has made it possible for wealthy individuals to give in unlimited amounts via super PACs. In addition to those who violated the overall limit for giving to federal campaigns, we identified as many as 1,478 individuals who may have given more than the legal limit of $70,800 to parties and committees and 507 who appear to have given more than the $46,200 legal aggregate limit to individual candidates.
Continue readingFEC denies same-sex appeal
The question of marriage equality for same-sex couples became a campaign finance issue on Thursday, as Federal Election Commission members addressed the application of a little-known rule that allows someone to contribute to a federal campaign from the checking account of his or her spouse.
That way, a spouse with the lion's share of the income can effectively double his or her contribution without hitting the cap on how much individuals can give to each candidate.
Federal election commissioners at today's regular open meeting denied the request from Massachusetts Senate candidate, Dan Winslow, to treat donations from same-sex ...
Continue readingDemocratic establishment betting heavily on Colbert Busch upset in S.C.
The shifting political tides in a coastal South Carolina congressional district are vividly apparent from the first look at last-minute big donations to Mark Sanford and Elizabeth Colbert Busch, rival candidates for the House seat left vacant when Republican Tim Scott was promoted to the U.S. Senate earlier this year.
Under federal law, any donations of $1,000 or more made during the final days before the May 7 election must be reported to the Federal Election Commission. Over the weekend, both campaigns filed their first reports, and they showed the late money breaking strongly in favor of Democrat ...
Continue readingGOP dominates list of top House fundraisers in 2013
On the heels of the most expensive campaign in the nation's history, members of the House and the candidates who want to replace them are already raking in cash for the 2014 mid-terms. In the first three months of 2013, they collected a total of $68 million, records just submitted to the Federal Election Commission show.
Most of the biggest fundraisers are party leaders, topped by House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va. Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Ga., a senior member of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, came in third. But Aaron Schock, a three-term Illinois ...
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