The Chairwoman Who’s At War With Her Own Agency

Ann Ravel says the Federal Election Commission is badly broken. But is her very public crusade the way to fix it?…

Now the six com­mis­sion­ers had be­fore them a tech­nic­al ques­tion: not wheth­er to act on the pe­ti­tion—which was un­likely to hap­pen, giv­en their 3-3 di­vide on ma­jor ques­tions and the sub­stan­tial par­tis­an enmity among them—but merely wheth­er to pub­lish the text of the pe­ti­tion in the Fed­er­al Re­gister. This form­al­ity set off what was surely one of the most bizarre ex­changes in FEC his­tory. In the view of Mat­thew Petersen, one of the three Re­pub­lic­an com­mis­sion­ers, be­cause Ravel and Wein­traub were sit­ting com­mis­sion­ers neither qual­i­fied as a “per­son” eli­gible to pe­ti­tion the FEC. Car­oline Hunter, an­oth­er Re­pub­lic­an com­mis­sion­er, agreed, say­ing there was “a lot of com­mon sense” in Petersen’s reas­on­ing.Ravel and Wein­traub were taken aback. “First of all, let me say, I can­not be­lieve that you are ac­tu­ally go­ing to take the po­s­i­tion that I am not a per­son,” Wein­traub said. “A cor­por­a­tion is a per­son, but I’m not a per­son? … That’s how bad it has got­ten. My col­leagues will not ad­mit that I am a per­son.”“My chil­dren,” she later re­marked, “are go­ing to be really dis­ap­poin­ted.”“I think you’re not an ali­en,” Hunter dead­panned, “at least not today.”

Source: NationalJournal