Next week — Jan. 13 to be exact — a federal appeals court panel will hear Green Party of Connecticut v. Garfield. Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, now running for U.S. Senate, is appealing the decision of a federal judge in August striking down Connecticut’s taxpayer financing system.
Connecticut Secretary of State — and “potential” gubernatorial candidate — Susan Bysiewicz filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit earlier this week supporting the state’s contention that Connecticut’s discriminatory rules for third parties and “rescue funds” punishing independent speech are hunky dory.
Bysiewicz’s campaign press release announcing her action (filed in her capacity as a candidate, not as an elected official) is packed with platitudes but short on specifics. She has the gall to argue that “public financing ensures that anyone can run for public office,” without mentioning a main reason why a federal judge ruled the program unconstitutional — it throws up insurmountable obstacles to third party candidates.
In a remarkable display of candidate chutzpah, Bysiewicz told the Hartford Courant that a recently-announced opponent in the Democratic gubernatorial primary should just give up because it’s so hard for candidates – read less-connected, non-establishment challengers to the status quo — to qualify for the taxpayer handout:
“I have great professional respect for Mary Glassman, she’s a very bright person and it will be very productive to have as many smart people as possible asking how we can fix the many challenges facing the state,” Bysiewicz said Tuesday. “But it takes so much persistence and organization to raise the funds required to qualify for public financing.” [emphasis added]
Hilarious! Political analysts in Connecticut know that the addition of Glassman, another credible female candidate, to a field of Bysiewicz and five male candidates has obvious implications for wooing Connecticut’s all important female vote in the Democratic primary.
Bysiewicz’s comment is a vindication to a lot of us on the free speech movement who have criticized so-called clean elections because of the ability of incumbents and established politicians to game the system to thwart lesser-known challengers. There’s a paradox in taxpayer funded elections that illustrates why it’s fundamentally bad policy: incumbent lawmakers either write the laws to make it difficult for candidates to challenge them or too easy for otherwise-unviable fringe candidates to secure taxpayer money.
