The Federal Election Commission today kicks off two days of public hearings to hash out long-awaited advertising coordination rules for political committees.

[IMGCAP(1)]Since passage of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, the FEC has struggled to write rules that would fully implement every aspect of the 8-year-old law. To date, former Reps. Marty Meehan (D-Mass.) and Christopher Shays (R-Conn.), who sponsored BCRA, have sued the agency three times over its proposed regulations. A federal appeals court nearly two years ago threw out the agency’s latest attempt to issue BCRA-related guidelines, a process FEC commissioners will continue anew today.

Scheduled to testify today are Wiley Rein’s Jan Baran, the National Republican Congressional Committee’s Jessica Furst, Public Citizen lobbyist Craig Holman, Bill McGinley of Patton Boggs, the National Republican Senatorial Committee’s Sean Cairncross and Mike Trister of the Alliance for Justice.

The marathon session continues on Wednesday, when Democratic National Committee lawyer Marc Elias is expected to appear, followed by the AFL-CIO’s Laurence Gold, Steve Hoersting of the Center for Competitive Politics and the Campaign Legal Center’s Paul Ryan.