Game, set, match

Everyone knows it’s dirty pool to try to change the rules once the game has started, but such blatant unfairness isn’t deterring a bunch of Albany Democratic legislators who are pushing a bad bill to undermine New York State’s brand new public matching funds for political campaigns.

Sorry folks, you know better than anyone else that this year’s legislative elections have started. Every senator and assemblymember who is running for reelection had to submit their petitions by midnight last Thursday night. Yet the bill to alter the public matching fund program for state candidates was filed by state Sen. James Skoufis on Wednesday. And the deadline for signing up to participate in matching funds was Feb. 26.

So perhaps there is someone running and in the new program out there who would not have enrolled in the optional matching funds setup or maybe not even run at all for the Legislature if the Skoufis changes were adopted.

Or maybe there is someone who sat this year out and would have decided to join matching funds or decided to run for office if the Skoufis bill was law.

Either way, it’s too late to alter such significant elements for this year’s campaigns and elections. So far there are 20 sponsors for the Senate bill. We won’t care if all 42 Democrats were on board or even if the 21 Republicans also joined. The game has started and the time has passed for any modifications.

So those are our objections on the timing. It’s also a fact that the proposed changes are just bad on the merits: Favoring incumbents, making it harder to challengers and letting campaigns hold on to excess monies are bad, bad and bad. It must not happen.

This adventure started in 2019, when the Democrats won majorities in both chambers. They then passed a public matching funds regime along with then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo, but pushed its start date far in the future, to 2024. Last June, with the new system looming ahead, the majority Democrats passed a terrible bill to undermine the whole program right before they left for the year.

The worst part of it was to allow the first $250 of all contributions to be matched with tax dollars. So if a fat cat wrote a check for $10,000 to a candidate for Senate, there would be a match on $250. The law was written specifically to disqualify any donations above $250 from being matched in order to encourage smaller contributions. To her credit, Hochul vetoed that mess in December.

But here they come again, having dropped the lifting of the $250 match ceiling, but retaining the other lousy changes. They are trying to jam it though with the budget, which is due today, having missed the statutory April 1 deadline and the backup on April 4. Hochul has to hold fast and refuse.

Changes to the campaign matching funds shouldn’t be part of the budget and they shouldn’t be in standalone legislation. The time to do any changes was before this year. The greedy Legislature tried to put in their “fixes” last year and Hochul stopped them. This year, she needs to do it again.

Always seeking the advantage for themselves and to stymie competition, lawmakers just never learn.