First-term state Sen. Steve Ward gets it. The ex-Marine and “recovering lawyer” gives things “plain meanings” until simplicity leads to “absurd results.”
That happened with Amendment 41, Colorado’s constitutional ethics reform. Lobbyists and some politicians used to accepting their favors cried wolf about 41’s broad language. It will keep scholarships from cops’ kids, they howled. It will outlaw fundraising for injured firefighters.
Ward knew that was absurd. So Thursday, the conservative Republican from Littleton bucked his party’s leaders and joined liberal Denver Democratic Rep. Rosemary Marshall to sponsor a bill that defines and implements 41.
The legislation says specifically that student financial aid, academic awards, disaster relief and fundraising for the sick are not covered by 41.
As if they ever were.
Attorney General John Suthers contributed to this lobbyist-driven hysteria with a December advisory. Suthers advised that Amendment 41 might prohibit professors from accepting Nobel Prize money. Suthers opined that government employees’ kids could not accept scholarships.
Since then, the AG has found case- by-case ways to allow scholarships for kids of public employees and elected officials. It involves making recipients do something in exchange for their aid. The same fee-for-service concept can work for academic awards.
With their bill, Ward and Marshall have codified common sense in hopes of silencing the cry-wolf pack. They will ask the Supreme Court to rule on constitutionality before the bill kicks in. First, though, the bill must survive bipartisan politically motivated attempts to gut it.
“I really don’t want to be flogged politically any more than I already have been,” Ward said. He probably can’t avoid the beating. Ward understands why he and almost everyone voted for 41. They did it to keep folks from violating the public’s trust for private gain, not to keep the children of government employees from going to college or to keep the Red Cross from giving food to rescue workers.
Ward and Marshall’s proposed law sets up the five-
member state ethics commission required by the amendment. It also offers specific exceptions not mentioned in the amendment. It further gives the ethics commission discretion to issue advisory opinions and answer general questions about who is covered. The commission can punish only those who “breached the public trust for private gain,” the bill says.
Ward rightly calls the Amendment 41 controversy “a tempest under the Capitol dome.” He talked to his constituents about 41. “They want it solved,” he said.
Much of the fury beneath the dome centers on one of 41’s major backers, millionaire Democrat Jared Polis. An ex-State Board of Education member and would-be congressman, Polis once poured money into political campaigns. His hopes of now riding an ethics crusade to D.C. appeals to certain legislators like E. coli-laced spinach.
“There is a lot of crying wolf about (41) in the name of throwing mud at Jared Polis,” Ward said. “I don’t like Jared Polis. But it’s wrong to put a fight with Jared Polis over kids. But for the fact that Jared Polis sponsored this, we’d already be looking at an enabling law.”
Ethics reform should be no one’s political tool. Ward gets that too. He never felt comfortable with lobbyist-paid breakfasts that used to open most days of the General Assembly. Nor was he fond of the other free meals and sports and entertainment tickets that lawmakers took.
“I had a rule that nobody bought me lunch,” Ward said of his days as an Arapahoe County commissioner and Glendale mayor and city councilman. “And for 12 years, nobody bought me lunch. It was just an easy thing for me to deal with. The culture down here is in shock. Somehow, it’s an infringement on someone’s free speech. They can talk to a legislator, but they can talk better when they’re having lunch? I don’t get that.”
Neither did the others who voted for 41. They still don’t. For them, ethics reform is about what it has always been.
Clean government, not political games.
Jim Spencer’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He can be reached at 303-954-1771, jspencer@denverpost.com or blogs.denverpost.com/spencer.
