From the National Journal: 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?

An insider's very frustrated look at the Federal Election Commission - and agency at the hart of the content in the section on campaign finance reform. The FEC - as mentioned in the notes - is hamstrung by rules that mandate that an equal number of members of appointees of each party control it. This makes rulings on major issues regarding alleged violations of campaign finance laws difficult, if not impossible. Critic argue that the FEC has been captured by the forces it is intended to regulate and - deliberately - has no teeth.

The link below takes you to a story which discusses the innovative way the current chair of the FEC is using to bring issues to the commission.

- Click here for it.

On a Thursday morn­ing in June, the six com­mis­sion­ers of the Fed­er­al Elec­tion Com­mis­sion—three Re­pub­lic­an ap­pointees, three Demo­crat­ic ap­pointees—con­vened at their headquar­ters in down­town Wash­ing­ton for their monthly open meet­ing. On the agenda was a pro­voc­at­ive item: The group’s Demo­crat­ic chair­wo­man, Ann Ravel, and one of her Demo­crat­ic col­leagues, El­len Wein­traub, had filed a pe­ti­tion with their own com­mis­sion—as if they were or­din­ary cit­izens rather than two of the six people who ac­tu­ally run the place. The pe­ti­tion urged the FEC to beef up dis­clos­ure of an­onym­ous cam­paign spend­ing and to crack down on the in­creas­ingly com­mon­place prac­tice of co­ordin­a­tion between can­did­ates and sup­posedly in­de­pend­ent su­per PACs.

It was a highly un­ortho­dox move—and that was pre­cisely the point. “People will say: ‘You’re the chair of the com­mis­sion. You should work from with­in.’ I tried,” Ravel told CNN at the time. “We needed to take more cre­at­ive av­en­ues to try and get pub­lic dis­clos­ure.”

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.

For more on the FEC, click on these below:

- The FEC homepage.
- Wikipedia: FEC.
- Wikipedia: Regulatory Capture.
- NYT: F.E.C. Can’t Curb 2016 Election Abuse, Commission Chief Says.
- The Atlantic: Another Massive Problem With U.S. Democracy: The FEC Is Broken.
- CPI: Gridlocked elections watchdog goes two years without top lawyer.