The mission and background of the FEC as stated on its web site is:
In 1975, Congress created the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to administer and enforce the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) – the statute that governs the financing of federal elections. The duties of the FEC, which is an independent regulatory agency, are to disclose campaign finance information, to enforce the provisions of the law such as the limits and prohibitions on contributions, and to oversee the public funding of Presidential elections. http://www.fec.gov/info/mssion.shtml.
The Commission is supposed to have six members with no more than three of the Commissioners from any one party. This requires that 4 commissioners agree to make a decision on matters before the Commission. Today, the FEC is dead in the water, unable to render any decisions on any the weighty matters before it. The Commission only has two members and thus cannot field the four votes necessary to carry most decisions. It is short handed and actually shutdown now during a Presidential election year, due to infighting between the parties. Of course, there is Directive 10 which empowers the Commission to at least meet.
The following link is to the minutes of the January 24, 2008 FEC open meeting which were approved on April 17, 2008. Everyone should review these minutes – they are short – to see just what kind of laughingstock our Congress has made of the incredibly important Federal Elections Commission, especially during a critical election year.
http://www.fec.gov/agenda/2008/approve08-06.pdf
A recent report in the Wall Street Journal sheds some light on why the Commission is broken and is now a joke. What is reported is eye opening. Senator Obama, the man who would bring our country together, is a cause of this now completely dysfunctional FEC. Remember it is designed to bring a nonpartisan approach to Presidential campaign finance oversight. So while Senator Obama is running for President, he is preventing the organization with the mission to keep financing order during Presidential campaigns from doing just that. He can’t even bring our FEC together. Rather, he is keeping it dysfunctional. Read the article here: http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB120398529319392115-Lkj52vNGviy5UKa0jdZEp5PwTHQ_20080326.html?mod=tff_main_tff_top
Clearly, Senator Obama has help and both parties are doing what they do – bringing government jurisprudence to a halt over another squabble.
