A group of left-wing activists and liberal politicians wants to stop the tsunami of corruption in New York. Their plan? Drying out greedy pols . . . by showering them with public dollars.
Sounds crazy, but these “reformers” want to push the city’s taxpayer-financed matching-funds program statewide. In theory, this would blunt the power of money in politics.
But gasoline doesn’t put out fires, guys.
The arrest this week of City Councilman Dan Halloran should have made that clear. The feds say Halloran took $6,500 in illegal donations to trick New York’s 6-to-1 matching-funds program into chipping in thousands of taxpayer dollars for his campaign. An aide and an associate to City Comptroller John Liu are on trial for a similar scheme.
The lesson: Letting unscrupulous people tap into another reservoir of public money won’t fix what ails New York. In fact, that’s precisely what’s wrong with New York.
Attorney General Eric Schneiderman backs the changes anyway. Even so, we suspect he’ll be quiet for a while — for he took more than $100,000 from the same fishy donors who were backing Halloran.
Schneiderman says he’ll give that money to charity, but it doesn’t wash his hands of this affair. He took advantage of the system to raise nearly $3 million for himself under Albany’s currently high donation limits — and now wants to cap donations before political challengers can raise as much.
The AG says he wants “justice.”
But he plainly wanted the money first.
Real reform would start with axing matching funds altogether, so pols such as Halloran can’t abuse them.
And it would mean fixing broken laws so that pols like state Sen. Malcolm Smith, also arrested this week for an alleged plot to buy a spot in the GOP mayoral primary, can’t use their campaign kitties as a license for luxe. In addition to his bribe scheme, Smith used $100,000 in campaign money last year to cover trips to China, meals at Le Cirque, car payments and liquor-store bills.
If the pols stopped subsidizing these abuses with matching funds from taxpayers, politicians wouldn’t feel quite so rich. Thieves wouldn’t enter politics as often. And New York might not need superheroes to save the day.