There aren’t many issues on which we count ourselves in agreement with 1199 SEIU, the powerful New York healthcare workers union, but here’s one of them: The New York City Campaign Finance Board’s proposal to ban campaign contributions from unions in city elections. “To rob union members of their voice in supporting candidates they believe would represent working families is a serious injustice,” the union’s executive vice president for politics and legislative affairs, Jennifer Cunningham, told our Russell Berman, and we couldn’t agree with her more.

The CFB, whose chairman is the lawyer Frederick A. O. Schwarz Jr., wants to ban not only unions but also businesses from participating in politics through campaign contributions. And also to ban almost completely the right of individuals to participate; its recommendation is to slash the allowable contribution in City Council races to a maximum of $250 from the current limit of $2,750. In other words, if you feel strongly about something — abortion rights, say, class sizes, the parks, taxes, zoning, or separation of church and state, to name but a few hot button issues — you are being told to butt out.

You’re being told this by a graduate of Harvard Law School who, in the person of Mr. Schwarz, practices at the white-shoe firm of Cravath, Swaine and Moore. He clearly has regard for neither the First Amendment nor the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court in June struck down as unconstitutional a law by which Vermont sought to curb its campaign speech by setting a $200 contribution limit. Given that advertising and other speech costs in Vermont are a lot cheaper than in New York City, it’s hard to see how a $250 limit could pass constitutional muster or withstand a legal challenge from someone arguing it is an abridgement of the First Amendment rights to speech, to petition, and to the press.

More broadly, if New York suffers from anything, it’s not too much spending on local elections, but too little, particularly given what is at stake. In the rare cases when serious private money has been poured into the city’s politics — Ronald Lauder’s campaign for term limits on city officeholders, Michael Bloomberg’s run for mayor — the effects have been healthy, not corrupting. Money permits people to have their say, bringing attention to the issues. The worst corruption takes place when not enough is being spent on politics to cause anyone to pay attention.

Mr. Schwarz’s scheme to restrict campaign speech would be a tragedy for the city and an irony for the left, whose ideology has foisted this whole speech regulation movement on the country. New Yorkers have just come through, in 2005, an election that was memorable for its lack of luster. It was a contest in which the challenger to a billionaire mayor — a wonderful mayor though he is — complained of being hopelessly outspent and found himself hamstrung by restrictive laws in raising the kind of money he and his supporters felt they needed.