Opinion: Change, But No Change

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Michael E. Toner, former counsel to the Republican National Committee, just announced plans to resign as chairman and member of the Federal Election Commission. Prior to taking the job in 2002, he was general counsel for the Bush-Cheney transition team, general counsel to the 2000 Bush-Cheney presidential campaign, deputy counsel to the RNC and counsel to the Dole-Kemp presidential campaign.

In other words, in addition to being an accomplished attorney, he’s unabashedly partisan. That’s par for the course at the FEC, and certainly one way to go for a commission charged with administering campaign finance laws. You get your Democrats and Republicans together and you let them duke it out.

The problem is that party people act in the parties’ interests, and that usually means being soft on soft money and looking for more ways to get more cash in the system, rather than providing strict enforcement. Toner certainly has been in that mold, and was a key vote in a ruling that allowed members of Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike, to raise unlimited amounts of money in last year’s disastrous California special election.

Realists scoff at the notion that campaign finance laws can be administered without partisanship by good-government types who believe in even playing fields. But California’s Fair Political Practices Commission at least tries. The $64 trillion question is whether nonpartisan agencies like the FPPC can outscore the politically-based FEC in fairness and effectiveness, deliver people the cleaner elections they say they want, and still enforce reality-based regulations that take into account the right, and power, of people and special interests to pump money into politics.