Irony alert: The complaint Barack Obama’s campaign filed with the Federal Election Commission yesterday, about an independent political group that supports Hillary Rodham Clinton, is going to be snarled up in the FEC by paralysis that Obama helped create.
The commission can’t actually do anything right now because it doesn’t have enough commissioners to get a quorum, thanks to a classic Washington partisan gridlock that has stalled the Senate confirmations of three new nominees. (There were four, but one of them withdrew because the stalemate was taking so long to resolve.)
It’s all because of a chain reaction that started with President Bush’s nomination of Republican Hans von Spakovsky, was a Justice Department official came under fire from former attorneys in the civil rights division because he overruled objections to Georgia law requiring voters to produce photo identifications at the polls.
Most Democrats oppose van Spakovsky's nomination, as do a broad spectrum of civil rights and voting rights groups. But Obama and Democrat Russ Feingold of Wisconsin were the two senators who raised the earliest, and loudest, objections. And so far, this seems to be one partisan Washington gridlock that Obama can’t, or won’t, solve.
In a letter to the Senate Rules Committee in June, Obama said von Spakovsky’s handling of the issue “raises significant questions about his ability to interpret and apply the law in a fair manner.”
In October, Obama and Feingold placed holds on his nomination to keep the Senate from voting on it. In response, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said he wouldn’t allow any of the four nominations – two Republicans, two Democrats – to come to the floor unless they all came up together. No deal, said Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada.
And that’s about where it’s been stuck ever since. Obama’s aides say they’re not aware of anything he has done to try to resolve the issue, and McConnell’s aides say they haven’t heard from him.
At one level, Obama might seem to have an interest in getting the commission working again, now that he’s in the thick of a presidential campaign where there are sure to be lots of potential election law violations to bring up. But von Spakovsky has become such a target of civil rights groups, who say he has made a career of keeping minorities from voting, that there may be no way Obama could soften his stance without losing their crucial support.
In an October op-ed in the Chicago Defender, Obama wrote that von Spakovsky has “amassed a record of undermining voting rights, creating restrictions that would make it harder for poor and minority communities to vote, and putting partisan politics above upholding our civil rights.”
In a conference call with reporters yesterday, Bob Bauer, the Obama campaign’s chief counsel, said the FEC could simply refer the investigation of the pro-Clinton group to the Justice Department if it’s unable to conduct the probe itself. Given how badly the FEC is snarled, and the fact that no one is coming close to blinking, Obama will have to hope someone in the Justice Department is willing to take it on.
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