New complaints against 2016 hopefuls may be resolved this decade — or not
The Campaign Legal Center today filed complaints with the Federal Election Commission against four potential presidential candidates — Jeb Bush, Rick Santorum, Scott Walker and Martin O'Malley — accusing them of full-on acting the part without officially registering campaign committees.
Good luck with that: If the nonpartisan campaign reform group is fortunate, FEC commissioners will rule on these cases sometime before the 2020 presidential election.
Indeed, the FEC, which exists largely to regulate and enforce campaign finance laws, sometimes takes longer to rule on complaints than it took the United States to win World War II.
Its fellow governmental agency NASA sent its Cassini-Huygens space probe flying past the planet Jupiter (after first swinging it around Venus) in shorter order than the FEC has resolved matters pending against some presidential candidates.
As the Center for Public Integrity previously reported, a 2003 complaint by the American Conservative Union against a supporter of former Democratic Sen. John Edwards’ 2004 presidential committee was ultimately resolved — in 2012.
More recently, Republican Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential committee won dismissal of a case against it in mid-2013.
A complaint filed in 2011 by the Campaign Legal Center and fellow reform group Democracy 21 against a limited liability company supporting Republican Mitt Romney's White House dreams? Still pending.
Related: How Washington starves its election watchdog
There’s more to this story. Click here to read the rest at the Center for Public Integrity.
This story is part of Primary Source. Primary Source keeps you up-to-date on developments in the post-Citizens United world of money in politics. Click here to read more stories in this blog.
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Copyright 2014 The Center for Public Integrity. This story was published by The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, D.C.
