Federal Election Commission (FEC) Chairman Lee Goodman, the College’s 2014 Lefever Fellow, presented “Campaign Finance Regulation and the First Amendment” to students and faculty members at a dinner on Wednesday, Sept. 24 in the Susquehanna Room.
While much of the Virginian attorney’s discussion focused on how the FEC monitors election campaign finances and contributions in general, it also delved into the intricacies of government regulation, negotiation between political parties and media rights.

Pre-Law Program Director Dr. Kyle Kopko, also the director of Elizabethtown’s political philosophy and legal studies major and an assistant professor of political science, introduced Goodman to the crowd and facilitated questions following the lecture. Philip Belder, a sophomore biology major and one of several students who had a lunch discussion with Goodman, inquired about the effects of political action committees (PACs) and super PACs on elections. He asked Goodman’s opinion “on the last election cycle’s political action committees and their impact on the way the election was handled,” as well as whether or not Goodman “foresees changes coming into the next several election cycles related to PACs and super PACs.”
A self-declared advocate of each political side’s right to free speech, Goodman answered with a focus on that particular right. “I think that independent groups are exercising their newly-recognized First Amendment freedoms … independent voices are asserting themselves more actively than we’ve seen in the past, when there were strict limits on who could exercise independent advocacy,” Goodman said.
“PACs and super PACs account for about a billion dollars of spending in the 2012 election cycle out of a total of about 7.3 billion. Most of that spending was fully disclosed and a very small percentage of it was by interest groups that are advocacy groups that were, by law, not required to disclose all their donors, and that accounted for about three to four percent of the total spending in the election.”
Goodman introduced himself as a libertarian who advocates for media rights and less regulation for all political parties’ speech.
“I think that the increasing role of independent speakers can’t be denied,” he said. “Many of us believe that’s a positive development. More speech is good; more perspectives are good. People are empowered by hearing more speech by different viewpoints.”
“However, to some extent, because government has been regulating speech and the amount of speech, the government has been in the role sort of like driving a team of horses,” Goodman said. “As the Supreme Court recognizes greater First Amendment freedoms for some speakers, it’s like letting some horses get out in front of other horses. Holding the harnesses on all those speakers has just been the role that government has assumed out of an objective of preventing corruption in the process.” He continued to use that analogy to illustrate the federal regulation of finances. “The one horse that I’ve been most concerned about in that process has been the political parties,” he said. “In the 1960s and 70s, the political parties were quickly being declared dead by political scientists. They had become somewhat insignificant in the political process. Then in the 1970s came the enactment of the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA), which imposed very strict limits on the financing of political parties, strict limits on the money that they could raise and strict limits on the money they could spend on behalf of their candidates.”
According to Goodman, the FECA had an enormous impact on fundraising strategies. “Parties used to be funded by a handful of wealthy donors, and the limits of the Federal Election Campaign Act forced the parties to adapt and implement new technological ways of raising money … the first most prominent way that they adapted was by going to direct mail,” he said. “More recently, the parties have been supercharged with the Internet, raising money through low-cost Internet communications. It still may not be enough. The parties are still subject to strict limits.”
Goodman also visited several classes, such as Technical Writing and Constitutional Law, on the following day.