It’s hard to ignore the irony.
Last year, Jared Polis helped bankroll the flawed Amendment 41. Now he has joined his foes in efforts to pressure the very lawmakers he was targeting into fixing the problems in the amendment that they had warned him about.
From a public-relations standpoint, the new campaign appears to be working. Over the past week there have been numerous stories about students who’ve had to turn down scholarships and public servants quitting their jobs so their kids aren’t affected.
They are all examples of the seemingly ludicrous Amendment 41 side-effects opponents warned about last summer.
But the new campaign is not sitting well with a lot of lawmakers, who were the main target of the constitutional amendment that prohibits them from taking anything from lobbyists and prohibits gifts worth more than $50 to most government workers and their families.
“We told them this was going to happen and they said, ‘Oh, no, that’s not going to happen. You guys are just going to the extremes,”‘ said Senate President pro tem Peter Groff, D-Denver.
“Now all of a sudden those things are happening when they could have fixed it before. So instead of wasting money on public-relations polls … they should be taking their time using the money the multimillionaire has and fixing it on the 2008 ballot.”
Polis, who has declined interview requests, has been working through a coalition of supporters and opponents of the amendment. That group has promoted stories of victims and last week released a poll of voters who said they were only trying to limit lobby influence, not scholarships.
Working with the group are lawyers Marc Grueskin and Mike Feeley, who has become a fixture at the Capitol.
Because Amendment 41 requires implementing legislation, they are drafting language that could be included to clarify that things like scholarships are not prohibited.
But some lawmakers have questioned whether they can legally make such changes.
“They changed the constitution – it’s the constitution. Here at the legislature, we write statutes. They are different,” said House Majority Leader Alice Madden, D-Boulder, who is a lawyer.
“I get a little angry hearing people say, ‘It’s the legislature’s duty to fix it,’ when they handed us this.”
Senate President Joan Fitz-Gerald, D-Jefferson County, a likely opponent of Polis in the 2008 2nd Congressional District race, has indicated she is unlikely to support legislation that tinkers with a voter-approved amendment.
Colorado Common Cause executive director Jenny Rose Flanagan, who worked with Polis on 41, insists the legislature has the legal authority to address these issues.
“By not doing anything right now, they are politicizing 41 and in fact dishonoring the will of the voters because they are not addressing the misinterpretations,” she said.
Legal issues aside, it’s the irony – and animosity – that may prove to be the coalition’s biggest obstacles.
“It’s baffling to me,” Groff said.
“Here is a guy with millions of dollars who, without any evidence of people being unduly influenced, goes out and creates this overly broad constitutional provision and says in essence these guys down there are crooked. … So we’re going to create this entire constitutional provision and then when it doesn’t work to his advantage he then comes back and uses his money to unduly influence us to violate the provision that he paid to put in the constitution.”
Capitol Bureau chief Jeri Clausing writes each Sunday. She can be
reached at 303-954-1555 or jclausing@denverpost.com.
