The Federal Election Commission is twisted in a knot, unable to meet a four-commissioner quorum requirement to conduct its business because it has been operating with just two commissioners since January 1. The Senate’s refusal to confirm four candidates—two Democrats and two Republicans—who were nominated last year by President Bush precipitated the FEC’s current state of affairs.

Enter “good government” lobby Common Cause which sent letters yesterday (See Government Policy Newslinks, March 27) to the three senators who are presidential candidates, urging them to flex their muscle and persuade their senatorial colleagues to confirm the FEC nominees.

“The fact that the country does not have a functional election watchdog during the most important presidential election in a generation is a national embarrassment. It is like playing the World Series without an umpire,” Common Cause President Bob Edgar (a former Pennsylvania Democratic congressman who previously was General Secretary of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA) said in letters to Sens. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain.

Too funny for fiction: Common Cause lobbyists fought hard in the 1970s for the FEC’s creation as a six-member Commission. The Common Cause-styled law says no more than three of the Commission’s members can come from the same party, and that no action can be taken unless approved by the affirmative votes of four of its members. In other words, the law guarantees a 3-3 deadlock (or at least the denial of a necessary fourth vote) whenever the interests of the Democratic and/or Republican parties are threatened by an FEC action.

Even funnier, ex-Rep. Edgar’s letter to Sen. Obama doesn’t mention that the four FEC nominees are blocked because Obama put a “hold” against one of the nominees—Republican Hans von Spakovsky. (That was the functional equivalent of blocking action on two of the candidates because the Senate traditionally confirms FEC nominees in pairs—one Democrat and one Republican—to assure that candidates from both parties survive the confirmation process together or not at all.)

In his letter to the senators, Edgar said the deadlock over FEC nominees was “triggered by the controversial appointment of Hans von Spakowsky [sic].” Actually, it was Obama’s hold on von Spakovsky’s nomination that triggered it. Obama described his complaints against von Spakovsky in a June, 2007, letter to Senate Rules Committee chairman Sen. Dianne Feinstein. Obama accused Republican von Spakovsky of playing “an active role in not only the creation of the Georgia voter identification law, which required all voters to provide certain government-provided identification at the polls, but also played a role in the approval of that law by the Department of Justice.” Imagine that. In Obama’s view, van Spakovsky is unfit for FEC service because he believes voters should prove they are who they say they are when showing up at the polls to cast a vote. This, of course, would be a totally foreign concept in Obama’s Chicago where Democratic machine hacks routinely steal identities so they can cast votes at as many polling places as they can visit in a single election day.

By Edward Zuckerman, Editor