March 14, 2010 08:10 PM UTC

Gotta Love Frivolous Ethics Complaints

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• by: Colorado Pols

As the Denver Post reported yesterday:

A Colorado Springs resident claims a state senator who is paying only $500 a month rent for a downtown Denver condo is violating the state’s ethics laws.

A complaint filed this week with the Colorado Independent Ethics Commission says Sen. John Morse accepted something of value greater than $50, which was outlawed when voters in 2006 approved Amendment 41.

Morse, a Colorado Springs Democrat and the Senate majority leader, said he has done nothing wrong.

“That is nonsense,” he said. “There is no way this is an Amendment 41 violation.”

The complaint was filed by Brandon O’Dell, a Republican and a 25-year-old graduate student at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. O’Dell declined to provide information about what led him to file the complaint, who researched it and who wrote it, except to repeatedly cite unnamed “friends.”

…Morse faces a tough re-election bid this year, from Republican Owen Hill, and said he believes questions about his living arrangements are politically motivated.

The complaint says the type of condo where Morse is staying rents for around $2,600 a month, which Morse said is “absolutely untrue.”

“They are out of their mind,” he said. “No one would pay $2,600 a month for a place where they can be kicked out on the weekends. I am basically subletting a room.”

As ethics complaints go, this one seems especially thin–nobody’s going to think that subletting a single room on weekdays should cost $2,600 a month, and we wouldn’t be surprised to find many legislators who represent districts outside Denver have had to get creative to find an affordable place to sleep during the session. Like we pointed out when Rep. Steve King faced his own ethics questions recently, they don’t make very much money. It’s more than a little possible that you might find, if you look hard enough, some living arrangements substantially more ‘creative’ than Sen. Morse’s, but that’s for another blog post.

Combined with the fact that the complaint was initiated by a 25-year-old College Republican who doesn’t want to talk about who helped him write it, citing only “friends?” Yeah, you already know very well what the purpose of this complaint is–direct mail glossies and robocalls. They’ve only got a few weeks, though, before the Amendment 41 commission laughs this one off, so we would expect to see those pretty quickly.