With less than two weeks left in the legislative session, Democrats are pushing a bill meant to provide some needed clarity to electioneering after the Supreme Court approved of corporate spending on candidates.
It’s a noble goal, but is it a workable timetable?
We urge lawmakers to make sure they have ample time to debate the merits and many working parts of the bill.
One of our immediate concerns is a provision that would prevent some corporations in Colorado with significant foreign investors from exercising their newly won free-speech protections.
We’d hate to see a bill rushed into law that complicates the election cycle in 2010 or negates what we see as the positive impacts of the Supreme Court’s decision, which supports free speech.
In January, the high court struck provisions from the McCain-Feingold Act of 2002 that greatly contributed to complex and ineffective restrictions on what constitutes protected political speech. The decision allows new freedoms for corporations and unions that want to support political candidates.
Further, in the majority opinion the justices noted that with today’s technology, disclosure of who’s paying for the ads should be easy and swift.
Colorado’s Secretary of State, Bernie Buescher, wisely sought advice from the state Supreme Court on how to deal with contradictions in existing state law, and the state’s high court instructed him that the federal law should be followed here.
The Colorado high court also affirmed the General Assembly’s right to set requirements for how those expenditures are to be disclosed.
Sen. Morgan Carroll, D-Aurora, is sponsoring Senate Bill 203, which would require those new to the game to register with the state Secretary of State’s office within 48 hours of running an ad that costs in excess of $1,000.
Carroll not only seeks to have those entities reveal who they are, but the bill also establishes much stricter fines for those who fail to register.
We support transparency in political donations and action. Voters deserve a clear record of who’s behind political messages and the amount of resources they are willing to spend.
But Carroll’s bill also would preclude corporations or entities from airing ads if they were 50 percent owned by foreign investors. That may have worked just fine 10 or 20 years ago, but given today’s global economy, it’s easy to find many companies that have a strong presence in Colorado that also benefit from significant foreign investment.
Those companies are good for the state, and deserve a voice here as well.
Complicating matters is that Republican lawmakers also have argued for clarifying the laws, but many of them haven’t been fully aired.
Against this complex backdrop, we urge lawmakers to tread carefully. If they don’t have enough time to fully engage in debate, they shouldn’t act in haste.
