...“Given that over 80 percent of New Yorkers think that state government is corrupt and they want Moreland to continue — even if they haven’t heard of the Moreland Commission, they want it to continue because they’re so desperate to see change — it puts some real pressure on the commission to have a strong report, which the commission sounds headed toward anyway.” I asked Scharff what gave her that last impression. “I think the past week or so of comments from the commissioners … show that they want to do a thorough investigation, and that they want to come up with a set of recommendations by the Dec. 1 deadline,” she said. ” … It seems like they’re very much aware and concerned about the idea that it’s what’s legal that’s the problem.” Scharff said that while beefing up election enforcement, doing away with loosely regulated housekeeping accounts and closing the “LLC loophole” would fall into that category, she believes that if the preliminary report doesn’t advocate for a taxpayer-funded campaign financing system, the panel would be “a failure” in terms of achieving broad reforms. “You can change all the rules you want about how much people give, but as we’ve seen with the independent expenditures, money find its way — unless candidates have an alternative,” she said. It is, of course, highly unlikely that such a system would be allowed on the floor of the state Senate by Republicans, who are categorically opposed to it. Gov. Andrew Cuomo proposed the creation of an opt-in public matching system late in the spring, but that item and the rest of his ethics package got the cold shoulder — thus the creation of the Moreland panel...
Posted on: Tue, 22 Oct 2013 14:25:03 +0000
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