Watch Governor Cuomo’s Campaign Finance Reform Speech

As I described in this blog post, Gov. Cuomo delivered a speech on campaign finance reform last week.

The Brennan Center for Justice, one of the organizations that hosted the event, has posted video of the Governor’s speech.  Watch it (or read the transcript) here.

Here are some of his comments, which preceded a panel discussion on the issue:

I’ve been asked to address several points that give context more than anything else for the discussion that you’re going to have today. I think the policy is relatively straightforward and clear. We know what we want to do, we know why we want to do it.

The real question is a political question. How do you bring change to the political system, and how do you bring change this year? Now this year is an interesting year in and of itself. It’s my third legislative year and it is an off year for the legislators, and that is good news, I think, because if there’s going to be a display of political courage, it normally comes in the off-year election, and that’s where we are during this current year.

The Governor seems to be struggling with whether a system of public financing can work in a world where “independent” entities can spend virtually unlimited sums in the same races:

I believe the independent expenditure committees have made it more complicated because the juxtaposition between an independent expenditure committee and public financing is truly difficult to explain, and the politicians feel a public financing system will handcuff them, and if an independent expenditure committee then parachutes into the race, they’ll be defenseless. And on one hand you’re limiting contributions to $175 matching funds. On the other hand, an unnamed committee can come into the race and spend a million dollars. And they have seen that happen. So they have a real substantive issue with what protection do they have from an independent expenditure committee, which is a good question and a question frankly I haven’t been able to fully answer at this point. I’ve spoken about the independence, I’ve spoken about the disclosure, but it is not a prophylactic to the basic vulnerability of Citizens United, which is yes, you could come up with a very restrictive system with very restrictive limits and then have an independent expenditure committee come in and totally violate the spirit of what we were trying to accomplish. That has made it more complicated.