Ever since a scary clown made your first balloon animal at a birthday party, you've known squeezing it doesn't pop it. It just bulges out someplace else.

And yet, when the scary clown is government, and it attempts to put the squeeze on campaign contributions, we all tell ourselves it will "get the money out of politics" — and we laud it as "campaign finance reform."

In reality, it only pushes the money someplace else. Usually, it's someplace that's harder to track and account for — but it influences an election all the same. The candidate's campaign no longer spends it or answers for it; instead, a special-interest group spends it — and answers to no one. It becomes "dark money," in political parlance.

That has been the law in Colorado for decades regarding campaigns for state office — limiting the amount of political contributions to candidates for Legislature, governor and the like. And it has failed miserably.

Shadowy independent committees moved in and took the money that the candidates no longer were allowed to take — splurging it on a whole new wave of attack ads we now regard as standard fare every election season. The mudslinging has turned off voters who, in turn, do their best to tune out the ads. And — guess what — overall campaign spending has soared.

Reform it ain't.

Now — perhaps, because misery loves company — state lawmakers are trying to foist the same failure on Colorado's cities. As reported this week in Colorado Politics, House Bill 23-1245 would cap donations to candidates from individuals and political parties at $400 and donations from "small-donor" committees like unions at $4,000 in municipal elections.

Denver would be exempt from the legislation as it already, unwisely, has adopted its own contribution limits along with a related boondoggle that uses tax dollars to fund campaigns. Other cities, however — from Aurora to Grand Junction, Pueblo to Fort Collins and beyond — would be under the state's thumb. Even Colorado Springs, though a home-rule city like Denver, likely would have to bow to the new limits if passed because it currently has none of its own.

To say the least, the bill represents yet another trampling of local control. On the heels of Gov. Jared Polis' pending plan to bulldoze local zoning rules in favor of a statewide land-use standard, this latest usurpation of local power is all the more of an outrage. Dissenting Republican lawmakers made that point in debate in the state House on Tuesday.

More fundamentally, though, HB 1245 is simply bad policy at any level of government. To repeat, it has done absolutely nothing to get the money out of state politics, and it will do the same for local politics. Even as the bill's backers bemoaned the recent, record-breaking campaign spending in the first-round mayoral elections in Denver and Colorado Springs on April 4, both cities' elections in fact underscored the bill's obliviousness to reality.

Under Denver's recently adopted campaign-contribution limits, the candidates in the current mayoral race raised $10.7 million — compared to $4.6 million total in its 2019 race, before the limits were enacted. And there still are weeks of fund-raising to go before the June 6 runoff vote. In Colorado Springs' municipal election, meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent by independent political groups touting some candidates and smearing others. Those groups wouldn't and, constitutionally, couldn't be curbed by HB 1245. They're beyond its reach.

The House's Democratic majority passed the bill anyway and sent it to the Senate. After all, it's "reform," right?

REPRINTED FROM THE COLORADO SPRINGS GAZETTE

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