“I’ll ask Zephyr Teachout to serve on my Moreland Commission,” Marc Molinaro told us Wednesday. The Republican candidate for governor explained, “We need the best of left and right” to start draining the Albany cesspool.
That’s a pretty clear signal that he really means to end the endless, massive pay-to-play culture that dominates state government. And it’s a pointed slap at Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who abruptly shut down his own Moreland Act Commission — in part, apparently, because it had started looking into figures close to him.
Happily, then-US Attorney Preet Bharara swooped in, grabbed the commission’s files — and used the evidence to help bring the arrest and eventual conviction of Sheldon Silver and Dean Skelos, then the Democratic and Republican leaders of the Legislature. Other federal prosecutors have since convicted some of the governor’s top aides.
But Molinaro wants far more than a commission: His 23-page anti-corruption plan aims to start by cleaning up state economic-development spending (the epicenter of most of those Team Cuomo convictions) and extends to pushing term limits for legislators, campaign-finance reform, creating new independent auditors and real ethics-oversight bodies and more — including government-transparency measures (like a “database of deals”) that Cuomo has been quashing.
As for Teachout: She won fame by challenging Cuomo in the 2014 Democratic primary, pulling a third of the vote as she harped on his ethical woes (including the rancid Moreland shutdown).
She also made a bid for attorney general this year, and there’s wide speculation that Cuomo got Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney to enter the AG race to split the vote and ensure that his favored candidate, city Public Advocate Tish James, would triumph.
Much as we disagree with Teachout on other policies, she’s plainly committed to clean government. Molinaro is wise to reach out to her for the bipartisan house-cleaning New York so desperately needs.