“Republishing Romney”

Bauer:

The Campaign Legal Center was pleased that the Federal Election Commission had fined the independent Romney Super PAC for republishing a Romney campaign video, but it was disappointed that the penalty, $50,000, was low.  Still, there wasenforcement, as my colleague Marc Elias pointed out on Twitter.

It is a mixed triumph for the FEC.  The agency got its settlement and collected a fine but also agreed with the Romney Super PAC that the law being applied had been unsettled and that PAC counsel had adopted a reasonable legal position in the absence of a clear rule or established interpretation…

Now the Romney Super PAC accepted the violation and paid the penalty—score one for the Commission–and there is more than enough room to question whether the Super PAC lawyers’ judgment was, in fact, reasonable.  The more important question is what the Commission did with the case.  It expressed disagreement with a legal judgment it chose to characterize as reasonable, on a question its rules and precedents did not clearly answer, and it added little to the understanding of the republication rules.

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