Federal Election Commissioner Ann Ravel announced this week her intent to resign on March 1, two months before the expiration of her term. By her own account, her three-plus years at the FEC have been a failure: In a bitter farewell op-ed at The New York Times she wrote, “the agency remains dysfunctional, more so than ever.”
Ravel is perhaps best known to conservatives as the FEC commissioner who wanted to regulate Internet politics under the guise of campaign finance reform. This was a repetitive theme for Ravel, and she rejected an effort by Republican Commissioner Lee Goodman to clarify that the Federal Election Campaign Act, intended to regulate private money in campaigns, did not apply to limit the publication of political books, satellite radio, and internet communications.
Commissioner Ravel came to Washington with a sincere desire to make the FEC a more effective, more efficient agency. Her plans, however, broke down in a combination of ideological overreach and a disdain for the hard work of democracy and governance.
Ravel ignored advice to focus her efforts on modest but meaningful goals that would have bipartisan support at the FEC, such as updating outdated regulations and improving reporting guidelines and mechanisms. Instead, she sought to implement a sweeping progressive campaign finance agenda that had not passed Congress: imposing controls on new media and pushing for unprecedented invasions of Americans’ political lives under the guise of “disclosure.”
Harping on so-called “dark money”—that is, the three to four percent of U.S. political spending conducted, in the public eye, by non-profit advocacy groups such as the National Rifle Association and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—she sought to have the FEC impose by regulatory fiat a bit of partisan Democratic legislation, known as the “DISCLOSE Act,” that had failed repeatedly in Congress.
Her efforts to pass a partisan agenda were stalled by the makeup of the FEC itself, a six-member body in which no party is allowed to control a majority of seats. This design is intended to prevent the FEC from becoming a weapon for one political party to use against the other. But Ravel chaffed at this inability to wield a partisan majority, and in an interview with Roll Call urged Congress to revamp the law to put a partisan majority on the commission whose role is regulating political campaigns. The danger of that approach should be obvious.
Ravel also failed to understand the limits of her position. The FEC oversees campaign spending. But Commissioner Ravel sought to become a sort of general election czar. She traveled the country appearing at progressive-friendly venues to rally support for more campaign regulation. She used agency resources to host a forum on how to get more women into elected office, something far beyond the FEC’s purview.
Most of all, Ravel fell victim to the progressive conceit that anytime her preferred regulatory solutions were stymied, it was because other commissioners—specifically, her Republican counterparts—” don’t want to enforce the law.”
This conflation of disagreements on law or fact with willful failure to “enforce the law” is a long-time dodge by proponents of campaign finance regulation. The law is complex, ridiculously so given that it operates in an area of core First Amendment activity. Even Supreme Court justices have conceded that the law is almost impossible to understand. Rather than provide clarity or restraint, Ravel simply ignored complex issues and accused her colleagues of malfeasance.
By the end of April 2015, just 4 months after taking over as FEC Chair, Ravel complained to The New York Times that the FEC was “dysfunctional” and, in The New York Times’ words, “she had essentially abandoned efforts to work out agreements” at the FEC. So much for the hard work of governing.
Ravel ends her stint on a disappointing note, with a flurry of media activity and the publication of a “report” prepared by her office offering tendentious descriptions of cases on which she lost votes at the FEC. As proof that the agency’s Republicans are violating their constitutional oaths to “enforce the law” she offers the mere fact that she could not muster a majority of the commission to agree with her.
Of course, if one were so inclined, the same charge could be hurled at Ravel—after all, one might reason, other than a refusal to abide by the law, why else would she vote for “enforcement” actions that were not authorized by statute?
Ann Ravel is a nice woman who sincerely wants to do good. But doing good sometimes requires a recognition of the good faith of those opposing your policies; a willingness to do the hard work of building consensus as well as the emotionally satisfying work of giving partisan speeches; and a recognition of the statutory and constitutional limits of one’s authority.
The five FEC commissioners besides Ravel are all “acting commissioners” whose terms have expired, but whose replacements were never nominated by President Obama. President Trump now has the opportunity to replace all six commissioners. Whoever is nominated should learn from Ravel’s experience.
This post originally ran in The Washington Examiner on February 28th 2017.
