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
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