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Seems like you can't walk down an Albany sidewalk without stumbling over a lawmaker charged with graft these days, but the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG) put out a report yesterday that shows how widely the system is failing.

According to the report, New York state lawmakers have violated campaign finance law 103,805 times since January 2011. Most of the violations are minor--including missing dates on disclosure reports to the New York State Board of elections, missing addresses, and wrong codes--but show that if a lawmaker were up to something more sinister, it'd be nearly impossible to pinpoint because of all the holes in recordkeeping, said NYPIRG research coordinator Bill Mahoney.

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mcdonald2013.com

The day after two former campaign aides of mayoral candidate John Liu got busted for attempting to defraud the city through an illegal campaign finance scheme, a Manhattan supreme court shut down GOP mayoral candidate George McDonald's hope of changing the city's campaign finance rules.

Currently, city campaign finance rules state that individual donors can give no more than $4,950 to mayoral candidates, but McDonald argued that candidates who don't participate in the public matching program don't have to abide by those limits. (In 2004, City Council passed a law requiring ALL candidates to stick to the same rules.) But here's the way the matching program works: For the first $175 of a person's campaign donation, the city agrees to pay $6 for every dollar spent--meaning that candidates, should they choose to participate, can sweep up as much as $1,050 in public funding per individual donor.

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Let's say you donate to a campaign. You really like said candidate and believe he or she will do a great job representing you and your interests in government. Eventually, your preferred politician gets elected and you're confident that your donation was well-spent.

And then, a year later, he or she is involved in a corruption scandal and, soon enough, you see your donation dollars in the hands of the candidate's lawyers. Wait, that's not okay, right?

That's the question being asked in Albany this week, as state lawmakers debate whether to include a ban on using campaign money for outrageous legal fees in the campaign finance reform bill coming out of Governor Cuomo's office. In 1989, the State Board of Elections decided that it was totally fine for candidates to spend their electoral cash on defenses in court. But, in the wake of the recent scandal fest, that opinion is quickly being revisited.

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In January, Gov. Cuomo reiterated a point in his State of the State address that he's made since his first day on office: New York needs to completely overhaul its campaign finance system ASAP.

"We must enact campaign finance reform because people believe that campaigns are financed by someone else at exorbitant rates," he told the audience. Except, in a modern political landscape where voices are heard through dollar signs, his plan has not made it out of the rhetorical stage.

But maybe a boost from a victorious White House team will help a bit.

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Last week, we reported on the Nine's decision to hear a case entitled McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission this coming October. In it, an Alabaman G.O.P. donator is attempting to upend the limits of biennial contributions to candidates or committees from an individual -- a restriction that's about $123,600 right now. Of course, there's SuperPACs and all that to circumvent this but, still, the written law stands to be overturned by a post-Citizens-United Supreme Court.

However, not all hope is lost for common decency in campaign finance: yesterday afternoon, Mother Jones reported that the highest court in the land has declined to hear a plea (labeled as "Citizens United on Steroids") that's made its way up the judiciary ladder. The case is called Danielczyk v. United States and, if the Supreme Court agreed with the plaintiff, it would've been the worst thing to happen to shadow political spending since the Koch Brothers.

In 2008, Mr. William Danielczyk and Mr. Eugene Biagi donated money to Hillary Clinton's Presidential run. For whatever the reason, they thought the private equity firm they worked for would reimburse them - except, instead, the Justice Department slammed them with corporate contribution charges. Arguing against them, the two businessmen pinned up Citizens United as proof that, logically speaking, direct corporate contributions are constitutional.

Luckily, the Supreme Court disagrees... today, at least.

[jsurico15@gmail.com/@JSuricz]

Any politician that shells out $108 million to win a mayoral race should be precluded from warning about the dangers of unlimited campaign spending.

Of course that didn't stop Mayor Michael Bloomberg from blasting City Council's proposed reform bill on campaign finance law -- a bill that Bloomberg says would corrupt future campaigns and roll back recent gains in campaign finance reform.

"This is just a blatant attempt by a handful of unions to get around [ the current law] and it is really not good for democracy," Bloomberg said. "You are going to throw away all the improvements in campaign finance if you do this. There will be nothing left of it."

The proposed reform would allow unions, corporations and other member organizations to spend unlimited amounts of money campaigning for a particular candidate -- so long as those efforts are directed solely at the union or organization's members and a corporation's executive administration and stock holders.

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