As the 2020 campaign enters its final months, the independent regulator of America’s elections will once again be without enough commissioners to do its job starting in July.
One of the Federal Election Commission’s four current members, Caroline C. Hunter, a Republican, submitted a letter of resignation to President Trump on Friday, just weeks after a new commissioner had joined the agency and restored the minimum number of members required by law.
“The F.E.C. would benefit greatly from new faces and fresh perspectives,” Ms. Hunter wrote in the letter, going on to rebuke a Democratic colleague on the commission with whom she and fellow Republican members had frequently deadlocked on votes, displaying reliably different views of the law.
The agency has been dormant for most of the past year, unable to conduct investigations or impose penalties from September 2019 to June 2020 because only three commissioners were in place. There are six seats on the F.E.C. board, and at least four must be occupied for the agency to function fully.
With the swearing-in on June 5 of James E. Trainor III, a Republican lawyer from Texas, the agency was finally able to begin taking official actions, like addressing a backlog of potential violations relating to how campaigns raise and spend money.
When it was without a quorum, the agency continued to process robust financial disclosures detailing how much candidates had raised and spent this election cycle. With a quorum, the agency is additionally able to open and close investigations, impose penalties, defend itself against lawsuits and advise campaigns on how to comply with the law. Even when it has had enough members to function, however, it has frequently been criticized as toothless.
Ms. Hunter, whose resignation will take effect July 3, said that she planned to join Stand Together, a philanthropic organization founded by the billionaire Charles G. Koch. She has served on the commission since 2008, when President George W. Bush nominated her to the post. Her term technically expired in April 2013, and she and two fellow commissioners — one Democrat and one independent — have continued to serve beyond their respective terms while waiting for the president and the Senate to replace or renominate them.
In her letter to Mr. Trump, Ms. Hunter said that in her dozen years at the agency she had “fought to protect Americans’ First Amendment rights to free speech and association, and to administer the laws as written by Congress and interpreted by the courts, rather than as some wished them to be,” while also fighting “unnecessary government regulations and unfair enforcement actions.”
Some election lawyers and commissioners — including the agency’s only Democratic member, Ellen L. Weintraub — have described Republican commissioners as broadly uninterested in enforcing election law or conducting investigations, regardless of the political party of a candidate.
Ms. Hunter on Friday called the frequent stalemates among commissioners of different parties “a natural consequence” of the agency’s bipartisan structure and took aim at Ms. Weintraub without naming her.
“One commissioner — who has served for more than a decade past the expiration of her term — routinely mischaracterizes disagreements among commissioners about the law as ‘dysfunction,’ rather than a natural consequence of the F.E.C.’s unique structure, misrepresents the jurisdiction of the agency and deliberately enables outside groups to usurp the commission’s role in litigation and chill protected speech,” she wrote.
In a statement on Friday, Ms. Weintraub called it “keenly disappointing for the F.E.C. to lose its quorum just a blink of an eye after we regained it,” going on to wish Ms. Hunter well.
The White House announced Friday that it would nominate Allen Dickerson, the legal director at the Washington-based Institute for Free Speech, a nonprofit that has promoted the deregulation of elections, to the commission.
But there has been little urgency among some lawmakers to fill empty seats on the commission. Mr. Trainor was first nominated in 2017 by Mr. Trump, who chose not to nominate a Democratic commissioner at the same time as a Republican one, as had been typical. The Senate voted on Mr. Trainor’s nomination three years later, confirming him in May.
“A huge majority of voters are concerned about the enforcement of our campaign finance laws, and Hunter’s resignation leaves their democratic elections with significantly less government oversight,” Trevor Potter, president of the Campaign Legal Center and a former Republican chairman of the F.E.C., said in a statement on Friday. “A strong and functional F.E.C. is vital to protecting our democracy, fighting corruption and holding politicians accountable for the campaign money they receive.”
In a telephone interview, Ms. Hunter, the departing commissioner, disagreed with the notion that campaign finance was of concern to average Americans. “Especially now, with the coronavirus and the economy,” she said, “I can’t imagine any poll that would show it to be a pressing issue in this country.”
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