Colorado lawmakers killed a proposal Thursday that would have prohibited lobbyists from donating to legislators, statewide elected officials or candidates for those offices.
Senate Bill 148 fell at the measure’s first hurdle on 2-3 bipartisan vote by a committee. The bill would’ve expanded a 31-year-old Colorado law that bars lobbyists from donating to campaigns during the legislature’s 120-day annual session.
Had the bill passed, the proposed year-round prohibition would have bumped Colorado into the ranks of a handful of states that more broadly limit lobbyist donations to the policymakers they’re trying to influence. But it failed to get out of the Senate’s State, Veterans and Military Affairs Committee.
Sen. Mike Weissman, an Aurora Democrat, sponsored the bill and is the committee’s chair. He said the bill was intended both to “catch up the law” to modern realities — lawmaking and meetings with lobbyists extend beyond the bounds of the legislative session — and to improve the public perception of government.
Weissman was the subject of a dark money-drenched primary challenge last summer, and a consumer-protection bill he sponsored was among the most-lobbied bills of last year’s session.
“People across the political spectrum are skeptical of government,” Weissman said Tuesday, two days before the vote. “That is a pretty bipartisan thing right now. So part of why I’m doing this is broadly stated: confidence in government.”
He added: “What we’re seeing around the world and beginning to see in this country is that when people cease to believe that representative government works for them, (and) their economic conditions aren’t tenable — they’ll start to entertain other things.”
Sen. Matt Ball, a Denver Democrat who voted against the bill Thursday with the committee’s two Republicans, said he was pleased with the state’s current transparency rules, which require that candidate donations be tracked and published online.
He worried that Weissman’s bill would simply shift spending elsewhere.
$500,000 donated in 2024 campaign — likely more
It’s unclear how much money is donated by lobbyists each year. While the state’s campaign finance system tracks donations by donors’ occupations, it’s an incomplete accounting. Donors must self-identify their professions, and while many lobbyists do so, others list their occupation as attorney, consultant or simply “other.” That self-identification may shift from donation to donation, too, further complicating tracking.
At a minimum, though, self-identified lobbyists donated just under $500,000 to statehouse candidates during the 2024 campaign cycle, according to state campaign finance reports.
Lobbyists typically are hired by corporations, nonprofits or government agencies to argue for or against legislation and policies. They are particularly powerful in Colorado: Legislative term limits result in significant turnover in the Capitol, with lawmakers generally limited to serving consecutive terms lasting eight years in each chamber.
Some lobbyists, meanwhile, have worked in the building for decades — and, in previous lives, many were legislative aides or officials for state agencies or governors. As lobbyists now, they’re often intimately involved in drafting legislation.
In an interview before the vote Wednesday, Lacey Hays, the president of the Colorado Lobbyists Association, questioned whether Weissman’s proposal would’ve survived a First Amendment challenge. The Constitution’s free speech provision forms the basis for much of campaign finance law, including the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision.
“We are individuals,” Hays said, “and regardless of our profession, there are people that we see and get to know on the candidate trail that we believe would be good patrons for their communities. To bar us from helping out their campaigns is just that First Amendment, constitutional (issue) — we think it just flies in the face of that.”
Twenty-nine states prohibit lobbyist donations during legislative sessions, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, a nonpartisan research group. Six states go further and limit lobbyist donations generally, as Weissman sought to do, NCSL said. Weissman said those policies have withstood lawsuits.
Few lobbyists besides Hays agreed to speak on the record for this story, as is lobbyists’ habit generally. Several prominent lobbying firms did not respond to requests for comment.
But privately, several lobbyists generally shrugged at the idea of limiting their own donations. Some joked that such a prohibition would just save them several thousand dollars every cycle, and others said it would end an expectation from lawmakers that lobbyists donate or hold fundraisers.
One said fundraising calls often begin almost immediately after each legislative session — when the state’s prohibition on lobbyist giving lifts until the next session.
Simultaneously, though, the lobbyists and Hays argued that $450 donations — the maximum allowed to individual candidates — weren’t enough to buy anyone’s vote, and they questioned whether they could be prohibited from offering donations on the basis of their profession.
“A $450 check from an individual is not buying anyone’s influence,” Hays said.
“Take their money … and vote against ’em”
Or, as Republican Sen. Rod Pelton said before voting against Weissman’s measure: “You wouldn’t make a very good legislator if you couldn’t take their money in the morning and vote against ’em in the afternoon.”
Weissman acknowledged that there hadn’t been scandals about lobbyists buying votes or abusing donations in Colorado (though lobbyists privately groused that some legislators made it known that they knew who had donated to them and who hadn’t).
Still, Weissman said, the fact that Colorado “was a bit better off in terms of the culture … doesn’t mean there’s not a good reason to do it, especially now in this era.”
The appearance of impropriety — of greased palms — was part of the motivation for the initial ban on lobbyist giving, said Doug Friednash, a former legislator who introduced the policy back in 1993. Friednash now works for lobbying giant Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, though he stressed that he was speaking on his own behalf, not for the firm.
When he ran the bill, he expected to get heat from lobbyists.
“What was eye-opening after I did that — the people that came to thank me were lobbyists. … Lobbyists were thrilled that they weren’t getting (pressured) to make contributions,” Friednash said.
As a lobbyist now, he said he liked Weissman’s bill for that reason, too. But he also questioned whether the bill was constitutional, and he echoed Ball’s argument that lobbyists would find a way around the prohibition: They could still give to political parties or certain fundraising arms, for instance, and the companies or groups that hired them could continue to donate, too.
“The system always finds a way for a workaround,” Friednash said. “Because parties raise money for candidates, (lobbyists) give to some party event or something with money that’s going to specifically go to these same candidates or candidate. I think it’s a lot more complex and complicated than just that simple narrow piece” of lobbyist donations.
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