Bragg's campaign-finance hook is bogus, too

If the federal campaign-finance laws are instead to be enforced by the more than 3,000 county prosecutors in the country, and interpreted by the courts of all 50 states, none of them steeped in the intricate arcana of campaign-finance regulation, the task of keeping up on what the law is and advising candidates on how to comply with it becomes vastly more difficult and complex, and the whole concept of fair notice of written law collapses — and buries in the rubble of that collapse the very beating heart of democracy, campaigns for public office.

Should that enforcement power be implied wherever the law is silent? Some federal statutes, such as provisions of the commodities laws, explicitly empower state attorneys general to investigate and enforce violations of federal law. Some New York state statutes, such as Executive Law § 63(12), explicitly empower the state attorney general to pursue certain violations of federal law. But nothing in federal or state law explicitly gives every local district attorney in the state the power to pursue prosecutions grounded in the DA’s interpretation of federal campaign-finance law. To the contrary, 52 U.S.C. § 30143 provides that “the provisions of this Act, and of rules prescribed under this Act, supersede and preempt any provision of State law with respect to election to Federal office[.”]