Backers of Amendment 54, one of the few survivors on last Tuesday’s overcrowded ballot, declared victory Thursday and vowed to defend their sweeping ban on political contributions by public employee union members and their families in court.
They’ll get that chance.
The deceptively packaged “clean government” initiative would appear to be in clear violation of both the 1st and 14th amendments to the U.S. Constitution. As we read it, it would deny union members and their families the same rights to participate in the political process that other citizens enjoy.
Amendment 54 contains the germ of a good idea in its ban on campaign contributions from businesses that later receive no-bid government contracts from a government agency. As it now stands, for example, a bonding company could contribute to a campaign to authorize school bonds and then possibly receive a lucrative no-bid contract to sell the very bonds it helped pass.
Reining in such “pay to play” practices is a legitimate objective and we could have supported 54 if that’s all it did. But in fact, the amendment goes overboard by defining labor organizations that represent public employees as “sole source contractors” and subjecting them to the ban on political contributions. Worse, their families also are covered, including parents, step-parents, spouses, nieces and nephews, and in-laws.
Suppose your brother-in-law is a janitor who works for the state of Colorado and is a member of the Service Employees International Union. Well, it seems that Amendment 54 would classify your brother-in-law as a “sole source contractor.” That means he — and you — could be prohibited from making a contribution to any political party or any state or local candidate for the duration of the labor contract in question plus two years.
To be fair, Amendment 54 is so vague and overbroad it’s not always clear whether its draconian punishments apply to individual union members or only to contributions by the union itself or any political action committees it may set up. But even in the latter interpretation, it would deny rights to union members that all other citizens enjoy.
At the other extreme of interpretation, it’s possible that Amendment 54 could force Aurora to fire a park employee who contributed $10 to a campaign to improve Aurora parks. The amendment says “a covered government contractor who intentionally makes a contribution in violation of the measure is barred from holding a covered government contract or public employment for three years.”
Amendment 54’s vague, open-ended and punitive language would seem to violate the First Amendment’s guarantees of freedom of speech and association, and the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection of the laws. The sooner the federal courts strike this monstrosity down the better.
