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For Immediate Release:
Wednesday, August 24, 2016
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Contact:
Citizens Union:
Dick Dadey, 917-709-2896
Common Cause New York:
Susan Lerner, 917-670-5670
League of Women Voters of NYS:
Laura Ladd Bierman, 518-465-4162
NYPIRG:
Blair Horner, 518-727-4506
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CIVIC GROUPS URGE
GOVERNOR TO VETO “REFORM”
LEGISLATION THAT MISFIRES
Legislative Fix to Citizens United Legal Case Overreaches and Unnecessarily Targets Public Charities and Their Loyal Donors Which Are Not the Problem
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Secret Process Produces Seriously Flawed and Sloppy Bill That Chills the Constitutional Rights of Civic Groups and Fails to Prevent the Rising Corruption Among State Elected Officials
Citizens Union, Common Cause NY, League of Women Voters of New York State, the New York Public Interest Research Group, along with the New York Immigration Coalition, releases a letter it sent to the governor’s office yesterday calling upon Governor Cuomo to veto bill A.10742/S.8160. This legislation purports to prevent “organizations from corrupting the political process and utilizing funds that are not intended for political purposes” when no such problem has been identified that requires the unconstitutional solution it puts forth.
The letter states that the legislation when announced in principle by the governor at Fordham Law School on June 8 was billed as a legislative fix to the disastrous Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case. The groups outlined a specific set of concerns and objections to the legislation in the letter, arguing that the legislation goes beyond the issues in the Citizens United case and could easily bring a result that causes more harm than good to the public interest.
The five civic groups in the letter said they believe that these flaws are the direct result of a secretive process which is all too common in Albany. This legislation was thrown together at the last minute with no public input. There were no hearings, no robust legislative debate, and no meaningful public conversation on the topic of its impact on non-profit charities. This poorly constructed bill will seriously harm some of New York’s most prestigious institutions, and infringe upon the rights of many public-minded New Yorkers to engage in their constitutionally protected right to comment and criticize. As a result, rather than advancing the public good, the legislation ends up as a secretly developed, clumsily drafted piece of legislation that in the end does little to advance meaningful reform other than dealing directly with problems caused by Citizens United. In fact, the legislation causes more problems than it solves by trying to solve a problem that wasn’t defined publicly and doesn’t really exist
The letter went on to state – “While the independent expenditure spending aspect of the bill has been widely discussed across the nation and includes many recommendations that have been discussed for several years, including several provided to your administration by our organizations, little else in the bill addresses the strong public consensus that corruption is a serious problem in New York. With New York’s two previous legislative leaders convicted of corruption, and at least 33 legislators in the past 16 years having left office due to scandal, we know how bad the problem of corruption is and how poor our actions have been to combat it. Yet the legislation does virtually nothing to respond to this unprecedented corruption.”
The groups posited that non-profit charities are already tightly regulated by the Internal Revenue Service. These organizations, known as 501(c)(3)s have strict limits on their lobbying involvement – limitations that amount to a small fraction of their budgets. They are forbidden from intervening in political campaigns on penalty of being disqualified as a charity.
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