In its first meeting since the Governor’s Regulator Review Council ordered it to repeal a handful of rules, including one that could force disclosure from some dark money groups, the Citizens Clean Elections commission responded with silence.

After spending an hour in executive session to discuss the matter with legal counsel, the commission decided to take no action regarding GRRC’s February 2 vote that Clean Elections must scrap three rules it’s passed since 2013 regulating political committees. GRRC addressed the issue at the request of Secretary of State Michele Reagan, who has spent much of the past year feuding with Clean Elections over the extent of its authority.

Clean Elections insisted at the time of the vote that GRRC lacks the authority to force it to repeal any of its rules. Tom Collins, the commission’s executive director, said the commission saw no need to take any action, and that it will revisit the issue at its next meeting in March.

“The status quo is that the commission believes that its rules and its statute remain in force, and there’s no change in that respect,” Collins said. “There’s no action to take at this point. We will probably have this on the agenda again in a month, I suspect, just because we don’t know what other circumstances might arise. But certainly today there is nothing to say other than what we said last month, which we’ll continue to reiterate, which is that the commission’s rulemaking authority is not subject to the Governor’s Regulatory Review Council’s authority.”

The ball is now in GRRC’s court. The council has a study session scheduled for February 23, but Clean Elections is not on the agenda. The council has not yet announced the date or released the agenda for its next regular meeting. GRRC declined to comment on the commission’s decision.

The commission’s decision, or lack thereof, did not sit well with Eric Spencer, Reagan’s elections director. If the commission believes GRRC lacks authority to repeal its rules, Spencer said the onus is on Clean Elections to comply with the council’s order and then go to court to dispute the matter.

“They’ve been ordered by the agency to repeal the regulations, and this is a form of legislative civil disobedience to not comply with the order. If they’re not going to comply with the order, then they’re at least obligated to go into court and seek a declaratory judgment and let the court decide this,” Spencer said. “But to simply ignore the order and do nothing is not what we do in a system that’s undergirded by the rule of law.”

The contested rules involve the commission’s authority over privately funded candidates and independent expenditure groups. The most recent and contentious of the three regulations, which the commission approved in 2015, seeks to clarify the statutory definition of “political committee,” and could force some “dark money” groups to register with election officials and disclose the sources of their anonymous funding.

A 2015 law approved by the Legislature states that a group qualifies as a political committee if it raises or spends more than $500 to influence an election and has the primary purpose of electioneering. Under Clean Elections, a group is considered to have met the “primary purpose” requirement of if more than 50 percent of its expenditures are used to influence elections.

Collins emphasized that those rules are still in effect.

“I think the most important thing, frankly, for candidates and folks who are spending money in candidate elections at the state level to understand is that right now, if they choose to ignore the Clean Elections Act and the Clean Elections Commission’s rules, they’re doing that at their own risk,” he said.