December 02, 2010 07:49 PM UTC

Colorado Supremes To Consider the "Magic Words"

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• by: Colorado Pols

From the Colorado Independent, watchdog group Colorado Ethics Watch has convinced the state Supreme Court to hear its case against two rather stiltedly “not political” committees:

In its first Supreme Court case ever, Ethics Watch is seeking to overturn a lower court ruling siding with the two groups – Senate Majority Fund and the Colorado Leadership Fund.

The two 527s, named after a section of the IRS code, successfully convinced a lower court judge and an the Colorado Court of Appeals that they did not act as political committees when they ran TV and print ads supporting several candidates for the State Legislature in 2008 because those ads didn’t use the terms “vote for” or “defeat.”

So that could have some implications, obviously–it seems to us there is some spectrum between entities that happen to do some messaging around an election, but are nonetheless rightly judged as not a “political committee” under Colorado election law, and an organization as patently devoted to electioneering as the name “Senate Majority Fund” implies. We would hope that Ethics Watch can get some of what it wants here while preserving that rightful distinction.

Fun fact: the Independent helpfully notes that the attorney of record representing the Senate Majority Fund in this suit is…Secretary of State-elect Scott Gessler, naturally!

One assumes they’ll need a new lawyer. Just another example of why, when we referred to Gessler during the campaign as “Fox for Henhouse Secretary,” we really weren’t joking.