December 28, 2011 07:31 PM UTC

Reminder: Scott Gessler Is Not Here To Help

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• by: Colorado Pols

Today, the Denver paper’s Sara Burnett reports that Secretary of State Scott Gessler has issued a rule on campaign finance reporting requirements for primary elections. Due to a legislative mistake when the dates for primary elections were moved up, Gessler had issued a rule that did away with the bi-weekly reports primary campaigns were required to file–a rule that was struck down by the legislative Legal Services Committee earlier this month.

In response to that decision, which technically kept Gessler’s rule intact through May allowing the legislature time to fix the reporting dates, the Secretary of State issued a new rule “honoring” the legislature’s “intent”–and forcing biweekly disclosures to begin next month. The correct intent, of course, is to have these more frequent disclosures in the weeks immediately prior to (and once right after) a primary election, not many months prior when regular reporting is sufficient.

In reality, all this will do is make fixing the statutory dates for primary campaign finance reporting the legislature’s very first order of business when the session convenes. This business of “honoring legislative intent,” when all parties agree that the legislature made a mistake, is an absolute insult–benign-sounding enough for 30 seconds on the evening news, but everyone even partway tuned in to any of this knows he’s simply rubbing their faces in it out of spite.

As we said previously, Gessler attempted to take advantage of this legislative mistake to eliminate affected campaign finance reporting requirements. This move was philosophically consistent with broad rule changes he has proposed that weaken campaign finance disclosure in other ways. Gessler doesn’t like disclosure. He didn’t like it as the GOP’s elections attorney, and he doesn’t like disclosure any better as Secretary of State.

It is perhaps a bit surprising to see him so openly spiteful wielding official powers, but that too is consistent with a man who’s not really in office to serve so much as further his “viewpoint.”