In case you missed it, Eric Schneiderman just sided with the billionaires and the vested interests against the Constitution and competitive elections. The attorney general did so by persuading a judge to delay until Oct. 8 a hearing on a lawsuit that has a bearing on this year’s city elections.
The lawsuit is from The New York Progress and Protection PAC, and it challenges a state law limiting individual contributions to PACs to $150,000 a year. The point is that in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, New York’s restriction is blatantly unconstitutional. So with Election Day barely a month away, Progress and Protection requested an expedited hearing for next Wednesday.
Enter Schneiderman. He proposed pushing the hearing off another week, to the following Wednesday, Oct. 9. In the end, the judge gave Schneiderman most of what he wanted by setting the hearing for Oct. 8. Which makes it likelier we may not have a decision until after the election.
Advocates of campaign-finance restrictions say they are keeping campaigns clean. But what they are really doing is tilting the playing field in favor of those who are very rich or allied with powerful vested interests. There’s no limit, for example, on what billionaires like Mike Bloomberg can spend from their own pockets — and those in the pocket of the unions won’t have any money worries either. This limits candidates in a position to challenge the status quo.
Some suggest that this law shouldn’t be decided in the middle of a campaign, especially because it is likely to help Republican Joe Lhota. But if Lhota is suffering and de Blasio is gaining because of a law or practice that is unconstitutional, it should be discontinued pronto. Wasn’t this the same logic Judge Shira Scheindlin used to reject the city’s request for a stay of the ruling that found stop-and-frisk unconstitutional?
Free and competitive elections are just as vital for New York. Time for this unconstitutional limit on speech to go — now.