The Sun
January 28, 2004
Editorial & Opinion
Page 10

Financing Gifford Miller
 
Michael Kinsley is fond of repeating a rule about Washington: The corruption isn’t what happens that’s illegal, the corruption is what goes on that’s perfectly legal. So it is here in New York City, where, as our David Andreatta reported in yesterday’s New York Sun, the speaker of the City Council, Gifford Miller, has been bankrolling his mayoral campaign with tens of thousands of dollars in contributions from executives of 64 nonprofit groups that get no-bid grants from the council. And if anything, these contributions are the tip of the iceberg, for there are plenty of volunteer board members of grant-getting charities who may be known to Mr. Miller as such, but who may have identified themselves with their paying day-jobs on the campaign finance filings.
  
We’ve been skeptical of the campaign finance “reform” priesthood that seeks to restrict such contributions or to ban them outright. Such an approach constitutes a restriction on free speech that in our view — though not,at the moment,in the opinion of the majority of Supreme Court justices — tramples on the First Amendment freedoms of speech and petition.Such restrictions are also impractical. New York’s system is tirelessly touted by the campaign-finance “reform”crowd as a “national model.”But even New York’s extensive regulations can’t prevent it from looking as if these nonprofit executives were giving in the hopes of getting something back from Mr. Miller.
  
It’s not just the cultural and social service institutions for which the donations look like an attempt to buy influence, but other industries. The taxi industry raised money for Mr.Miller,who has a big say over how many taxi medallions are issued. And the city subsidizes private bus companies that serve parts of the city; officials of five of the bus companies gave a total of $5,775 to the speaker. Altogether, it leaves the image of the council as a kind of vending machine. Put contributions into the politicians, get money out for your business or charity.On a slot machine,Mr.Miller would be three piglets all in a row.
  
If anything, what the Miller example and the New York “model” illustrate is the folly of trying to clean up politics by restricting contributions. What could stand cleaning up here is not the system of how the politicians collect their campaign funds, but how they dole out the taxpayers’ funds. After all, if everyone knew for sure that the way the city handed out grants to cultural institutions and social service organizations was merit-based and not susceptible to being influenced by campaign contributions, there’d be less pressure on the nonprofit executives to contribute to the politicians, and both the institutions and the politicians would be less tainted by the appearance that the gifts had some connection to the grants.
  
As it is, the campaign contribution disclosures are a useful indicator to taxpayers of opportunities for savings.These columns and others have called for eliminating the system of taxi medallions and for genuinely privatizing the city’s bus routes as a way of improving service and saving the taxpayers money.It’s no coincidence that the businesses with an interest in preserving the present inefficient system are giving money to Mr. Miller’s campaign.
  
The same goes for the grants from the City Council to cultural institutions and social service groups. For these grants, there is no formal application, no advertisement of a request for proposals, no competitive bidding process, no public notice. Yet in such a vacuum, Mr. Miller and his council colleagues forcibly remove about $40 million from hard-working taxpayers and dole the money out to their campaign contributors’ institutions. The fact that this is legal doesn’t mean it isn’t corruption.

© 2004, The New York Sun