It probably never occurred to Ann Ravel, when she accepted an appointment from Barack Obama to serve as a Commissioner on the Federal Elections Commission (FEC), that she would receive death threats. She was no doubt surprised that people outside of the Washington beltway even knew her name. A Democrat, she was appointed to the FEC to maintain the 3-3 split in party identification that has persisted since the Republican Party’s criminal behavior in Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign came to light.
“Follow the money,” Deep Throat (Mark Felt) told Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward in 1972. The money that floated around the Nixon re-election campaign often did so in cash and in paper bags, hotel laundry bags, and gym bags.
One man, W. Clement Stone, gave more than $2 million to President Richard M. Nixon’s 1972 reelection campaign. The Watergate break-in was financed with secret campaign contributions. Fat cats plunked down cash for ambassadorships, and corporations for special treatment.
Writing for Politico back in 2012, Fred Wertheimer discussed the clear pay-to-play nature of the campaign contributions.
Consider, ITT pledged $400,000 to help finance the 1972 Republican convention, and the Justice Department quickly settled an antitrust case in ITT’s favor. Nixon himself intervened in the case. The dairy industry gave $2 million to the Nixon campaign and soon got the increase in dairy price supports they were seeking. Nixon overrode his Agriculture Department’s objection to put these supports in place.
That was a lot of money in those days. Enough that, after the Watergate hearings, Congress moved to institute a new law, the Federal Election Campaign Act, and a new agency to implement it. Given no criminal prosecutorial powers when it was established in 1975, the Federal Election Commission was designed to be a watchdog, using civil fines to enforce the new campaign finance laws and to prevent money from corrupting our political process—ever again.
From the FEC website:
The duties of the FEC, which is an independent regulatory agency, are to disclose campaign finance information, to enforce the provisions of the law such as the limits and prohibitions on contributions, and to oversee the public funding of Presidential elections.
Before the Supreme Court redefined humanity by deciding corporations are entitled to First Amendment protections, the FEC struggled to keep our politics free from financial scandal. And to a certain extent, and for a certain period of time, they were successful at doing so. Intentionally divided into three Republican and three Democratic (currently two Democrats and one Independent) commissioners, it was hoped that their decisions would be free from partisanship. You might be able to imagine how that has been working out lately.
When a majority of Congress is made up of people who do not believe in government, it is not surprising that the people they approve for regulatory positions do not believe in regulations. The refusal of the Republicans on the FEC to regulate anything having to do with money and politics has led to repeated 3-3 votes. It was after one of those deadlocked votes on whether political ads that run for free on YouTube need public disclaimers that Ann Ravel decided it was time to look again at how political advertising was regulated online.
As a Commission, we need to consider the changing role of technology in our elections and recognize how technology is changing our politics. For that reason, next year, I will bring together technologists, social entrepreneurs, policy wonks, politicos, and activists—from across the spectrum—to discuss new and emerging technologies and how the Commission’s current approach may or may not fit with future innovations. Such a dialogue will permit the Commission to develop a firmer understanding of emerging technologies and help us as policy makers to make better decisions.
As the article by Dave Levinthal for the Center for Public Integrity explained, this statement by Ann Ravel was pretty well buried in the FEC website. And, if you have never used it, the site looks like it was set up at the turn of the century, making the search for anything like this statement difficult, at best. (It has finally had a revision that has been stuck in beta since October of last year—which makes our tech team look like geniuses. Which of course, they are.)
But somehow, word of Ravel’s desire to take a second look at the influence of technology on our elections spread like wildfire across the right wing blogosphere, from the Washington Times to the Drudge Report. It was given an assist by the then Chairman of the FEC, Lee Goodman, who appeared on Fox News shows with Tucker Carlson and Steve Doocy, expressing his concern about the “specter of a government review board,” and how it could limit free speech.
It didn’t take much more than that to demonize Ann Ravel, whose email inbox soon filled with messages like these:
“Die, fascist, die!” one anonymous person wrote to Ravel in an email reviewed by the Center for Public Integrity.
“Hope you have a heart attack,” read another email.
“Go fall down about ten flights of stairs,” yet another person wrote.
…
“Best to be careful what you ask for. You will more than likely find the ‘Nazi’ scenario showing its ugly head,” one wrote to Ravel, who is Jewish.
“Keep it up, and the pitchforks will come out and then you and your ilk will have no place to hide and the People will have their justice,” promised another.
Ravel’s recent vote to sanction conservative filmmaker Joel Gilbert for alleged violations of federal election laws — the FEC deadlocked on the matter — have prompted a new round of hate mailers to, in recent weeks, call her a “communist c---sucking b----” and wish her “the worst for you and yours.”
(Joel Gilbert is the producer of Dreams From My Real Father, purported to be an exposé of President Obama.)
It’s not clear which is more concerning: That Republicans have once again managed to cripple an agency set up to protect our electoral process, just like they did with the Election Assistance Commission, or that a bureaucrat who is simply trying to do her job would be subject to such an assault.
At the front door of the agency are the words of Justice Louis Brandeis, “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.” And perhaps it was in that spirit that Ann Ravel gave the following interview to Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Trevor Noah.