On February 8, the Federal Election Commission voted 6-0 to approve the Green Party’s submission, setting up the Green Party Senate Campaign Committee. The advantage to any political party to having an FEC-recognized Senate Campaign Committee (or a House Committee), is that individual donors can give far more money to such a committee than they can to any particular candidate for Congress.
Until today, no other political party has ever had an FEC-recognized Campaign Committee for either house of congress, except for the Republican and Democratic Parties.
The FEC recognizes 8 national political committees (Democratic, Republican, Constitution, Green, Libertarian, Natural Law, Reform and Socialist). The Libertarian Party has been thinking about setting up FEC-recognized congressional committees for some time, but has not acted on the idea.
Yes, the Libertarian Party should have one– actually, we need one for Senate candidates and one for Congressional; also, the Dems. and Repubs. have their own national Governors associations for fundraising. I closely followed the Federal Election Commission campaign finance reports of a Congressional race last year; the Libertarian candidate did not have access to a national party Congressional Committee. His two major parties’ competitors received hundreds of thousands of dollars in the most critical last few weeks before the General Election.
The Green National Committee has approved a House committee as well, but was waiting for the Senate committee to be approved before elected officers to it.
Actually, the Libertarian Party does have a National Congressional Committee, established a little over a year ago. At the time, because there was no precedent, the FEC staff informally opined that since the Libertarian National Committee was already a national committee recognized by the FEC, no formal FEC action would be required to also recognize the LNCC as a national committee. All that was required was a letter signed by the chair of the LNC.