Amendment 41 Has Become a Fine Mess
I've written about the efforts to clarify Amendment 41 before, but the newest update to the saga is worth a mention. I'll let the preventing scholarship winners from accepting their awards if their parent(s) are state employees.
There are also politics involved here (as there always are), some of which I explained in a previous post. Polis and Senate President Joan Fitz-Gerald are the two frontrunners to replace Rep. Mark Udall when the latter runs for the U.S. Senate. Polis' bid for congress will be severely damaged if Amendment 41 is not "clarified," because then he'll have to run for office as the guy whose amendment took scholarships away from kids. That's not good, and Fitz-Gerald knows it, which is a big reason why she has no desire to see Amendment 41 altered in any way.
Republicans are also coming out in favor of keeping Amendment 41 the way it is for political reasons; they hope that Democrats will alter the amendment, and then they can go back to voters in two years and say, Democrats changed the meaning of an ethics amendment that YOU voted to support.
If Amendment 41 prevents certain kids from accepting scholarships, obviously that is a bad outcome that was not intended by the people who wrote the language of the measure – and it surely wasn't what voters thought they were voting for. But at the same time, in some ways you get what you pay for here, and I really have a problem with the statement from the creators of Amendment 41 that goes something like this: "Obviously, this isn't what we intended."
But you wrote the amendment.
Saying "This isn't what we intended" is like calling your spouse a bad name and saying, "I didn't mean to hurt you." You can't press rewind and re-word your insult because it didn't turn out well.
Back when the language for the amendment was being drafted, critics warned that Amendment 41 was too vague and could create unintended problems. Those concerns fell on deaf ears at the time, which is a shame because all of this could have been avoided with a little more attention to detail. When the amendment was being drafted, all they had to do was to write the language so that it was more specific. But they didn't, and now they're scrambling to fix it.
Now, rather than discussing the merits of lobbying reforms and the fear of preventing scholarships from being awarded to students, the talks over Amendment 41 have become symbolic. Can you change the meaning of something that the voters approved? If you can, and if you should, then who gets to decide what the true meaning is supposed to be?
Right now, it looks like lobbyists get to have that discussion.
They just can't do it over dinner.
Comments
Submitted by Elevated Voices - Confusing Rhetoric with Logic (not verified) on Fri, 2007-03-09 23:25.
[...] I won’t repeat the points I’ve made about Amendment 41 in the past (you can read them here and here if you’d like), but the basic battle is this: Most people agree that Amendment 41 is a problem b [...]
Submitted by Elevated Voices - Save Us From Ourselves (not verified) on Tue, 2007-02-20 21:10.
[...] hreshold for constitutional amendments and lower it for statutory changes. Here, here! As we’ve seen with the debate over what Amendment 41, where the discussion has been about what it was “supposed [...]
Submitted by Elevated Voices - Look At All My New Friends (not verified) on Fri, 2007-02-09 10:18.
[...] ed officials and public workers are prohibited from accepting anything from a lobbyist. I have written before about the political maneuvering behind Amendment 41, so I won’t repeat that again here [...]
Submitted by Ralph Trenary (not verified) on Fri, 2007-01-26 22:37.
Hi Jason,
I'll weigh-in with you on this one. Amendment 41 shows that we've hit a low point in the long history of Colorado paying the price for a State Constitution that can be used as a toy for anyone with enough ambition and money to launch a ballot initiative campaign.
The Legislature must implement what is now Article XXIX of the Constitution. The hard part comes in when the instigators of 41 continue to push their "...but, that's not what I wanted..." whine. It is truly amazing that those who rode the “Government Ethics†horse into November are now pushing huge amounts of cash to lawyers, lobbyists and high-profile political operatives to force the legislators to bend to their will.
Yeah, you’re right…what a fine mess.
