Excuse me, but is this legal?
While most Americans will be enjoying the first weekend of summer outside and away from work, Mitt Romney will host his richest campaign donors at a retreat in Utah where they’ll have access to high-profile Republicans who would likely be in the candidate’s administration if he wins the race.
Usually, party bigwigs and donors have to wait until the conventions to hear leaders speak and rub elbows with the GOP elite, but not this summer, as many will be descending on the tony Deer Valley resort area of Park City beginning today.
The guest list is impressive — James Baker, Mike Leavitt, Bobby Jindal, Meg Whitman, Paul Ryan, John Thune, Condoleezza Rice, Rob Portman, Bob McDonnell, Tim Pawlenty, and many more recognizable GOP figures.
Including Karl Rove, the mastermind of George W. Bush’s presidency whose super PAC is raising millions of dollars to spend against President Obama in commercials. The confab in Utah is a reward for so-called campaign bundlers who have gathered donations for Romney, many of them around $150,000. But that money is limited by campaign finance law, whereas super PAC money is unrestricted. Just as the bundlers will have access to potential VPs, Rove will be in the same room as all of the donors, many of whom probably have more money to spend and know lots of other rich supporters who do, too.
Who knows if it’s legal? Furthermore, who cares?:
[W]hile the Federal Election Commission has established elaborate, though narrow, guidelines for determining whether the creation of a specific campaign advertisement violates the coordination ban, it has not focused on other kinds of activities between all PACs and candidates. Rules the commission adopted in 2003, still on the books, allow for regulation of this gray area, but they have been largely ignored.
“Most of the focus so far has been on the ads, but there may be a lot of other activity that is being coordinated between the campaigns and the super PACs that could be seen as resulting in a benefit to the campaign,” said Lawrence M. Noble, a campaign-finance lawyer at Skadden, Arps and a former general counsel for the election commission.
The regulations on coordination include a general prohibition on expenditures “made in cooperation, consultation or concert with, or at the request or suggestion” of candidates and their representatives. The commission’s records show that when devising this rule, it turned aside pleas from political groups to limit enforcement only to ads, saying such a narrow focus was not what Congress intended.
Nine years later, however, there is little evidence that the commission has followed through on this intent.
The commission, made up of three Republicans and three Democrats, has long been divided along partisan lines on how far to go in enforcing rules on coordinated expenditures, often resulting in paralysis.
Last fall, the commission was asked by American Crossroads if it could broadcast certain ads, “fully coordinated” with a candidate, who would be consulted about the script and appear in the advertisement. The group argued that it would not be improper as long as the ad ran outside of a time window established by the commission for “electioneering communications.”
The commission deadlocked and could reach no conclusion.
“The campaigns know the F.E.C. isn’t going to enforce the law, and so they’ve decided to do whatever they want,” said Fred Wertheimer, whose watchdog group, Democracy 21, has complained to the Justice Department about the lack of enforcement. “What is going on is just absurd.”
Who says we have a dysfunctional political system?
We have reached a point at which people like Karl Rove aren’t even trying to keep up the appearance of independence anymore, and Mitt Romney couldn’t care less. They know there will be no sanction, legal or social. Anything goes.
And this is exactly the sort of thing that plays into the “resistance is futile” strategy. Breaking the letter and spirit of the law completely out in the open and daring anyone to do something about it (knowing they won’t) reinforces the idea that it’s pointless to even try to oppose them.
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