A House committee advanced legislation that critics say will make the American political system even more vulnerable to the sway of big business.
The House Committee on Administration voted on Wednesday to mark-up a bill that would withhold public financing from presidential election campaigns. The measure was passed without either a roll call vote or debate.
The Washington-based nonprofit watchdog Public Citizen called the move a “sneak attack” and said in a press release that it would “give corporations and the wealthy still more influence over American elections.”
Craig Holman, a Public Citizen lobbyist, said that the maneuver “tells the American people that you want to give corporations more power over our government rather than make democracy work for ordinary Americans.”
“The measure also embraces the unintended consequence of Citizens United: dark money,” he added, referring to the 2010 Supreme Court decision that eliminated many restrictions on campaign financing.
In a Congress controlled by Republicans who seem intent on slashing non-defense spending whenever possible, it is likely the bill will eventually find its way to the Oval Office. But while the President has threatened to override many initiatives advanced by the GOP-dominated legislative branch, it is unclear if he will veto this one. Public Citizen pointed out President Obama, in 2008, “was the first candidate to opt out of the public financing program in the general election.”
Holman told The Sentinel he is hopeful that Obama “would step in to veto this,” noting that, despite his track record on participating in the program, the President “has praised it and seen it as a useful tool.” He has heard no commitment yet from the White House on a veto threat, however, but will “ask the White House to try weighing in if it gets picked up in the Senate.”
“We’re hoping to be able to kill it in the Senate,” he added.
The committee on Wednesday also advanced another bill opposed by Public Citizen that would affect how Washington oversees elections. The legislation would abolish the Election Assistance Commission.
The body was established in the wake of the 2000 presidential election debacle to oversee federal votes and modernize the voting system.
“It was so bad, Fidel Castro offered to send Cuban election observers to Florida,” Holman recalled.
But the EAC itself has long been dysfunctional.
However, as the committee’s ranking member Bob Brady (D-Pa.) noted in attempting to oppose the advancement of the measure, the EAC has quorum of commissioners for the first time in four years. He called on Congress to reform the body.
As electoral systems expert J. Ray Kennedy pointed out in 2013, the commission could be used to address how election officials deal with new information technology and cyber-security concerns. The US, he said, “continues to fall farther behind other countries that have more functional bodies to address such issues on an ongoing basis.”
But if House and Senate leaders advance the bill, the EAC could soon find itself at the scrap heap.
The sponsor of the proposal, Rep. Gregg Harper (R-Miss.) called the commission an “onerous, costly program” and said it “stifles innovation in the elections community.” Its functions, he claimed, “can better be performed by other government or private entities, as they once were.”
Holman, however, gave the legislation little chance of passing the Senate, saying that it just appointed the new EAC commissioners, and voting to scrap the body would be “hypocritical and a total waste of time.”
