The Federal Election Commission (FEC) is an agency created to administer and enforce the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1975 (FECA), the statute that governs the financing of federal elections in the United States.
The duties of the FEC, which is an independent regulatory agency, are to disclose campaign finance information, to enforce the provisions of the law such as the limits and prohibitions on contributions, and to oversee the public funding of U.S. presidential elections.
The Commission is made up of six members, who are appointed by the President of the United States and confirmed by the United States Senate.
Each member serves a six-year term, and two seats are subject to appointment every two years. By law, no more than three Commissioners can be members of the same political party, and at least four votes are required for any official Commission action. This structure was created to encourage nonpartisan decisions. The Chairmanship of the Commission rotates among the members each year, with no member serving as Chairman more than once during his or her term.(Web,1)
Four years after its inception, the FEC allowed political parties to collect as much as they wanted for generic activities such as voter registration and get-out-the-vote campaigns. What seemed a minor exception at the time created the soft-money monster. These unlimited funds have poured into party coffers, exceeding a half billion dollars in 2002.
The abuse of the system became so blatant that Congress passed the Campaign Reform Act, signed by President Bush in March of 2002, to plug the soft-money spigot. Or so it was assumed.
The six-member FEC, aptly nicknamed the "Failure to Enforce Commission," drew up a series of regulations that diluted the ban on unlimited contributions. The upshot is a spate of "527" political committees that are making a mockery of the law...................
