Politicos souring on FEC advice?
You operate a political committee.
You have a novel campaign idea — say, running tiny candidate ads on smartphones, or accepting donations in Bitcoin.
But you're not certain whether your brainstorm, put into action, would violate federal law and expose you to penalties.
Used to be that you'd file what's called an advisory opinion request with the Federal Election Commission. Advisory opinions, according to the FEC, are "official commission responses to questions regarding the application of federal campaign finance law to specific factual situations."
These days, however, an historically low number of people are asking the frequently gridlocked FEC for its formal opinion.
To wit: The six-member commission — three Republican appointees, three Democratic — has received only 10 advisory opinion requests this year, according to a Center for Public Integrity review.
That puts the FEC squarely on pace to receive 19 advisory opinion requests and tie its second-lowest yearly total since the commission's creation in 1975. The commission also received just 19 in 2013, edging out its lowest annual total — 15 — in 2002.
Related: How Washington starves its election watchdog
During the past three decades, the average number of FEC advisory opinion requests for one year is about 36. The agency has never received fewer than 20 during two consecutive years.
Four factors may be contributing to the decline in these requests.
First, it's increasingly likely the FEC won't formally respond to an advisory opinion request.
During 2013, commissioners deadlocked on three of 19 advisory opinion cases — 16 percent — presented to them.
While such a failure-to-rule rate is hardly overwhelming in a political vacuum, it would have been unheard of at the FEC just a few years ago.
Consider, for example, that the commission deadlocked on just one of the 170 advisory opinion request cases — half of one percent — presented to it from 2000 to 2005, FEC vote tallies indicate.
Secondly, the full commission sometimes reaches a conclusion, but it can't agree on the details or a rationale.
Related: FEC advisory opinion requests
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.
