How Corrupt Are Our Politics?

SEPTEMBER 25, 2014 ISSUE

When New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo was elected in 2010, he promised to restore integrity to state government. Two and half years later, as several state legislators were indicted for bribes, and perhaps just as importantly, as Cuomo’s reelection loomed, he did what many politicians do when faced with a vexing problem: he appointed a commission. In July 2013, with much fanfare, Cuomo announced the creation of the Commission to Investigate Public Corruption, which came to be known as the Moreland Commission. He promised that it would be independent. As he put it at the time, “Anything they want to look at, they can look at—me, the lieutenant governor, the attorney general, the comptroller, any senator, any assemblyman.” And he featured the commission in his reelection ads, proclaiming that “trust is everything.”

Less than one year later, Governor Cuomo prematurely shut down the commission, claiming that he’d been able to persuade the legislature to adopt new ethics rules in exchange for doing so. But many questioned the decision. The new laws were actually quite tepid. And reports emerged that the governor’s office had consistently interfered with the commission’s work, leaning on it not to pursue investigations of the governor’s allies and supporters. The New York Times published a damning account, based on a three-month investigation, finding that the governor’s office and its agents had “deeply compromised the panel’s work, objecting whenever the commission focused on groups with ties to Mr. Cuomo or on issues that might reflect poorly on him.”1

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/sep/25/how-corrupt-are-our-politics/