Poor Fred Wertheimer. The man otherwise known as “Democracy 21” is upset by the decision of the Federal Election Commission not to pursue an almost certainly futile, en banc appeal in EMILY’s List v. FEC, in which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit held last month that regulations of the Federal Election Commission governing the solicitation of campaign contributions and the speech of independent, non-party organizations violated both the FEC’s statutory authority and the Constitution’s First Amendment guarantees. According to Fred Democracy 21, “the three Republicans have voted to keep in place an extreme and overbroad decision by the panel that declared important FEC regulations unconstitutional.” This is part of “their pattern of doing everything they can to emasculate the nation’s campaign finance enforcement agency and thereby to emasculate the nation’s campaign finance laws.” That was yesterday.
But back when the FEC passed these very regulations, however, Wertheimer told the Los Angeles Times that the regulations “wouldn’t stop soft-money groups ‘from blatantly violating the federal campaign finance laws.'” So, apparently the regulations won’t stop “blatant violations of the federal campaign finance laws,” but their being struck down by a unanimous Court of Appeals will “emasculate the nation’s campaign finance laws.”
We’re beginning to think that poor Mr. Wertheimer has an urequited man crush on some of the FEC Commissioners.
