The good folks at the Brennan Center For Justice work long hours trying to recapture some sort of equilibrium in the way we run our elections. This, of course, has become harder since a) Anthony Kennedy opened the floorgates; b) John Roberts declared the Day of Jubilee, and c) the president* decided that worrying about foreign ratfcking is not his bag, man. Nevertheless, the Brennan folks are out with a new report examining in detail how toothless and useless the Federal Election Commission has become and how, possibly, perhaps in another universe, the Congress could make it less so.

In the past decade, the legal and technological landscape surrounding U.S. campaigns and elections has changed radically. Politically, one major catalyst for changes was the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United, which permitted corporations to spend unlimited money on elections and led to the rise of super PACs. Since Citizens United, the financing of U.S. elections—and thus political power—has shifted to a small group of wealthy mega-donors, who make multimillion-dollar contributions to groups with close ties to candidates and parties. And technologically, the rapid growth of social media platforms has changed how politicians and others try to influence voters.

But as demonstrated in Fixing the FEC, the agency has essentially done nothing to update its rules in response to either the legal or technological changes of recent years. For example, the Citizens United ruling facilitated the rise of super PACs and unleashed a massive wave of new outside election spending. But the FEC hasn’t updated its rules to even include the term “super PAC,” much less taken into account all the ways super PACs, which are supposed to be independent, actually collaborate with candidates and parties. Another FEC rulemaking standstill involves a routine proceeding, currently stalled, to update disclaimer rules for the types of ads used by Russia to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.

The FEC logo could possibly use an update as well. Congressional Quarterly AP

Additionally, the agency has failed to deal with the problem of dark money, which Citizens United created when it allowed so many new groups to spend money on campaigns. Too many of these groups are not required to disclose the identities of their donors, allowing them to spend money on elections while hiding where their money comes from. The lack of effective disclosure rules has allowed more than $1 billion of secret money to pour into U.S. federal elections since 2010, including money from foreign actors.

The Center's proposed solutions are eminently sensible, eminently doable, and probably eminently beyond the reach of this deeply screwed up political moment. Many of them are derived from H.R. 1, the good-government bill that was the first order of business for the new Democratic House majority. Others seek to make the FEC more of an actual regulatory body with actual enforcement power and not a body as vulnerable to political gridlock as it is now.

· Creating an independent enforcement bureau within the Commission, whose director would be selected by a bipartisan majority of commissioners and have authority to initiate investigations and issue subpoenas (subject to override by a majority of commissioners);

· Providing an effective legal remedy for both complainants and alleged violators to obtain legal clarity if the Commission fails to act on an enforcement complaint within one year;

· Limiting the Commission’s use of prosecutorial discretion to avoid pursuing serious violations;

· Restoring the Commission’s authority to conduct random audits of political committees;

· Reinforcing the Commission’s system of “traffic ticket” administrative fines for reporting violations by making it permanent and requiring the Commission to expand the program to cover all reports; and

· Increasing the Commission’s budget to allow it to hire additional qualified staff to ensure timely, effective resolution of enforcement matters.

None of this is either complicated nor unconstitutional. It requires an act of political will and a commitment to clean and fair elections on the part of a group of people, some of whose continued employment depends on elections being neither one. Lord, this is a long road back.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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