In a court dispute in which oral argument is evidently scheduled for April, the government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) is pushing to let a campaign finance complaint against Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) connected to his first and so far only run for his present spot in the Senate stand.
The underlying concern hinges on what CREW describes as Scott administering a super PAC aligned with his campaign while also running for office, which it would seem is generally not allowed, since those outside organizations are broadly forbidden from direct coordination with whatever campaign they’re supporting. The mechanism Scott used appears to be that he delayed formally declaring his candidacy until later, although his ambitions for office only became more obvious. “Scott illegally delayed declaring his candidacy with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to avoid triggering federal requirements, while co-opting New Republican, a super PAC, to raise millions of dollars outside the legal limitations, which would later be spent supporting his campaign,” the Campaign Legal Center said.
A political action committee called End Citizens United, in reference to a Supreme Court case that vastly increased opportunities for spending on elections, brought a complaint over Scott’s arrangement to the Federal Election Commission (FEC), but members of that agency were unable to reach a majority agreement and instead broke along party lines. Commissioners who make controlling decisions at that agency are, under longstanding rules, divided evenly between both major parties.
CREW’s arguments came in the form of a brief filed with the D.C. appeals court handling the latest stage of the dispute. After the FEC effectively rebuffed the complaint from End Citizens United, the organization “then sought to challenge the dismissal in court—as federal law permits—but the District Court refused to even review the FEC’s dismissal,” according to CREW, who said that court hinged its arguments on notions including prosecutorial discretion mentioned by FEC Republicans. Thus came the appeals stage.
CREW also challenged particular cases cited by the district court in rejecting the earlier plea. “CREW urges the D.C. Circuit to recognize the conflict and clarify that courts may not rely on the pair of cases, but are rather bound by earlier and higher precedent that recognizes Congress’s plan that empowers Americans to protect themselves from dark money,” that organization summarized.
Scott has drawn a lot of attention on the Republican side for ideas including his past proposal to force Americans nationwide to pay some income tax, although it’s not as though some aren’t doing so just because they don’t want to participate. He has also pushed the idea of forcing Congress to vote again and again on vast swathes of legislation, which seemed at first to blatantly include programs like Medicare and Social Security, which would make those initiatives needlessly subject to partisan whims in the House and Senate. He’s since insisted his unpopular notion wouldn’t include those programs.
