Now we’ve done it. When Holly opened up her can of Obama® brand worms yesterday, she invited our readers of the left-leaning persuasion (of which, I must admit, my wife is one…) to “help us keep Deceiver nonpartisan” and let us know if John McCain does anything hypocritical. Since the topic du jour was campaign finance, we got quite a few reminders that McCain himself had once pledged, like Obama, to accept taxpayer-subsidized campaign “matching funds” in exchange for limiting the amount of “private” money he would raise and spend in pursuit of the White House.

Fair-minded guy that I am, I decided to look into it. And what I found reminded me of something that should be obvious to everyone by now: Nobody in Washington, DC really deserves to wear the white hats, at least not consistently.

This post is a bit long, and yes, it’s a civics lesson. But you’re gonna love it.

John McCain’s Republican primary campaign was eligible for the matching funds pretty early in the process. Last August, in fact. As National Public Radio tells it: “The Federal Election Commission approved the application, but McCain never cashed in his certificates.” In February, McCain told the Commission that he had no plans to take any taxpayer dollars. In other words, he opted out. (Just like Howard Dean did in 2004, incidentally…)

This is where it gets interesting. It turns out that you can’t just notify the FEC of your intention to “withdraw” from the public system of election financing. They have to rubber-stamp your request in order to make it official. But in February, when McCain sent his official notice, the FEC was powerless to ink its rubber stamp.

Why? Because it lacked enough Commissioners to form a “quorum.” There were so many vacancies on the Commission that it was literally impotent. That didn’t change when the Democratic National Committee filed a formal complaint against McCain in February, or when the DNC sued in Federal court in April, or when a judge dismissed the case in May. Without a quorum,  the Federal Election Commission simply couldn’t make a ruling on whether or not to let John McCain “opt out.” And that will probably still be the case next week, when the DNC says it will sue again.

So why, you may ask, does the FEC lack enough Commissioners to do anything useful? Good question.

Last year, President “W” nominated four new Commissioners to fill the vacancies. (There are only six seats, folks, and four are empty.) By law, half of the Commissioners have to be Democrats, and half Republicans. So he nominated two of each. Traditionally, the U.S. Senate has voted to confirm these nominations as a group — all at once — because it would be messy to guarantee the required 50-50 balance if anyone objected to just one of the nominations.

Except this time, two Senators decided to place a “hold” on just one nominee, effectively stalling the whole process indefinitely.

Guess who one of those Senators was?

Depending on whom you ask, the nominee in question was either a redistricting strategist bent on denying voting rights to minorities or a soft-spoken lawyer with strong feelings about prohibiting felons (regardless of their race), and people with no identification, from voting. Regardless, if John McCain looks like a campaign-finance hypocrite now, it may be because Barack Obama wanted to build his civil-rights street cred a year ago.

Here’s a good summary of the Obama maneuver from Politico.

We’re still eager to hear about how John McCain is a hypocrite. Just make it stick this time, m’kay?