Charlie Spies in WSJ Opinion: “Campaign finance rules create an incentive for Mr. Biden to stay in the race through the Democratic National Convention in August. At that point, but not before, Mr. Biden would be able to transfer his campaign’s anticipated $100 million war chest to Vice President Kamala Harris, assuming that she, too, is still on the ticket.”
Update: USA Today has more on this issue, discussing the $240 million held by various pro-Biden groups.
Update 2: Adav Noti of Campaign Legal Center responds to Spies:
The WSJ piece seems demonstrably incorrect. It relies on the factual claim that “[i]n August 2023 the Biden for President campaign amended its FEC Form 1 to assert on Line 5 that the committee was the principal campaign committee for both Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris” – an “amendment” that the piece says had no legal significance.
But there was no such amendment: the Biden for President committee has been continuously registered as the principal campaign committee of both Biden and Harris since before the 2020 election. See, e.g., Form 1 filings from January 2021, August 2022, and April 2023. And because Biden for President is already Harris’s principal campaign committee, the piece is legally wrong to characterize the potential transition from a Biden-led ticket to a ticket with Harris and other candidate as an impermissible “transfer” of funds.
For the same reason, the Romney comparison is inapposite — he wasn’t an incumbent with an existing VP, so (unlike Biden) he didn’t have a VP candidate on his campaign committee at this stage of the cycle.
Despite being wrong about the Harris scenario, I do think Mr. Spies is on to something more generally when he writes near the end of the piece that “the Supreme Court’s recent decisions in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless Inc. v. Department of Commerce to dispense with agency deference could mean a quick test of judicial willingness to enforce [FECA].” Unless SCOTUS is going to carve out a separate deference rule just for the FEC, it seems likely that the era of judicial nonreviewability of FEC inaction is over.