Jul 14, 2004 -- Testimony of Trevor Potter before the Senate Rules Committee on the Federal Election Commission

Testimony of Trevor Potter
President and General Counsel, Campaign Legal Center
Before the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration
July 14, 2004

Mr. Chairman, Senator Dodd, and members of the Committee,

I thank you for the honor of testifying before the Committee today on the subject of the Federal Election Commission, and commend the Chairman for holding a hearing on this important - but too frequently overlooked - subject. I am a former member of the Commission, having been appointed by the first President Bush in 1991. I served a year as Chairman in 1994, a year as Vice Chair, and as a member of the Commission's Finance and Regulations Committees. One of my priorities as Commissioner was the attempted improvement of the Commission's enforcement process, and the Commission's Enforcement Priority System was developed during my time in office.

Since leaving the agency, I have had continuing experience with the Commission as an election lawyer in private practice, and, since 2002, as president and general counsel of the Campaign Legal Center, a non-profit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to promoting the public interest in enforcement of the nation's campaign finance laws, and as general counsel of the Reform Institute, a non-profit seeking improvements in the election system. I also continue to serve as a lawyer in the political affairs practice at Caplin & Drysdale, a Washington law firm.

Mr. Chairman, these years of experience with the FEC lead me to conclude that the agency, in critical ways, fails to fulfill its responsibility to enforce the federal campaign finance laws. Instead, the Commission has often been the agent of the law's undoing, actually causing our most notable campaign finance disasters, including the soft money system, the current attempts to recreate that scheme through the improper use of so-called 527 organizations and the financing of supposedly publicly-funded political conventions by soft money entities completely unconnected to the cities actually hosting the conventions.

It is important to note that the problems that have arisen this year with regard to new 527 organizations created to affect the 2004 federal elections are not a function of the new Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act. The BCRA itself is clearly working, and accomplishing its goal of breaking the relationship between large soft money donors and federal officeholders and the political parties. And despite the predictions of some of the law's opponents, the parties and candidates are thriving under the new law, raising unprecedented amounts of hard money in the current election cycle: indeed, at this point, hard money raised in small individual contributions has more than replaced the funds raised through the huge soft money donations of the last election.

The growth this year of 527 soft money activity explicitly aimed at influencing the 2004 Presidential election is, however, yet another direct result of the Federal Election Commission's failure to interpret and enforce the longstanding Federal Election Campaign Act.

Click here to read Trevor Potter's testimony in its entirety.

Click here to view important instances of FEC deadlock since 1996.