Mark Everson, a former chief of the IRS who is making a long shot bid for the GOP’s presidential nomination, said he is filing a complaint with the Federal Election Commission on Monday challenging the method Fox News is using to pick the candidates on stage for Thursday’s first primary debates.
Mr. Everson, who ran the IRS under President George W. Bush and who was a high-ranking immigration official overseeing the 1986 amnesty in the Reagan administration, declared his campaign in March, as reported first by The Washington Times.
He has not appeared to have gained significant traction, but he is listed among the 18 candidates on the Republican National Committee’s website straw poll.
Fox News has one debate and one forum scheduled for Thursday. The prime time debate, limited to the top 10 candidates, will be decided by who’s polling the best. The forum, which will run earlier in the day and is open to others who don’t make the top stage, is open to those who are regularly included in pollsters’ lists — a concession to allow those who don’t score even 1 percent of the vote to make it.
Mr. Everson said it’s the fourth set of rules Fox has announced, and he said they are acting arbitrarily and using “inexcusably exclusionary tactics.”
“Fox News has missed the boat,” he said.
His complaint to the FEC argues that Fox is giving unfair candidate promotion by changing its criteria to allow other poor-showing candidates entry into the forum, but still keeping him off the stage.
Mr. Everson said in scrapping the 1 percent threshold for the forum, Fox is admitting that polls are irrelevant, but yet is still relying on the list of names pollsters are asking.
“Our position is that there are 18 candidates,” he told The Times.
Michael Clemente, executive vice president of Fox News, said they’ve always had set rules for the debate.
“All candidates who meet our criteria and are included in the five most recent national polls will be eligible for the debates,” Mr. Clemente said in a statement.
There are more than 100 candidates registered with the FEC as Republicans, though most of those have little government experience and are considered to have little bearing on next year’s election.
Using polls to determine who gets on stage is standard practice, and Fox and other networks used them as part of selection criteria in determining debate participation in 2012.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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