By Dan Eggen Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 2, 2010; 12:27 AM
After years of wrangling, the Federal Election Commission has issued new rules aimed at clearing up the question: When is it illegal for an interest group to coordinate with a political candidate?
But it’s not clear if anyone likes the FEC’s answer.
By a vote of 5 to 1, the commission decided last week that any ads or other messages that contain the “functional equivalent of express advocacy” for or against a congressional candidate should be considered subject to FEC campaign finance restrictions.
Some campaign finance reformers, however, say the rules don’t go far enough and leave loopholes allowing broad coordination between candidates and outside groups that support them. The rules also appear to do little to clarify what kinds of cases might run afoul of the limits, almost ensuring further litigation.
The issue is important because deciding whether an interest group is acting in coordination with a party or a candidate is crucial in determining whether it must abide by contribution limits and other oversight from the FEC.
The issue is even more relevant in the wake of January’s Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. FEC, which found that corporations can spend unlimited amounts of money in an election – as long as they are not coordinating with a candidate.
Consider one high-profile example in the news this week: Joe Miller, the political novice who beat Sen. Lisa Murkowski in the Alaska GOP primary, benefited from about $600,000 in independent expenditures by the California-based Tea Party Express. To spend that much, however, the group could not coordinate directly with Miller’s campaign.
WASHINGTON — A Texas congresswoman admitted that she wrongly steered thousands of dollars in college scholarships from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation to her own relatives and the children of a staff member but said she did so unintentionally.