Bob Biersack took to the pages of The New York Times this week to bemoan what he termed a failure of the Federal Election Commission to fulfill “its basic obligation to save what’s left of our campaign finance laws” through timely publication of campaign finance reports required to be filed with the Commission. By timely, Biersack makes clear that such reports should be published on the Commission’s website within 30 days of the filing date.
Biersack reports that the FEC is simply not doing its job when it comes to assuring the swift publication of campaign finance compulsory disclosure reports. He writes, “when we downloaded the F.E.C. files on May 21, we believed that virtually all reports from 2014 House candidates submitted by April 15 would be included. We were shocked to find, however, that information for 347 of the 703 active House candidates for the first quarter of the year was missing.”
Biersack informs his readers that this is a calamity on par with the plight of the Andrea Doria. “[T]he agency has lost sight of the core elements of its mission,” he explains. “[T]he public has a right to know who finances campaigns, and how candidates, parties and other political committees are using those funds,” a right that is being “undermined.” He and his colleagues at the Center for Responsive Politics (“CRP,” no relation) “were so struck by the missing information for many campaigns that we asked the F.E.C. for detailed breakdowns of the time required to process new filings in each quarter over the last several years.” And they were “alarmed” that “[i]n the current two-year election cycle, the Agency has taken more than 30 days to process 18.8 percent of the new reports filed as of June 20, as compared to 11.4 percent for the same period in the 2011-2012 cycle.”
Now, let’s think about this for a minute. The reader is told that it is vital that reports be publicly available “quickly,” and is told that this means within 30 days. Yet it appears that CRP, an organization that exists primarily to publicize campaign finance disclosure information, and which massages the data in countless ways, had no idea of the percentage of reports taking over 30 days to appear online; no idea of the breakdown for processing filings over the past “several years,” and despite its eagerness to get info, didn’t notice that reports were not online until more than five weeks after the filing deadline. And although Biersack reports that CRP does such downloads as a “routine” matter, it apparently dawned on them that they had no idea of whether this one week delay was unusual or not. Apparently, no other news organization had noticed this either. Maybe it’s just us, but this seems to suggest that having reports online within 30 days really isn’t that big a deal.
There’s an episode of Seinfeld, “The Little Jerry“, in which Elaine begins dating a competitive swimmer who, for reasons of speed in the pool, had shaved his head, and then kept it shaved for many years. He liked his look, and was quite happy with it, until Elaine sees an old picture of him with a full, luscious head of hair, and suggests that he grow in his hair again. But when he tries to do so, he discovers that in the intervening years, he has become bald. This baldness, which until then hadn’t bothered him at all, sets him into a state of total alarm. Similarly, CRP has discovered something that was so irrelevant that they hadn’t even noticed it – but having noticed it, it is suddenly undermining democracy.
Biersack’s column is interesting, too, because Bob has been in this game a long time – he began his long service at the FEC in 1981. Surely he recalls that it wasn’t that long ago that no FEC disclosure reports were online, period because, well, there was no “online.” To view reports, one had to go physically to the FEC, and pore through reals of microfische or hard paper copies. Oh, those despairing days of the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s, when American democracy nearly came apart over the lack of immediate access to campaign finance filings.
As supporters of reasonable, effective disclosure, we’ve watched in some amazement and some amusement as the lobbyists for more regulation have become veritably unhinged about disclosure. We have more disclosure, and more information about political spending in America, than at any time in our nation’s history, yet to hear “reformers” tell it, we face a crisis of non-disclosure and “dark money.” The regulatory lobbyists seem to think that Americans are unable to make reasonable decisions at the polls in November, if April disclosure reports are not online four weeks later in May. And yet, they themselves really hadn’t even noticed that it was taking more than 4 weeks for some reports to appear online.
Disclosure can help voters monitor their elected representatives, and in some cases evaluate messages. But when an organization that lives to track reports admits that it hasn’t noticed one way or the other how quickly the FEC is getting data online, it’s enough to make one wonder if instant disclosure isn’t a bit overrated.
