Professor Jed Shugerman wrote an op-ed published in the New York Times on the need for further clarification when it comes to campaign finance laws.
After the president’s cavalier comments, Ellen Weintraub, chairwoman of the F.E.C., tried to bring some clarity to the issue. “Let me make something 100 percent clear to the American public and anyone running for public office,” she said. “It is illegal for any person to solicit, accept, or receive anything of value from a foreign national in connection with a U.S. election.”
The problem is that she didn’t clarify anything. What is “anything of value”? Any meeting with a foreign citizen? Any meeting about an opponent? Or if she was she talking only about opposition research, what counts as that versus protected speech?
No one knows. That’s why it’s urgent that Congress and the F.E.C. clarify the law to deter even more flagrant violations in 2020, while also saving the regulations from their own vagueness. Leaving the statute and regulations ambiguous on foreign meetings invites the Supreme Court to strike them down, as it did with a similarly vague criminal statute this week in U.S. v. Davis.
