The Federal Election Commission said yesterday that it will appeal a federal judge's decision to strike down more than a dozen of the government's current rules on political fundraising.
In a statement, however, the commission said it had not decided whether to ask the U.S. Court of Appeals to review all or some of the rules sent back to the agency by U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly.
Last week, Kollar-Kotelly ordered the FEC to write new rules to govern key aspects of fundraising, including when candidates and outside parties can coordinate activities.
Kollar-Kotelly ruled that some of the regulations the FEC devised after passage of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act in 2002 would "create an immense loophole" and allow for abuses that lawmakers who wrote the law never intended.
Besides requesting new rules governing coordination between candidates and outside parties, she also ordered the FEC to say how far the law goes in banning corporate, union and unlimited "soft money" donations. The judge also ordered the commission to take a step it had resisted: regulating at least some political activity conducted over the Internet.
