McCain's Money Woes

Hans von Spakovsky was one of Alberto Gonzales' cronies in the Justice Department who is now implicated in the Attorney Dismissal Scandal. In 2006, President Bush made Von Spakovsky a member of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) by using a controversial recess appointment.

His term on the FEC has now expired and President Bush wants to reappoint him. But Senate Democrats refuse to consider him. They went to the extreme of conducting pro forma sessions over this past Christmas vacation to prevent another recess appointment. Bush refuses to retract Von Spakovsky's nomination. The net result of this impasse is that the FEC currently has only two out of the normal six commissioners and cannot make any rulings because that would require four votes. The FEC has effectively been shut down.

In August 2007, before all this FEC nonsense began, John McCain's presidential campaign ran out of money. He applied to the FEC for public financing and was accepted. Federal financing laws promised to supply him with almost $6 million in public money but limited him to spending no more than $54 million total for the entire primary season. In December, he leveraged that promise of future public financing to secure a $1 million loan, which kept his campaign afloat for a couple of months.

In case you haven't heard, John McCain's political prospects improved considerably in January 2008. He's now the presumptive Republican nominee. He won't receive the public funds until March, but he's already spent all of his allotted $54 million. And he'd definitely like to spend more before the Republican convention in September. Since he has lots of donors now, financing is no longer a problem. So he very much wants to opt out of the public financing system, just as Dick Gephardt did in 2004.

But he can't. Not legally, anyway.

He's filed all the required paperwork with the FEC to opt out. Normally, the decision to allow him to do so would be quick and routine. But, as I said before, the FEC can't currently make any decisions because it doesn't have a quorum of four commissioners. Catch-22.

The Republican Chairman of the FEC, David Mason, recently wrote McCain a letter saying, "the Commission will consider your request at such time as it has a quorum." He went on to say that McCain can't legally withdraw from public financing until the FEC gives him written permission to do so. If his campaign spends any more money before September, it will risk being in violation of federal campaign financing laws and John McCain could be subject to fines and up to five years in prison.

The McCain campaign has announced that they're going to continue spending money anyway. They say that in the meantime they'll seek a judgment on the matter in federal court. But it's uncertain if the courts have the authority to order the FEC to make a decision without a quorum. And, in any event, there's no guarantee that either the courts or the FEC will rule in McCain's favor.

Oh, by the way, the law that John McCain may now be willfully violating is called the McCain-Feingold Act.

There are some other twists and turns to this story, which Josh Marshall covers in the following video:

(Click below to play video)