To do so, the cross-aisle senators introduced bills that would dissolve the FEC and, from its ashes, create the “Federal Election Administration.” A key feature of the most recent proposal: installing a three-member administration panel to prevent deadlocked votes.

But the Senate referred the bills to its Committee on Rules and Administration, where they sat, then died, without a hearing. Feingold is no longer in the Senate; McCain, whose office declined to comment, stopped trying. Little in the way of Congress-initiated FEC reform has surfaced since.

“We’re not anyone’s No. 1 priority,” Weintraub concedes.

Don’t look to Obama for major FEC reforms, either.

The president once regularly railed against the Citizens United decision and decried the influence of big money in the political process, but his recent track record is hardly reformist.

Indeed, Obama became the first president since the FEC’s creation to not successfully appoint someone to the FEC during an entire term. His lone nominee, labor lawyer John Sullivan, withdrew from consideration after the Senate blocked his consideration.

McGahn’s term expired April 30, 2009. The White House could have nominated his replacement at any point during the next four-plus years. It chose not to, and McGahn kept working against campaign reformers’ most every demand.

By 2012, Obama had given his blessing to supportive super PACs. In 2013, he blessed formation of Organizing for Action, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit political lobbying group that reveals limited information about its donors. These actions, campaign reformers say, eviscerated any hope they had that the president would push back against election deregulation in a meaningful way.

White House spokesman Eric Schulz declined comment.

Thin Reeds of Hope

But hope persists, even at the FEC.

Upon their nominations for the FEC on June 21, Weintraub sent Goodman and Ravel effusive email messages—the McGahn era appeared to be nearing an end.

“Allow me to be among the first to welcome you to the FEC!” she wrote Goodman, who with Ravel, would ultimately take his oath in October after a relatively uneventful confirmation process.” She told Ravel that “I'm so looking forward to working with you. ”

For Goodman and Ravel, their time is now. Come this winter, the FEC will likely elect Republican Goodman as its chairman and Democrat Ravel its vice chairman, since all other current commissioners have had their turn in the rotating leadership positions. It’ll be their agency to direct.

“I am an eternal optimist, and if I wasn’t, I wouldn’t be here,” said Ravel, who in October as chairman of California’s Fair Political Practices Commission oversaw the outing of numerous donors to nonprofit organizations that sought to influence a ballot initiative vote.

Ravel will continue fighting for expanded political disclosure at the federal level, saying, “It is the essential purpose of the FEC.”