I received several requests to send a letter from the Bush-Cheney website. I'm a definite supporter of the President.
But, I thought, as I'm sure the FEC will think, that pre-formatted emails from the Bush-Cheney website are not persuasive. MoveOn.org has it right.
Erick Erickson
-----Original Message-----
From: Holman@aol.com [mailto:Holman@aol.com]
Sent: Wed 4/14/2004 5:46 PM
To: election-law@majordomo.lls.edu
Cc:
Subject: Section 527 e-mails
Bush-Cheney e-mails set a record at election commission
By ANDREW MOLLISON
Cox News Service
April 14, 2001
WASHINGTON -- Judging from e-mails to the Federal Election Commission, the
Bush-Cheney campaign is taking very seriously this week's two-day hearing on
Republican proposals to limit contributions to tax-exempt non-party groups and
pre-election advocacy by such groups.
The bipartisan commission received more than 140,000 e-mail replies to its
request for pre-hearing comment. Roughly 48 percent arrived through a feature on
the Bush-Cheney Web site, where users could sign and e-mail a pre-written
message directly to the commission, a Cox Newspapers study showed.
The Bush-Cheney campaign maintains that the current rules allow anti-Bush
groups to evade campaign finance laws. Opponents of tighter regulations say that
lawmakers deliberately placed tighter restrictions on federal candidates and
their parties than on independent groups.
Thanks to the Bush-Cheney campaign, e-mails from supporters of tighter
regulations for non-partisan non-profits outnumbered those of opponents 60 percent
to 36 percent. The remaining 4 percent of the e-mails consisted of spam and
virus-infected messages.
Another 60,000 comments were submitted by fax or regular mail. The total of
some 200,000 is "by far the most comments the FEC has ever received" on a
proposed rule, said George Smaragdis, commission spokesman. The previous record was
well below 2,000.
The study covered a scientifically selected random sample of 384 of the
142,121 e-mails posted in the comments section of the commission's Web site. The
margin of error was plus or minus 5 percent.
The Bush-Cheney e-mail urged the commissioners to move quickly to create
stricter regulations for the politically active non-profits that are known as 527
committees because their tax-exempt status is spelled out in Section 527 of
the Internal Revenue Code.
"More than 66,000 of our supporters have sent e-mails to commissioners,
asking that these 527 committees operate in accordance with the same campaign
finance laws everybody else abides by," confirmed Bush-Cheney campaign spokesman
Scott Stanzel.
That was far more than the total of prepared e-mail messages signed and sent
through such opponents of tougher regulation as Defenders of Wildlife, the
Drug Policy Alliance or the AFL-CIO's Working Families Activist Network.
Wes Boyd, a founder of MoveOn.Org, the largest of the anti-Bush 527
committees, said it didn't try to match the Bush-Cheney effort.
"We didn't do the form-letter kind of thing, because we decided it wouldn't
be very persuasive," Boyd said. "We simply asked people who are active in
non-profit groups to submit letters in their own words about how the rules change
could affect them."
In hearings that begin Wednesday, the commission will hear testimony on
whether, in addition to regulating 527 committees, it should limit fund-raising and
pre-election advocacy by unions, charities, congregations, foundations, civic
clubs and other tax-exempt organizations.
The Bush-Cheney e-mail did not comment on that suggestion. Almost every
e-mail that did was strongly opposed to sweeping such groups into the regulatory
net.
"The commissioners should at least read through the comments and see what the
public believes," said Diana Aviv, president and CEO of Independent Sector.
Her Washington-based group leads a coalition of 80 large foundations and
national non-profit groups opposed to applying campaign finance rules to charities.
Andrew Mollison is a Washington correspondent for Cox Newspapers.
Craig Holman, Ph.D.
Public Citizen
215 Pennsylvania Ave., SE
Washington, D.C. 20003
TEL: 202-454-5182
FAX: 202-547-7392
Holman@aol.com