In a telling sign of what’s ahead, the special commission that’s rewriting New York’s state election laws spent most of its first “public” session behind closed doors.
Commissioners were apparently discussing what legal counsel to hire, since their work is sure to face a host of court challenges — not least because it’s insane to have an unelected panel revise the rules of a democracy.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the state Legislature set up the commission to create a statewide system for taxpayer funding of political campaigns and to tackle other issues such as “fusion voting,” whereby minor parties supply their ballot lines to major-party candidates.
Unless the Legislature returns for a special session in December to reject or revise the commission’s plan, it will automatically become law — at least, until the courts start weighing in.
A similar commission last year granted lawmakers huge pay hikes while banning most outside income and greatly limiting legislators’ bonus pay (a k a “lulus”). But two state judges have now tossed (different) parts of that package, with the final results still uncertain. If the same thing happens with this commission, state election law could wind up being rewritten all throughout the 2020 campaign season.
That’s hardly the only mess here. The commission got its first meeting listed on the state website with just minutes to spare to meet the Public Meetings Law’s three-day notice requirement.
Meanwhile, as Cameron Macdonald of the Government Justice Center discovered, the lefty Citizens Action of New York had already listed not just that meeting, but future ones, on its own site.
Presumably, it got the info from commission member Denora Getachew, who is former counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, a Citizen Action ally. Both groups are in the Fair Elections NY coalition, which is pushing for a state system based on the city’s public campaign finance laws.
Of course, most of the commissioners lean left, since the people that appointed them do. (Henry Berger, Mayor Bill de Blasio’s election lawyer and adviser, is another member.)
The larger problem, though, is the whole gimmick of the people’s elected representatives passing the business of writing new election and campaign law off to a bunch of appointees.
If a majority of legislators dislike the final package — but find themselves helpless because the Legislature’s leaders refuse to allow a special session — they’ll have to sue.
In other words, this is a recipe for election law to be written by the courts. The whole thing is making a farce of representative government.