The already minimalist regulation of federal campaign money can resume, after it was suspended for almost the entirety of the 2020 campaign, because three new members of the Federal Election Commission were confirmed Wednesday.
The Senate voted 92-4 to make Shana Broussard, a veteran FEC attorney, the first Black commissioner since the agency was created almost half a century ago. A Democrat, she was tapped because federal law requires the commission to have partisan balance. The results fell along party lines for the Republicans put forward by President Trump: 49-47 for conservative think tank attorney Allen Dickerson and 50-46 for senior Senate aide Sean Cooksey.
The confirmations will allow the FEC to get back to work just in time for the start of the 2022 midterm campaign — but too late to have any meaningful role in by far the most expensive cycle ever. The cash poured into presidential and congressional races doubled from four years ago, to $14 billion.
A steady flow of court decisions in favor of campaign finance deregulation, most notably the Citizens United case allowing unlimited corporate spending, have combined with almost uninterrupted partisan deadlock at the FEC to produce only minimal crackdowns on political money in the past decade.
But the FEC was not able to conduct even the most routine business during the last campaign because it has lacked a quorum for all but one of the past 16 months.
The three new members will mean all six seats are occupied for the first time in nearly four years.
It takes four commissioners to consider complaints about misconduct by candidates or groups that seek to influence elections, alter the rules at the margins or even conduct public hearings. The absence of that quorum has allowed 446 cases to gather dust on the enforcement docket -- with three fifths of those stuck at the point in the process when the commissioners could review them.
In 113 of those, the staff suspects campaign finance laws were broken, according to Commissioner Ellen Weintraub.
"The real mark of our progress will be not how many less-significant matters we dismiss, but how many quite significant matters we address," she said.
The backlog started to build in September 2019, when one commissioner resigned and left just three behind. Trump was able to get Texas campaign attorney Trey Trainor confirmed this spring after a three-year delay — but just a month later another resignation dropped the roster to three again.
Trump quickly nominated Dickerson, the top attorney at the Institute for Free Speech, which advocates for almost total deregulation of money in politics as part of its agenda to promote unfettered First Amendment rights. A week from the election, Trump announced his two other picks: Cooksey, general counsel to GOP Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri and before that an aide to GOP Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, and Broussard, who has been a senior FEC attorney for 12 years and before that was an IRS lawyer and New Orleans prosecutor.
By law, Trump could only nominate three people from his own party, making Broussard his sole Democratic pick. Senate Democrats have been promoting her nomination for more than a year, and career employees this summer pressed the president to nominate a person of color.
Wednesday's confirmations bring to 32 the number of commissioners since the FEC was created in 1975 in response to the campaign finance abuses of Watergate. All before Broussard have been white except Ann Ravel, a Latina who departed to run unsuccessfully for state Senate in California this year.
Democrat Weintraub has been a commissioner for 18 years and Steven Walther, an independent who mainly sides with her, for 12 years. Commissioners are supposed to serve six-year terms, but can stay on longer if no replacement arrives. So once he becomes president, Joe Biden may make two FEC nominations of his own.
Even with all six seats filled, the FEC is unlikely to be much more functional than it was without a quorum. In the past, three-to-three deadlocks have sidelined an array of proposals for controlling the ocean of cash surging through American politics.
Good-government groups worry this will continue to be an issue at the agency.
"The FEC's jurisdiction is candidates for federal office," noted Meredith McGehee of Issue One, which advocates for stricter campaign finance rules. (It owns but is journalistically independent from The Fulcrum.) "The FEC has frequently shown itself to be a prime example of a 'captured agency' that is more interested in pleasing politicians and the lawyers who appear before it than in protecting the public interest."
Tiffany Muller, president of End Citizens United and Let America Vote Action Fund, two democracy reform advocacy organizations that merged in January, lambasted the newly confirmed Republicans as commissioners "who will stonewall any action to uphold our campaign finance laws and hold violators accountable."
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.