Ann Ravel, one of the three Democratic appointees on the deeply divided Federal Election Commission, announced Sunday that she will leave her post on March 1, setting up one of the first tests of how President Donald Trump will approach campaign-finance regulation.
Ravel said in an interview that she would send Trump her letter of resignation this week. She pointed to a series of deadlocked votes between the panel's three Democrats and three Republicans that she said left her little hope that the group would ever be able to rein in campaign-finance abuses.
"The ability of the commission to perform its role has deteriorated significantly," said Ravel, who has sparred bitterly with the Republican election commissioners during her three years on the panel. She added, "I think I can be more effective on the outside."
The departure of Ravel, whose term was set to expire later this spring, puts the three Republican commissioners in the majority until her replacement is selected and confirmed by the U.S. Senate. But since federal law requires at least four votes on the six-member commission to take official action, there is little the Federal Election Commission can accomplish until Trump names her successor.
[PRESIDENT TRUMP: Timeline, appointments, executive orders + guide to actions in first 100 days]
"They can't do anything significant with a 3-2 vote," said campaign-finance lawyer Daniel Petalas, who served as the commission's acting general counsel and head of enforcement.
"I have thought for some time that my presence on the commission was not achieving what I would like to do internally," Ravel said. "I recognized that raising the problems at the commission -- after a certain point, they stopped to resonate, if you keep saying the same things all the time."
"I felt I could do more on the outside rather than at the commission," added Ravel, a former California campaign-finance regulator who plans to teach at the University of California at Berkeley's School of Law. Her resignation was first reported by The New York Times.
As a parting shot, Ravel plans to release an analysis her office has prepared on what she says is the worsening gridlock at the commission. The title sums up her feelings: "Dysfunction and Deadlock: The Enforcement Crisis at the Federal Election Commission Reveals the Unlikelihood of Draining the Swamp."
By her analysis, the rate of deadlocked votes blocking "substantive" enforcement actions against possible campaign violations has reached a new high of 37.5 percent. And, in such cases, she said, financial penalties against campaigns have dropped significantly over the last decade.
Trump made a denunciation of big donors a centerpiece of his presidential bid, lambasting the role of super super political action committees and promising to "drain the swamp."
As with many issues at the election commission, Ravel and her Republican counterparts are sharply at odds over the panel's performance. Lee Goodman, a Republican commissioner, called her analysis "nonsensical and arbitrary," saying that deadlocked votes were far more unusual.
Ravel has continued to push "the tired meme of dysfunction" simply to make her political case, he said. His own data, he added, indicates that campaigns are complying with finance laws far more than before.
Goodman suggested that "contrary to the spin" from Democrats, "the situation has indeed changed, but for the better."
His rhetoric was at odds with that of many congressional GOP leaders and conservatives, who have sought to roll back limits on political contributions. One of the biggest advocates for deregulating campaign finance is former election commissioner Donald McGahn -- now Trump's White House counsel.
Among the measures that McGahn pushed at the agency was an effort to bar Federal Election Commission staff members from sharing information with federal prosecutors unless the panel first gave its approval.
By tradition, the selection of Ravel's replacement would go to the Senate Democratic leadership, but it is unclear whether the Trump administration will follow that practice. The president cannot select a Republican to fill the post, because federal law bars the commission from having more than three registered members of either party seated on the panel. But he could appoint an independent to the seat.
Ravel said she is hopeful that Trump will tap someone in line with the concerns he expressed on the campaign trail, adding that she believes the deepening concentration of political money is warping the political system.
"It adds to the polarization and nastiness and unwillingness to compromise that we see both at the commission and in Congress," she said.
Information for this article was contributed by Matea Gold of The Washington Post and by Eric Lichtblau of The Associated Press.
A Section on 02/20/2017