[EL] “Supreme Court Asked to Eye New York’s ‘Pay-to-Play’ Limits on Campaign Money”

[Joe La Rue]

Some of the Listserve members might be interested in Jim Bopp's press
release concerning the cert petition he just filed in the U.S. Supreme
Court, asking for review of a Second Circuit decision upholding NYC's
campaign finance laws:

In 2007, New York City created a blacklist. It singled out nearly 12,000 of
its most prominent citizens and said that they were the most likely to try
to bribe politicians with campaign contributions. So the City published
their names on the Internet for everybody to see and reduced the amount of
contributions they can make to their chosen candidates by 90%. Everybody
else is allowed to give $2750 to candidates for City Council. But the
blacklisted citizens are only allowed to give $250. And while everyone else
can give $4,950 to candidates for mayor, the blacklisted citizens can only
give $450.

This might make sense if the blacklisted people had actually ever tried to
bribe politicians. But none had. In fact, for the previous nineteen years,
New York City has not had a single instance of corruption tied to campaign
contributions. The nearly 12,000 blacklisted people had always played by
the rules, but the City punished them anyway.

Strangely, most of the people on the City’s blacklist are not the type of
people we normally consider untrustworthy or corrupt. For instance, Lee
Bollinger, president of Columbia University, is on the list. So is Paul
LeClerc, the president of the New York Public Library, and Donna Lieberman,
the director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. The list has numerous
leaders of nonprofits, hospitals, museums, churches, and yeshivas. They are
all publicly fingered as untrustworthy and punished by having their
candidate contribution limits reduced to less than one-tenth of everyone
else’s. And while everyone else’s contributions are matched with public
money, the blacklisted citizens’ contributions are not matched.

Read the rest here: http://www.jamesmadisoncenter.org/press/03-19-2012/212/

And the Petition for a Writ of Certiorari itself is available here:
http://www.jamesmadisoncenter.org/cases/files/2011/09/Cert-Petition.pdf

Joe
___________________
*Joseph E. La Rue*
cell: 513.509.6494
email: joseph.e.larue at gmail.com


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