Not Ted Cruz
U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz’s campaign manager filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission Thursday, accusing U.S. Rep. Colin Allred’s campaign of illegally coordinating on television ads with the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.
Cruz’s campaign cited a series of ads running in Texas paid for by the DSCC and Allred’s campaign they claim cost $10.6 million, exceeding the $2.8 million cap on coordinated expenditures between a candidate and their party. Campaigns and national committees like the DSCC can spend in excess of that amount on so-called “hybrid ads” that include generic party messaging, but Cruz’s campaign is claiming the four ads in question do not qualify under FEC rules.
“Colin Allred’s campaign is illegally coordinating with Chuck Schumer and the DSCC. We are calling on the FEC to immediately investigate and put a stop to this flagrant violation of federal law,” Cruz’s campaign said in a statement.
Allred’s campaign referred questions to the DSCC, which said the ads followed existing FEC guidance on what is and is not allowed in hybrid ads.
“The DSCC is running the same kind of advertisements that the (National Republican Senatorial Committee), the Republican National Committee and Republican members of the FEC all argued are legal — and that are being run by Republican Senate campaigns across the country,” a DSCC spokesperson said.
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Earlier this year Democrats challenged the NRSC’s practice of running ads for individual candidates that looked like fundraising appeals, allowing them to get cheaper ad rates and save millions of dollars on advertising. The FEC deadlocked 3-3 along party lines, and the practice has been allowed to continue, opening the door for both parties to run the type of “hybrid” ads in question, the DSCC is arguing.
However, Cruz’s campaign is claiming the ads do not devote equal time to “generic” candidates and issues, and Cruz and Allred themselves. Under FEC rules, hybrid ads are required to be “equally divided” between the two, they say.
In their complaint, Cruz’s campaign counted the number of seconds devoted to Cruz and Allred versus the amount given over to generic campaign issues like abortion. In one instance they write, “the ad features 14 seconds of ‘generic’ content and 13 seconds addressing ‘clearly identified federal candidate[s]’.”
This is hilarious to me for three reasons. One is that “14 seconds of ‘generic’ content versus only 13 seconds of ‘clearly identified federal candidate[s]'”. Like, how do you even measure that, what counts as “generic”, and how is that not sufficiently “equal” by any reasonable definition? Two, you may recall that there have been three complaints filed against Cruz for his podcast-related activities, one back in April with the FEC and the others with the Senate Ethics Committee (one in April and one in July), with no action taken on any of them. I don’t know what his expectations are, but I would advise him to keep them modest. And three, the FEC has been a morass for decades now thanks in part to the Republican appointees’ unwillingness to do anything and in part to the fact that the FEC has limited authority to begin with. If the self-proclaimed hugely bipartisan US Senator Ted Cruz thinks that our campaign finance laws and the enforcement mechanisms we have for them are inadequate, well, he is better positioned than the rest of us to Do Something about it. Please do let me know when he does. The Trib has more.