Election Law Attorneys Submit Rulemaking Comment Letter to the FEC on Behalf of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce 

November 18, 2015

Jan Witold Baran, Caleb P. Burns, and Dwayne D. Sam authored a comment letter to the Federal Election Committee (FEC) on behalf of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, addressing the latest proposal to write new oversight rules for campaign spending by super PACs, tax exempt and other groups acting independently of federal candidates and political parties. Mr. Baran is co-chair of Wiley Rein’s Election Law & Government Ethics Practice, of which Mr. Burns is a partner. Mr. Sam is an associate in the Appellate, Litigation, and Telecom, Media & Technology practices. The public comments that the FEC received were the subject of a November 16 article in Bloomberg BNA’s Money & Politics Report.

The six-member FEC, which includes three Democrat commissioners and three Republican commissioners, has been divided over whether additional regulations are needed to address spending by independent groups following the decision in Citizens United v. FEC by the Supreme Court of the United States.

Wiley Rein’s comment letter, on behalf of the Chamber, was quoted multiple times by Bloomberg BNA’s Money & Politics Report citing Congress’s “repeated rejection” of proposed legislation known as the DISCLOSE Act, a measure that would have enacted many of the legal changes sought by the FEC rulemaking petitions, and that the Citizens United ruling “cannot be read as either an explicit or implicit invitation to fill a statutory gap or otherwise alter the regulatory landscape.”