M.D. Kittle writes for the Federalist about a dubious campaign on the political left.
A leftist lawfare group previously bankrolled by disgraced crypto mogul Sam Bankman-Fried is suing to overturn Federal Election Commission rules on coordination between campaigns and like-minded outside groups.
The timing is ripe for the Campaign Legal Center (CLC), which knows the FEC can’t defend itself as the Senate dithers on confirming President Donald Trump’s nominees to fill two vacancies and give the commission a long-lapsed quorum.
On Monday, the Republican National Committee intervened in CLC’s lawsuit, which seeks to knock out the FEC’s 2024 Advisory Opinion allowing federal candidates to work with third-party groups in coordinated canvassing campaigns. CLC claims the opinion unlawfully enables candidates to “outsource and conceal untold millions of dollars in campaign spending through overtly coordinated canvassing.”
Of course, CLC’s left-wing pals didn’t think so when they were pushing for the opinion in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, asserts the FEC’s opinion violates the Federal Election Campaign Act and is in “brazen defiance” of the act’s requirement that campaigns “treat all ‘expenditures’ coordinated with federal candidates as in-kind contributions.”
RNC Chairman Joe Gruters said the Campaign Legal Center “twiddled their thumbs for two years, waiting to sue over an opinion they don’t like, and now they’re trying to win by default because the FEC doesn’t have enough commissioners to fight back.
“The RNC isn’t going to let that happen,” the chairman vowed in a statement. “This advisory opinion lets parties and grassroots groups work together to knock on doors and talk to voters — exactly the kind of engagement our elections should encourage.”
The FEC, which has lost three members during Trump’s second term and a fourth at the end of Joe Biden’s presidency, has consented to the RNC’s participation in the lawsuit.
