In every New York City municipal election since 1989, the city Campaign Finance Board tries to protect its rules and a level playing field that the public wants, often actions that candidates and their campaigns don’t like. To us, that means it’s working in seeking to regulate money in politics.
Since the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that campaign spending is a type of speech and speech can’t be controlled by the government (Buckley vs. Valeo in 1976), the CFB and other programs around the county are voluntary. Candidates agree to a spending cap and in exchange are granted public matching funds.
And every mayor (with one billion-dollar exception) since it began has had problems with the CFB. Again, that shows us that the CFB is unafraid to go up against the most powerful figure in the city.
The board fined incumbent Mayor Ed Koch and his challenger (and successor) Mayor David Dinkins for the 1989 campaign, during the first outing of the new system. On the board then was a top-notch New York City lawyer named Sonia Sotomayor, who later we understand got a job as a judge.
The CFB would later fine Mayor Rudy Giuliani during his 1997 reelection. Mayor Bill de Blasio was fined by the board. And the current incumbent, Mayor Adams, has had his request for matching funds denied.
The missing mayor in the list is Mike Bloomberg. Unlike all the rest, Bloomberg did not join the program. But also unlike all the rest, Bloomberg did not raise any money from contributors. If someone sent him a donation, his campaign sent it right back and he ran three times, winning each time.
There was no issue of anyone trying to buy influence with Bloomberg, who had only a single contributor during his three campaigns: Mike Bloomberg. He was an outlier, but having billions does that.
Beside locking out Adams, the CFB is also for now withholding a portion of matching funds from mayoral frontrunner Andrew Cuomo. That is because of another U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission in 2010, freeing up campaign spending by outside groups.
There is an outside group of Cuomo backers, called a super PAC (political action committee), where his big money supporters are writing big checks, far above the CFB limit of $2,100. That is allowed under Citizens United and they can spend that war chest to promote Cuomo or attack his rivals. But the super PAC, called Fix the City, can’t coordinate with Cuomo’s campaign.
The CFB says that “preliminary results of our investigation” of a Fix the City TV ad costing $622,056 mirrors language issued by Cuomo’s campaign. So the board is withholding $622,056 in public match funds to Cuomo, while granting him $1,509,185. Cuomo’s campaign disagrees and the board says its “investigation into this matter is ongoing.”
We urged Cuomo to join the program, and to his credit, he did and he is now having to jump through all the hoops as past mayors and his current rivals. As the long record shows, getting into squabbles with the CFB doesn’t mean that you are going to win or going to lose, only that the CFB is a proper stickler for the rules and applies the standards fairly no matter who is running.
