Saturday, August 23, 2003

Democrats eject one of their own to weaken campaign finance reform

The New Republic has a great article by Peter Beinart called "Compound Interest" about FEC commissioner Scott Thomas. Thomas, a Democrat who has served in the FEC since 1986, wants to enforce campaign finance reforms passed under McCain-Feingold. So the Democrats fired him:

Scott Thomas went to work for the FEC soon after it was founded in the wake of Watergate, and he has served as one of its commissioners since 1986. Appointed by President Reagan, then reappointed by Presidents Bush and Clinton, he has, by any honest measure, done an outstanding job. As the American Enterprise Institute's Norman Ornstein wrote in Roll Call last month, "No one knows the law and the history of campaign finance better than Scott Thomas. No one better understands the fiduciary responsibility of a member of an independent regulatory commission."

Specifically, while many of his fellow commissioners have brazenly tried to undermine the nation's campaign finance laws, Thomas has actually tried to enforce them. The discrepancy has been particularly stark throughout the last year, as the FEC--in a series of rulings that John McCain has called "disgraceful" and Thomas has called "beyond silly"--has created gaping loopholes in the newly enacted McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, patently contradicting the intent of its framers.

You might think all this would make Thomas a hero among congressional Democrats, who overwhelmingly voted for McCain-Feingold last year. You would be wrong. This year, Thomas came up for renomination. By tradition, each party appoints three of the commission's six members, so, as a Democrat, Thomas's fate lay in the hands of Tom Daschle and Nancy Pelosi. And last month they sent him packing. Rather than renominate Thomas, Daschle and Pelosi selected Robert Lenhard, associate general counsel of AFSCME, in his place.

The article concludes on a happy note (for me) by stating "it's 1984 all over again". Heh-heh, wasn't that the year that Mondale won Minnesota?

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