Bill de Blasio’s got the broad narrative right: We’ve got two New Yorks today, with a fat and privileged overclass lording it over everyone else.
What de Blasio won’t tell you is that the class profiting at everyone else’s expense is the city’s public sector. Because the campaign-finance laws privilege this class, their chosen candidates start out any race far ahead. But de Blasio won’t tell you any of this because if he’s elected mayor, this is the New York he’ll be working for.
The good news is there’s an opportunity to take on this spoils system and ensure more competitive and democratic elections. It all hangs on Manhattan federal Judge Paul Crotty.
On Tuesday, the judge held hearings on a political action committee’s request for an injunction against a state law that limits individual contributions to a PAC to $150,000. He could render his opinion any moment.
The suit was brought by New York Progress for Protection PAC, which wants to help promote Republican Joe Lhota. The PAC says it has people willing to donate. But the $150,000 state limit on individual contributions to a PAC effectively means that while public-sector unions are free to spend millions promoting de Blasio, those who would challenge him are not.
New York Progress and Protection is absolutely right that the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United makes restrictions like New York’s unconstitutional. But as strong as the constitutional case is, the case for fairness is even more compelling.
For though Democrats like to warn about a coming “flood” of corporate money, New York’s election system is already drowning in public-sector-union dollars.
In this election cycle alone, of the total $13.5 million in independent expenditures, the United Federation of Teachers has spent $3.4 million. Toss in other unions representing correction officers, municipal workers, janitorial staff in public buildings, hospital workers in nonprofits dependent on Medicaid and so on, and it adds up to a third of the total.
And as Daniel DiSalvo of the Manhattan Institute points out, all this money is all going in one direction: to the party of more government.
What makes this cash different from the spending of any other group is the conflict of interest at the heart of it. Workers in government unions are supposed to work for the politicians who are elected. But when their money and manpower dominate primaries and election cycles, the reality is reversed: The politicians end up working for the public-sector unions who got them into office.
That’s important because mayors, comptrollers and city councilmen are supposed to represent taxpayers in negotiations. But when politicians owe the public unions that put them in office, they tend to give the unions what they want: higher pay, plush pensions and more benefits. These same pols will then raise taxes on everyone else to pay for it.
And the sheer size of these public-union campaign operations — their election spending, their get-out-the-vote efforts, their phone banks, their messaging — is all but impossible to stand up to.
That’s what makes the case before Judge Crotty so compelling. It’s not about Lhota or even Republicans in particular. It’s about opening up a system whose unconstitutional limits on speech ensure that a candidate who believes that, say, our public pension system needs to be reformed, doesn’t have to start out any race 80 yards behind his public-sector-backed opponent.
The history of the past quarter-century suggests that Democrats’ 6-to-1 advantage over Republicans in voter registration is more complicated than it looks. In 1993 New Yorkers put Rudy into office because people were afraid of crime. Eight years later, they went for Bloomberg, partly because voters feared Democrat Mark Green was too liberal in the wake of 9/11 and partly because Bloomberg had enough money to make himself heard.
In short, we do have a tale of two New Yorks, with people who are supposed to be this city’s public servants increasingly its lords and masters. Let’s hope Judge Crotty uses the chance he has been given to uphold the First Amendment — and to ensure that a New York candidate doesn’t have to be a billionaire to challenge the city’s unholiest alliance.
William McGurn is The Post’s editorial-page editor.