More on the Millionaire's Amendment
This of course is another black eye for Senators McCain and Feingold who led the fight for the provision tossed by the Court today.
Not mentioned in the Court's opinion is that no one really understood how this provision was supposed to work in many situations.
It was gamed by candidates all the time. Many if not almost all of them (Davis excluded) filled out their candidate declarations saying they would NOT spend more than the millionaire amendment amount, knowing full well they planned to do just that.
Doug Ose, who recently lost to Tom McClintock in California, pulled off the greatest stunt to game the millionaire amendment I've ever seen. He donated over a million bucks to his OLD campaign account, retired its debt, then transferred the cash "left over" to his NEW campaign account. All while claiming he didn't cross the millionaire threshold of $350,000 until weeks later. Nice trick, eh? If the FEC ever figured it out, I'm not sure they would agree with those shenanigans, but now he has nothing to worry about.
Plenty of other candidates didn't file their millionaire amendment forms on time or send them to opposing candidates as required.
The opposing candidates often didn't file their statements indicating whether they were eligible for increased contribution amounts. It drove us nuts at the Club when our members asked if they could donate more or not, as often we could not glean that from publicly available information as the information was not filed properly. And we didn't want to ask the candidates either due to our concerns about the vague coordination regulations, which just got tossed by another court for not being strict enough.
Election "law" is incomprehensible, and we can be thankful the Court just cleared a shrub in a very thick thicket.
