It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that New York State’s Democratic-dominated Public Finance Board has maliciously denied public funding to Republican gubernatorial challenger Bruce Blakeman.
We’ve seen the political hacks on this campaign finance panel act egregiously before, as when they denied former mayor Eric Adams the right to access public financing funds for his mayoral reelection. They claimed the reason was that he was tainted with ethical allegations lodged against him, but the real reason was that he had fallen out of favor with the Democratic establishment in supporting President Trump‘s crackdown on illegal immigrants coming into New York City after he had rolled out the red carpet for them.
Adams hadn’t been convicted of anything and yet these hacks on the board took it upon themselves to be the moral arbiters to say he was not worthy of the funds.
And now they are doing everything they can to gum up the works of Governor Hochul’s main Challenger this November.
The excuse they use for denying him funds is that Blakeman did not fill out the application form correctly. Blakeman filled out the forms for himself, but did not include his running mate on the forms.
There are a couple of problems with this scenario. First, Blakeman did not even have a lieutenant governor appointed at the time he submitted the application.
Secondly, the change in the state law was implemented just a very short time before the new policy was put into effect. In the past, the candidate for governor would put in one form and the lieutenant governor candidate would submit another. The new law, passed suddenly just before the filing deadline, required them both to be on the same form.
But perhaps the biggest flaw in the campaign board’s reasoning is that they failed to note that the state regulators themselves had failed to update their forms to have a space where the gubernatorial candidate could also include his lieutenant governor candidate as well. If there’s no place to put in the person‘s name, why would the applicant think that he would have to include it?
The same abnormality was evident with the submission of another Republican primary challenger, Larry Sharpe, who previously had run as a Libertarian.
If there was any chicanery here, it was by this horribly partisan campaign finance board, and not by the candidates who were victimized by the board’s shoddy practices.
It’s true that Blakeman and Sharpe were technically not in compliance, but any rational court would have to agree that the whole process has to be voided because the board itself presented forms to candidates that could be described as a “gotcha” trap. They passed a law saying that both the governor and lieutenant governor must be listed on the form, but then, whether deliberately or not, omit any place for the lieutenant governor‘s name to be mentioned. What a crock.
Blakeman may eventually overturn this on appeal, but will the delay itself be a death blow to his campaign? Perhaps that was always the intent of the Democrat-controlled board.