Mayoral candidates John Liu and George McDonald may not have much in common: While McDonald is suing to escape the city’s matching-funds program for campaigns, Liu’s team is busy sucking it dry.
But the sinner and the saint have met on the road to City Hall. For both are being hurt by New York’s campaign-finance laws.
This page has no sympathy for Liu, who has filed for $3.4 million from the city’s matching-funds program. He has done so even as the feds have charged that his former 2013 treasurer and a top money-man created networks of fake donors to trigger illegal payments from that very program.
The city’s Campaign Finance Board will be watching the federal trial to help it decide whether Liu gets his matching funds. But it still hasn’t completed its audit of Liu’s 2009 run for comptroller. Which means Liu might not get his answer about matching funds until after the election.
McDonald, by contrast, is a man who has helped the homeless find work and now wants to run for mayor without taking matching taxpayer dollars (and the limits that go with it). But it’s taking so long to get his court case resolved that McDonald now says he’s going to have to take public funds if he wants to keep his campaign alive.
So in a big way, it’s not the voters but the courts and the commissars deciding if Liu and McDonald really have a shot.
It’s a mess created by the intersecting and often senseless laws that run campaign finance and the game of politics. And it’s no surprise and no accident that it so often comes down to the courts to call the shots.
But if unelected judges and the unelected Campaign Finance Board are effectively going to decide who’s a viable candidate, what’s the point of holding elections?