rules against coordination between super pacs and candidates tough to enforce

[xchrom]

http://www.nationofchange.org/rules-against-coordination-between-super-pacs-candidates-tough-enforce-1326554894

Pres­i­den­tial front-run­ner Mitt Rom­ney knows that he can’t talk to the peo­ple who run the no­to­ri­ous “super PAC” that may have won the Iowa cau­cuses for him.

“It's il­le­gal, as you prob­a­bly know. I'm not al­lowed to com­mu­ni­cate with a super PAC in any way, shape or form,” he said in De­cem­ber on MSNBC’s Morn­ing Joe show. “My good­ness, if we co­or­di­nate in any way what­so­ever, we go to the Big House.”

Well, prob­a­bly not. Crim­i­nal pros­e­cu­tion is the­o­ret­i­cally pos­si­ble, but highly un­likely — and even civil sanc­tions are rare, ac­cord­ing to a re­view of Fed­eral Elec­tion Com­mis­sion ac­tions.

Since 1999, the FEC has con­ducted a total of three in­ves­ti­ga­tions into al­leged co­or­di­na­tion be­tween a can­di­date com­mit­tee and an in­di­vid­ual or or­ga­ni­za­tion mak­ing “in­de­pen­dent ex­pen­di­tures.” Two of those probes re­sulted in fines to­tal­ing $26,000, ac­cord­ing to a Cen­ter for Pub­lic In­tegrity in­ves­ti­ga­tion.




*** pardon my cynicism *** rules and laws for a certain set of people always seem to hard to enforce -- why is that?