Replace FEC with agency that will enforce law

The State (Columbia, S.C.): There is probably no such thing as a completely neutral person when it comes to politics. Even if you don't like any political party, you're going to agree with one on some issues and another on others. When the parties disagree, you are almost certain to lean one way or the other, no matter how hard you try not to.
So the task of finding neutral election referees will never be easy. However, there's no better way to guarantee that you never get neutrality than to require that your referees be appointed by the two major political parties. Yet that is precisely what we do with the Federal Election Commission, whose decisions literally determine whether candidates for federal office obey the campaign laws written by the Congress. The result is not surprising: The commission works to protect the parties, not the public.
We have known this for years, at least since the Federal Election Commission created the whole "soft money" fiasco that forced the Congress, finally, to intervene and overturn this commission-written law.
Unfortunately, as first the U.S. Supreme Court and now U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly has painstakingly detailed, the commission was determined from the start not to let the Congress rein in its parties. And so it wrote regulations that effectively overturned much of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. Among the clearer abuses cited by Judge Kollar-Kotelly:
--The law prohibits federal candidates from "soliciting" unlimited soft-money donations. The commission said candidates didn't solicit soft money unless they directly asked for a donation. Judge Kollar-Kotelly noted that this "is a definition foreign to every dictionary brought before this Court."
--The law strictly limits spending by outside groups that "coordinate" their efforts with the candidates. The commission said this rule didn't apply to ads run more than 120 days before an election unless they used such magic words as "vote for" or "vote against."
--The law requires that "voter registration" and "get out the vote" efforts must be paid for with regulated funds. The commission said activities that merely "encourage" voters -- as opposed to actively "assisting" them -- don't count. Similarly, the agency said the purchase of voter lists is not a "voter identification effort."
--The law requires any broadcast ad that names a candidate, in that candidate's district, near an election to be paid for with regulated funds. But the commission gave a blanket exemption to ads run by 501(c) groups, even though many of them run ads that meet the definition and are designed to influence the election.
It is unfortunate that the ruling came too late to allow McCain-Feingold to be properly enforced for the 2004 elections. More unfortunate is the fact that the commission has no intention of ever doing that. Commissioners appealed the ruling, with one insisting that the loophole-creating, Congress-defying regulations "were clear, and effectively implemented McCain-Feingold."
Critics like to say that McCain-Feingold is a failure, that it shows you can't regulate money in politics. As this ruling so clearly demonstrates, the truth is that the commission is a failure, and it can't regulate money in politics. It is a failure because it is designed to be a failure.
Unless we are ready to give up on regulating the attempts by special interests to control our politics, we need to dismantle the commission and create an enforcement agency that is actually interested in enforcing, rather than subverting, the law. It's hard to see how the replacement could be worse than what we have now.