The city’s public advocate is supposed to help citizens connect to city government — to fight for New Yorkers against the bureaucracy. But Public Advocate Bill de Blasio has launched a campaign to fight federal campaign-finance laws.
Early this month, de Blasio issued a “study” claiming that large corporations used corporate-tax breaks to spend money on political ads — and, the press release, insisted “showing some of the biggest recipients of corporate tax breaks are also among the biggest spenders in politics.” More: “The contributions are also on the increase since last year’s Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.”
In fact, de Blasio misread the campaign-finance data; his charges are unfounded. His big blunder: mislabeling the donations of company employees as corporate contributions.
De Blasio’s office analyzed the political spending of five companies — finding, for example, that Boeing spent $2.43 million on campaign contributions in the 2010 cycle. But the donations didn’t come from Boeing itself, but from board members, employees who voluntarily contributed to the company’s political action committee and workers who made contributions wholly independent of the company.
This devastates the so-called report’s entire premise — namely, that companies are making political donations to win tax breaks.
Thus, if a Boeing engineer gave $200 to his local congressman, de Blasio’s office considers that a corporate contribution to further Boeing’s tax interest — when in reality it had nothing to do with Boeing.
De Blasio then pretends that all this spending was legalized by the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United — when individuals have always been able to donate to candidates, and corporate PACs have been around since the 1970s.
Citizens United simply threw out government limits on corporate and union spending to advocate for or against candidates independently. De Blasio completely misrepresented the decision by claiming it authorized the long-legal spending at issue in his brief “report.”
In short, de Blasio is wasting taxpayer money to spout uninformed nonsense about federal campaign-finance issues. His focus should be about impacting the day-to-day lives of New Yorkers by focusing on issues that matter to them.
Oh, and on cleaning up his own campaign act. During his 2009 campaign, he illegally littered the city with campaign signs. Sanitation police removed 4,050 signs from public property, for more than $300,000 in fines.
By the way, de Blasio got $2.3 million in taxpayer funds for that campaign — in other words, he took public money to mar public property.
In office, he could at least stop using public money to produce and promote junk “research” — and start focusing on issues that average New Yorkers actually care about.
Bradley A. Smith, a former Federal Election Commission chairman, heads the Center for Competitive Politics, which protects First Amendment rights.