Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said on Tuesday that he would seek legislation to significantly expand New York's regulation of political spending by corporations, individuals and tax-exempt groups during his third year in office.
Mr. Cuomo also said he would push to make the public financing of campaigns a part of any bill, but refused to say whether the absence of such a provision - long sought by liberal groups - would be a deal-breaker in any negotiations with Republicans in the State Senate, who have opposed public financing in the past.
“I think it's very, very important to have a public finance piece in there,†Mr. Cuomo said.
Mr. Cuomo's comments, made in an interview on Tuesday afternoon with WXXI radio, came hours after Eric T. Schneiderman, the attorney general and an occasional rival of the governor's, proposed forcing politically active tax-exempt groups to disclose the donors to their political efforts in New York. As attorney general, Mr. Schneide rman is the state's top regulator of charitable organizations and can approve his new rules without legislative consent.
“The attorney general's jurisdiction is helpful; I think we need to go further,†said Mr. Cuomo, who held that post before becoming governor two years ago. “The attorney general only has jurisdiction over not-for-profits registered in the state.â€
Both Mr. Cuomo and Mr. Schneiderman have made tighter campaign and ethics regulations a priority during their first terms. Mr. Cuomo sought last year to strengthen ethics oversight of the Legislature, with mixed success, while Mr. Schneiderman has focused on tax-exempt nonprofit groups, in New York and around the country, that have injected hundreds of millions of dollars into federal and state elections.
Advocates for such policies have long faulted New York for having confusing, p oorly enforced and porous campaign finance rules, including some of the highest limits in the country for contributions to candidates. (Those high limits have generally been a boon to incumbents and especially governors in New York, including Mr. Cuomo.) And little has been done to update state election law in the wake of the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling, which in 2010 made it legal for corporations and unions to make unlimited expenditures in political campaigns so long as they do so independently of candidates.
The state has no law requiring individuals and corporations to disclose independent spending that falls short of directly advocating the election or defeat of candidates, for example, a problem Mr. Cuomo said he would seek to address.
“If an individual is doing the election campaign, it's not covered,†Mr. Cuomo said. “If a corporat ion that's not a not-for-profit is doing the activity, it's not covered. You have all these national not-for-profits that aren't registered in New York but we were just watching their advertising during the presidential campaign; I want them covered also.â€
Few other details of Mr. Cuomo's proposal were made available on Tuesday night. A potential deal with the Legislature could do more than make existing regulations tighter and more clear. Mr. Cuomo could also seek to issue new regulations that would affect the state's tax treatment of donations to politically active nonprofits, for which New York donors have long been a major source of cash, or require tax-exempt groups to more frequently disclose their political activity, which Mr. Schneiderman cannot do.
