Court upholds rules for lobbyists
Critic of authority of ethics commission loses long-standing lawsuit
As New York’s current ethics commission prepares to shutter in July, one of its most significant legacies has survived a legal challenge.
By unanimous decision, a state appellate court in Albany upheld key aspects of a lower-court ruling, which had held that sweeping regulations governing state lobbyists were legal.
In 2019, the Joint Commission on Public Ethics adopted the lobbying regulations, which sought to expand the types of activities that must be publicly disclosed in New York. JCOPE, whose enforcement of ethics laws was often criticized over a decade of existence, also significantly expanded the amount of lobbying data available.
Beyond simply requiring the disclosure of traditional lobbying — such as when a lobbyist asks a government official to take an action — the regulations sought to cover other types of efforts that have grown prominent. That included so-called “grassroots lobbying” in which an entity seeks to sway lawmakers through mass mobilization of the public around an issue. For the first time, the rules also required lobbyists to disclose the specific name of a public official they’d sought to sway.
Kat Sullivan, an alleged rape victim who fought to pass the Child Victims Act, argued that JCOPE’S efforts had gone too far.
She was the plaintiff in the lawsuit seeking to overturn not only JCOPE’S regulations but the entirety of the state lobbying law. Sullivan, who had paid for billboards and an airplane to fly a banner over the Capitol in 2018, had declined to register as a lobbyist, arguing her citizen activism was fundamentally different than the work of a professional lobbyist. Sullivan did not stand to financially benefit from the law she sought to pass.
After an extensive investigation, JCOPE dropped the matter, but Sullivan continued to pursue the litigation. In a 2019 complaint, attorney Cameron Macdonald of the nonprofit Government Justice Center, who represented Sullivan, argued that “no person of ordinary intelligence can ascertain what conduct is allowable under the Lobbying Act,” and that the regulations had dramatically and unlawfully expanded the definition of lobbying.
In the appellate division ruling Thursday, the justices unanimously found that authority to issue the regulations was “fairly implied” by JCOPE’S existing powers and noted the Legislature has since passed a law replacing JCOPE with a new ethics commission but leaving JCOPE’S regulations intact.
In one smaller victory for Sullivan, the court did affirm her right to bring the case against the outgoing ethics commission.
“JCOPE could not get away with threatening her for more than a year, drop the matter after getting sued by Kat, and then argue she did not have a ripe case for the court to decide,” Macdonald told the Times Union.