Campaign Finance

“All the Republican commissioners need to do is include the magic words ‘prosecutorial discretion’ and a court will then decline to review the action,” said Paul S. Ryan, vice president for litigation at Common Cause, who has regularly filed F.E.C. complaints. Indeed, Republican commissioners recently deployed that exact phrase — twice — in dismissing an investigation into whether Mr. Trump violated election laws with the payment of $130,000 to the pornographic actress Stormy Daniels in 2016 to keep her from publicly discussing her relationship with him.

“Republican intransigence on voting rights is not an excuse for inaction and Senator Manchin must wake up to this fact,” said Karen Hobart Flynn, the president of Common Cause, a government watchdog group, which backs the bill. “If Senator Manchin thinks there should be more input from Republicans – as there was in last month’s Senate markup, when several Republican amendments were adopted by the committee – you do that by advancing the bill through the legislative process,” Stephen Spaulding, senior counsel for public policy and government affairs at Common Cause. “Senator Manchin should vote to advance the bill to a full floor debate, and not filibuster the bill with his Republican colleagues.”

The fight for voting rights does not end with an op-ed. The For the People Act (S. 1) has overwhelming bipartisan support nationwide and in West Virginia 79% of Senator Manchin’s constituents support the bill – including 76% of registered Republicans. Leader Schumer should advance the bill to a full Floor debate. If Senate Republicans try to filibuster such a motion to proceed to a full Floor debate, Senator Manchin should not join such a filibuster. He should vote to allow the debate to take place on the Floor and not just in the op-ed pages. The bill has already passed the House, had a Senate markup that adopted 5 Republican amendments, and is poised for Floor action.

Common Cause has always maintained that Trump cheated en route to winning the 2016 election by violating campaign finance laws. Michael Cohen, Trump's former lawyer and fixer, was sentenced in 2018 for, in part, orchestrating payments to help to cover up Trump’s alleged affairs. Now the other big player, AMI, has been fined. But to date there’s been no accountability for Trump. Here’s the backstory on Trump’s alleged crimes and why they matter.

“With this limit struck down, officeholders can raise money after an election and that money effectively goes straight into their pockets in the form of a loan repayment,” said Paul S. Ryan, vice president of policy & litigation at Common Cause. “This is the most potentially corrupting money in all of politics.”

Paul S. Ryan, Common Cause’s vice president for policy and litigation, hailed the news as “a win for democracy.” But he argued that the FEC’s “failure to hold former-President Trump and his campaign accountable for this violation lays bare the dysfunction at the FEC.” He noted that the decision comes on the heels of a similar decision by the agency to drop an inquiry into whether Trump violated campaign finance laws when Cohen paid adult-film actress Stormy Daniels $130,000 in the days leading up to the 2016 election. “The agency has again shown itself incapable of fully enforcing the campaign finance laws passed by Congress,” Ryan said in a statement.