If Mike Huckabee violated campaign finance laws, would anyone take note? And who would do anything about it?
The answer to the first question is yes: As reported in The Washington Post, the Campaign Legal Center has called out Huckabee on the first day of his presidential candidacy for a remark he made during his announcement speech: “I will be funded and fueled not by the billionaires, but by working people who will find out that $15- and $25-a-month contributions can take us from Hope to higher ground… . Now, rest assured [he said to laughter], if you want to give a million dollars, please do it.” According to the center, that’s a violation, joke or not, since candidates for federal office can solicit amounts no larger than $5,000. And if he was suggesting that people direct their donations to a Super PAC, that would also have been a violation: Super PACs are independent of candidates, and fundraising for them must stop once a potential candidate becomes an announced one. Republican Jeb Bush and Democrat Martin O’Malley are two presumed presidential candidates whose Super PACs continue to raise money while they linger on the sidelines, which is precisely (some say) why they continue to linger on the sidelines.
A million here, a million there—once it might have soon begun to add up. Yet with the Koch brothers pledging to funnel close to $900 million into the 2016 election (having already amassed $250 million at an event earlier this year), notions of what constitutes “real money” might need to be reconsidered. Huckabee’s modest request could cause him some trouble, assuming there was a bipartisan body set up to monitor and enforce such things. If you said that’s what the Federal Election Commission was for, you wouldn’t be incorrect, but you’d be overstating its ability to do so, and maybe even its interest in doing so. As reported this past weekend, the FEC is effectively neutered, its three Republican and three Democratic members in a “perpetual deadlock.” The FEC chairwoman bluntly states that the likelihood of enforcing campaign finance regulations in the 2016 presidential election is “slim” – this when about $10 billion in total spending is expected, an amount loosed in large part via the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. Democrats on the commission want more oversight on just where the money is coming from; Republicans say there's nothing to see here. Where members did manage to compromise was on what would be served to eat at a recent event commemorating the FEC’s fortieth anniversary: one side wanted bagels, the other doughnuts, so they settled on both.
It’s campaign season in the United Kingdom as well, where rules are somewhat more stringent: No party can spend more than about $30 million in the year ahead of the election. In the last cycle, the Conservatives spent $25 million and Labour less than half that. The Center for Responsive Politics says American presidential candidates spent about as much money on raising money in 2012 as the two main British parties spent on their entire campaigns in 2010. There is no TV or radio advertising in British elections (though spending on digital ads is rising). Even then, parties and candidates tend to have money left over. Maybe enough for scones?
