Colorado House Majority Leader Amy Stephens is feeling the heat – not from sweltering summer temperatures but instead from the sizzling tempers of Republican “anarchists” who think the Monument legislator has violated conservative and constitutional values. They seem bent on anointing a warrior to defeat Stephens in 2012 – the frontrunner is Kanda Calef.
The feud between outgoing state Republican Party Chair Dick Wadhams and state Sen. Ted Harvey, who aims to succeed him, is exploding with revelations about Harvey’s financial history.
Clear the Bench Colorado founder Matt Arnold this week lost another court case, the second case in the last half year, but not for lack of trying. Arnold appealed the ruling in the first case even as he leaned on that ruling to file the complaint in the second case. “I got out-lawyered,” Arnold told Westword, conceding, even if unwittingly, that perhaps the both-ways legal strategy he took toward campaign finance laws over the last few months was less about winning than it was about sending messages.
Colorado State Senator Morgan Carroll, D-Aurora, said she missed an opportunity to head off the controversy now surrounding newly elected Secretary of State Scott Gessler. Carroll had been weighing whether or not to introduce legislation that would have set strict disclosure laws for the secretary of state’s office in particular and tightened state worker conflict-of-interest laws in general. She didn’t introduce that bill but that doesn’t mean a legislative response to the Gessler controversy is off the table, she said.
As the head of Clear the Bench Colorado, firebrand Matt Arnold has toured conservative activist events across the state this past year asking Coloradans to vote against retaining members of the state’s supreme court. He argued and is arguing in the last weeks before the November elections that members of the bench are liberal activists who disdain the law. In recent days, an administrative courts judge and the elections director for the state informed Arnold that he failed to follow the laws that govern the form of political activity in which he has been engaging.
In ruling Friday in Denver against Clear the Bench Colorado, the small-government committee seeking to oust three state supreme court justices, Judge Robert Spencer levied no fines but ordered the group to change its registration with the state…
On Friday, Administrative Law Judge Robert Spencer ruled that Clear the Bench Colorado, a group campaigning against retaining three Colorado Supreme Court justices this November, improperly filed with the state as an issues committee and that it must now file as a political committee. The ruling comes after a complaint filed by government watchdog group Colorado Ethics Watch. The ruling limits Clear the Bench fundraising and ups the group’s obligation to report contributions. It is the latest chapter in a legal battle colored by partisan rhetoric and suspicion and it is likely not the final chapter.
Clear the Bench, a group campaigning to replace Colorado Supreme Court Justices, took what looks like bad advice from Secretary of State staffers last spring when it decided to file with the state as an issue committee rather than as a political action committee. The distinction may sound esoteric but it’s exactly the distinction Colorado citizens voted into place in 2004 with Amendment 27 because they believed it could head off the kind of corruption that can swing legal rulings that affect everyday issues– the safety of drinking water, for example, the outlines of labor rights, the frequency of tax hikes.
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