Is The New York City Council A Racketeering Enterprise?

The New York Sun reports:

Lest the City Council slush fund be interpreted as just another dog-bites-man story about corrupt local government officials, the point needs to be made that this was a double default. Not only did the City Council create a slush fund by allocating funds to dummy organizations that did not even exist, but Mayor Bloomberg — the mayor with a reputation as a competent businessman manager — failed to exercise oversight over the money.

It was the inevitable consequence of a city budget process that is a sham. At the federal and state level, there's oversight and negotiation between the executive branch and the legislature over how much gets spent and on what. In New York City, there's no such negotiation. The entire budget "negotiation" is a talk about how much money the Council will get to spend itself, however the various members want.

In a good year for the Council members that could be as much as $200 million, in a bad year $140 million. The rest of the city's $52 billion budget is up to the mayor — the Council has basically no say over it. The Council's money is allocated entirely by the Council, which is why one can walk around the city and see absurdities like trash cans and Prospect Park garbage trucks with signs on them that say something like "paid for by Councilman David Yassky." Or go to a concert and see funding from a City Council member listed in the program.

In fact the trash cans and garbage trucks or the concert haven't been paid for by Mr. Yassky or some other Council member, but by the individuals who pay taxes, money that Mr. Yassky or some Council member and the mayor forced individuals to pay and over which Mr. Yassky or some Council member has sole discretion. At least those expenditures are on actual services, rather than on groups with close ties to elected officials, or charities whose board members are supposed to recycle the tax money back to the politicians in campaign contributions.

Instead of the "checks and balances" envisioned by John Locke and James Madison, New York City's government spending consists of blank checks with no balances. In other words, the Council slush fund scandal isn't just about a few crooked Council members or Council staffers or even crooked Council speakers. What it is about is a default by both the Council and the mayor of their fundamental duties to act as a check on the other branch of government.

It's no wonder that the mayor says he sees nothing wrong with spending taxpayer money on high-priced outside lawyers to protect the individual City Council members and their staff from federal and local prosecutors trying to get to the bottom of the matter. If the truth does come outs, it isn't going to leave anyone involved looking like responsible custodians of public funds. If Mr. Bloomberg or Speaker Quinn want to save their reputations, the right move for them is to abjure public funding of defense lawyers and start working to right the city's government into a form where there are genuine checks and balances. Dictatorship, no matter how benevolent, is no substitute for Madisonian checks and balances. It's a job for Mr. Bloomberg's charter revision commission.