According to campaign finance reports filed for the first quarter of 2013, Morse made two purchases at the Relax the Back store using campaign funds. Nearly $2,300 in donor money was spent by the Morse for Senate Committee in February and March of this year at Relax the Back.

While finance reports do not list the actual item purchased by the Morse campaign, a quick search of the Relax the Back catalog shows one item customers can purchase in the price range detailed in Morse’s report of expenditures.

“The Cozzia Massage Chair features full body shiatsu massage and a seat lift function for easy exit and stretching,” according to a Relax the Back item listing.

The average individual contribution to Morse’s campaign works out to approximately $140. Based on the expenditures reported to the state, 20 proud Morse campaign donors can claim credit for relaxing the embattled senator’s back.

Additional expenditures in the April 15th report show purchases of office equipment from the Apple Store and phone services from AT&T.

During the first quarter of 2013 Morse has reported only one donation to his campaign, a $250 contribution from David Sparby a resident of St. Paul, Minnesota and Vice President of Xcel Energy.

Xcel Energy lobbyists were listed as monitoring the Renewable Energy Standard Retail Wholesale Methane act, legislation which Morse voted for and which has been dubbed by opponents as a “War on Rural Colorado.”

Morse has a history of questionable accounting; in 2011, a Senate committee investigated the senator over per diem claims that went far beyond to 120 day session.

According to a March 2011 article by The Denver Post, Morse billed the state $99 per day “for 211 days out of 239 off-session days.” Additionally, Morse was one of only 11 who charged the state for all 120 days of the session.

In another instance, an ethics investigation was brought against Morse when news came out that he was payed just $500 for a two bedroom apartment in Denver. As reported by The Gazette in March of 2010, “Morse told the TV station he rents the place, complete with a bedroom jokingly dubbed “The Passion Pit,” for $500 a month,” and said “he is getting a good deal on rent from a friend of 31 years.”

According to Great Education Colorado’s publicly available IRS 990 reports, $120,000 – 55 percent of the group’s $220,000 in total 2011 revenue – was spent on employee salaries. Another 20 percent of Great Education’s budget went to fundraising expenses.

Great Education spent nearly $61,000 on a handful of fundraising events in 2011, twice the standard 10 percent fundraising expense to contribution ratio.

The majority of nonprofit organizations in Colorado devote roughly 20 percent of total expenses to administrative and fundraising overhead, with the rest typically spent on the services each group was established to provide.

Nine of ten nonprofits spend at least 65 percent on programs and services. Charity Navigator, which evaluates nonprofits in order to hold them financially accountable, gives a zero star “Financial Health” rating to any nonprofit that spends more than 33 percent on administrative, fundraising, and other overhead costs.

In 2011, Great Education Colorado spent a whopping 75 percent on salaries and fundraising, which left just $55,000 for education advocacy projects in Colorado.

This year, the small amount of funding Great Education has managed to dedicate to education advocacy went towards efforts to draft and lobby for eight different education initiatives which would amount to a nearly $1 billion tax increase if approved by state referenda.

Great Education submitted its eight ballot proposals to the Colorado legislature last month, each in favor of Senate Bill 213, Senator Mike Johnston’s $1 billion school finance overhaul for the state.

When asked by EdNews Colorado why so many plans were filed in a recent article titled “Lots of Ways to Raise Your Taxes”, Great Education policy director Lisa Weil simply replied, “We wanted to make sure there are as many options as possible.”

Great Education brands itself as a “nonpartisan, grassroots organization that works to inform citizens about critical education resource and reform issues,” with a goal of empowering citizens “to advocate effectively for permanent change in how we invest in our schools and our children.” The group’s entire staff and Board of Directors are registered Democrats who have a consistent history of supporting only liberal candidates and partisan education causes.

Weil has personally contributed several thousand dollars over the last few years to support 21 different Democrat campaigns and issues. This list includes a donation to education union champion Evie Hudak, who currently faces a special election recall after making multiple controversial comments during this year’s legislative session.

Weil has not contributed to any Republican campaigns or issues.

Not only do those who run Great Education support strictly partisan causes under a non-partisan banner, the freshman Democratic Senator Jesse Ulibarri is listed as an active participant on the group’s advisory board. Ulibarri voted in favor of Colorado’s recent school finance overhaul and relied on the strong financial support of local, state, and national education unions to get elected to the Senate last November.

Most recently, Great Education Colorado has partnered with Great Futures Coalition and the 2013: Year of the Students campaign, both of which also backed Senator Johnston’s partisan school finance tax measure.

Despite the clearly partisan nature of Great Education, the enriching of its employees over the education of the public, and its brushes with non-compliance with Colorado’s mandatory reporting requirements, there is no evidence the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has ever challenged its nonprofit tax exempt status as the IRS recently admitted doing to many tax-exempt entities on the right side of the political spectrum.

Perry explicitly noted that these thoughts weren’t directed to those who perpetrated an actual act of terror in Boston, but rather at the NRA, its members, and those in Congress who defend the 2nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Perry went on to refer to senators who opposed recent attempts to restrict Americans’ gun rights as a “craven, lying, sniveling, cowardly” minority before writing, “[b]y using the weapon of choice for all terrorist organizations, extortion, the NRA has forced the action of about 45 ineffectual U.S. senators, a clear act of terrorism and treason.”

Who are these treasonous terrorists Dave Perry thinks should be shipped to Gitmo?

Here is a list of 6 women who might just fit the bill:

1. “The woman had just parked her car when the suspect grabbed her by her hair from behind. Police said he dragged her down a sidewalk until she reached into her purse and pulled out her legally-owned gun.”

2. “The woman was working in an upstairs office when she spotted a strange man outside a window … she took her 9-year-old twins to a crawlspace before the man broke in using a crowbar … The woman then shot him five times, but he survived“

3. “A call came in from a neighborhood north of New Albany city limits at just past 9 after police told WDRB-TV that a woman shot an intruder to her home several times in the chest. The person who was shot was taken to Floyd Memorial Hospital and Health Services in New Albany.”

4. “Donna Hopper had first fired warning shots at the man after she was awakened by the sound of him trying to break into her Branstetter Lane bedroom window just before 4 a.m. … She shot him when he came back and tried to climb inside the window a second time…“

5. “Around 3AM yesterday morning, this group of armed robbers sexually assaulted and robbed at gun point a woman in Lumberton. After the robbery and sexual assault (at the corner of Raider Lane and Village Creek Parkway near the middle and primary schools), the group of 3 black males from Beaumont tried to attack another woman at her home on Dennis Drive in Lumberton. This time though, the woman was exercising her Second Amendment rights, and she pulled out her handgun and shot one of the criminals.”

6. “the woman came home to 5512 Bogan Drive and found two men burglarizing her house. The men told the woman they wouldn’t hurt her if she reached for her purse. She grabbed a handgun out of her purse and fired … The men fled.

In a follow up to his attack on the NRA, Perry again took to the pages of the Aurora Sentinel and wrote another article in which he claimed to have been threatened by angry readers upset with his views on gun control. Perry ended the follow up article with, “If more of us don’t stand up to the NRA, nothing will change.”

Is Perry one of the many that the Pew Research Center noted are unaware of the dramatic decrease in gun violence since 1993?

As reported by the LA Times, “The number of gun killings dropped 39% between 1993 and 2011, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported in a separate report released Tuesday. Gun crimes that weren’t fatal fell by 69%.”

In what seems a desperate attempt to stop the possibility of Sen. Morse’s ouster in a special election, the political action committee (PAC) “A Whole Lot Of People For John Morse” has created a website called “Colorado Recall Watch.”

The site is vaguely eerie, with a black and red color scheme and typesetting apparently meant to resemble a police report. It warns people not to “become a victim,” instructing visitors to listen to a “Public Awareness Alert” linked on the page.

This “alert”, in reality, is an abusive political robocall currently targeting Colorado Springs and Manitou Springs residents, airing on AM radio stations throughout Morse’s district. A man with a deep, serious voice tells the listener that out of state workers are in their neighborhood gathering data on their homes and families.

The advertisement warns residents to be concerned, demand that these petitioners leave their property, and even to report them to the police. At one point, the narrator says: “Criminals, convicted of forgery, fraud, and even sexual assault – if they are not already, these workers will be in your neighborhood soon.”

During the 2012 Presidential campaign, Luke Buchanan, a canvasser for Obama For America, sexually assaulted an unsuspecting 21 year old female resident of Loveland. Colorado Recall Watch does not specify if Buchanan is now working to recall Morse or if this is what the ad may be alluding to.

Nowhere in the call is Morse’s name or campaign mentioned; the word “recall” is used generally and only twice.

One Colorado Springs resident, Karla DeCall, was very disturbed by the call and thought it was from government or safety officials: “The message was very urgent…I thought maybe a child was missing or something.”

However, DeCall noted that recall signature gatherers “did not appear to be criminals to me. They were just trying to follow the political process.”

While the website, robocalls, and radio ads strive to dissuade voters from signing the Morse recall petition through intimidation, characterizing the drive as “data mining,” visitors to the Colorado Recall Watch site will  find two separate requests for the collection of data by Colorado Recall Watch itself.

The site instructs that the first step of action residents should take is to “Decline To Sign” the recall petition against Sen. Morse before requesting that residents “Sign up here if you pledge to protect your family’s personal information…” [emphasis added]. The site then asks the reader to provide personal information including full name, email address, and zip code.

“A Whole Lot Of People For John Morse” spent nearly $2,000 to launch the site and the initial robocalls, according to the PAC’s latest campaign filings with the Colorado Secretary of State. The Colorado Democratic Party has provided $2,100 in funds for website support and voter file access.

Of the $23,000 in donations documented on the TRACER site, 97 percent came from outside Morse’s district.

Morse’s extreme stance on gun control has won the favor and financial backing of several national far-left organizations including America Votes, which accounted for $20,000 in contributions to “A Whole Lot Of People For John Morse” with a check on April 29.

Sen. Morse sponsored a measure earlier this year that would have held gun manufacturers and retailers legally liable for all injury or harm where that weapon was involved, pulling the proposal on the day it was to be introduced due to lack of support from his fellow Democrats.

Morse faces a growing effort by his constituents to unseat him by recall election not only because of legislation he authored on gun control and his alignment with groups like Bloomberg’s Mayor’s Against Illegal Guns group, but also due to his support of SB 252, which would hurt rural energy providers such as Colorado Springs Utilities.

To celebrate the end of this session we have created a top 14 list of some of the best and worst moments in the 69th Session of Colorado’s General Assembly.

1. “I ask for a no vote. Yes, these are all great a wonderful people, but that some of them come back with significant mental health problems…”

2. “High capacity magazines have one purpose and one purpose only. And that is to quickly kill large numbers of people.”

3. “The purpose of high capacity magazines is to steal, kill and destroy”

4. “Don’t you think that if Magpul leaves the state another company will come in and pick up that market?”

5. “Just because you can’t prove decisively that a bill will solve a problem, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to pass the bill to solve the problem.”

6. “Actually, statistics are not on your side, even if you had a gun…. chances are that if you had had a gun, then he would have been able to get that from you and possibly use it against you.”

7. “Letting women conceal carry on campus increases the likelihood of death.”

8. “I just have to say that I believe that promoting people from carrying concealed weapons gives them a false sense of security. Especially women… The prevalence of guns increases the severity of crime. It increases the likelihood of death.”

9. “And you don’t know if you feel like you’re gonna be raped, or if you feel like someone’s been following you around or if you feel like you’re in trouble when you may actually not be, that you pop out that gun and you pop… pop a round at somebody.”

10. “There are other methods of self-defence. There’s mace, what about a taser, the buddy system. Other methods at self-defence, uh, judo or what have you.”

11. “There are other ways to address violence…it doesn’t mean we have our kids exposed to crossfire…very valiant folks have stood up to defend themselves and protect themselves before and they did it will ballpoint pens.”

12. “Who are we kidding, is this a joke? I think our Vice President would call it malarkey. I got a text from several of my constituents and friends that use a more technical term, they call it horse shit! And that’s what this is.”

13. “I would be in jail if I did this as a CFO. This makes Enron look like good accounting.”

14. Hudak: “Here’s a coin you can flip.”
Hill: “I didn’t knock on 20,000 doors to flip a coin.”

Arapahoe County voters found that the centers with shorter lines were often on the other side of the county from their current location or required nearly an hour drive in traffic, which caused many of them to give up or arrive at the center after the polls had closed.

While Medicaid currently consumes more than 20% of Colorado’s annual budget, the Medicaid expansion bill seeks to widen the margin of people who qualify for the government program. State Senators Irene Aguilar (D-District 32) and Mark Ferrandino (D-District 2) are the two sponsors of Senate Bill 200. The current bill to expand Medicaid would increase the program’s eligibility from 100% to 133%, effectively qualifying over 160,000 additional people for the Colorado’s Medicaid system.

According to the Common Sense Policy Roundtable, “Colorado’s Medicaid enrollment is projected to grow 44% by 2014 if state lawmakers opt-in and accept the expansion proposed as part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.” If the Medicaid expansion SB 200 becomes law, Medicaid expenses are expected to grow by $2.5 billion between fiscal year 2011-2012 to fiscal year 2024-2025. This is estimated to consume over 27% of Colorado’s General Fund, over a quarter of the state’s overall budget.

Many in Colorado have expressed concerned about the toll the expansion will have on the budget. According to Michael Tanner from the non-profit, non-partisan Cato Institute, the added burden on Colorado’s annual budget will force the Medicaid program to pull from other state important funded programs, such as K-12 education. Concerns about the current level of Medicaid participants are also being voiced because Medicaid enrollment in the state of Colorado has already reached over 651,000.

Even the bill’s political backers are wary of the unknowns and long term effects of the expansion legislation. Jeremy Schupbach, a Legislative Liaison for Alliance Colorado, supports the bill, but admitted to Media Trackers that the state budget will have to expand to accommodate the significant extra cost, or other essential programs will have to be cut.

“We see it [the expansion] as potentially good by allowing access to better care, although we are wary of how the state budget will expand,” Schupbach said. Alliance Colorado represents Medicaid participants with developmental disabilities. Schupbach also said that his organization will be keeping a close eye on the people his group represents so that they are not financially shorted in any way with the influx of new Medicaid participants.

While the Medicaid expansion bill extends the qualifications for Medicaid participants by widening the state’s participation in government funded healthcare, SB-200 also narrows certain aspects of state funded healthcare recipients by limiting healthcare for the elderly.

According to the bill, “The cash funds appropriation from the old age pension health and medical care fund created in section 7 (c) of Article XXIV of the Colorado constitution is decreased by $1,745,639, for the old age pension state medical program” (SB-200, Section 3, Point 18-20). This section of the legislation would severely limit Colorado’s elderly from receiving state-funded healthcare.

The SB  200 Medicaid expansion bill was introduced on March 1, 2013. It passed the Senate on April 15, and passed the House on April 26 in a 36-23 vote which split closely along party lines.

A total of three briefs were filed to the Colorado Supreme Court on April 26 against the complaint brought by ACLU, which has appealed to the state’s high court against the CSP. Legal representation from Rothberger, Johnson, and Lyons filed an opposition brief on behalf of Douglas County School District.

The Colorado Attorney General and IJ submitted petitions on behalf of the Colorado Board of Education and the families of students involved in the program, respectively.

Last month, the ACLU claimed that the CSP was a “misguided scheme” to use public funds to “subsidize religious institutions,” according to Alex J. Luchenitser, associate legal director of Americans United. The Colorado Court of Appeals disagreed, ruling in favor of the Douglas County School District and lifting the injunction against the program.

The ACLU responded by taking its complaint to the Colorado Supreme Court.

In its petition to the Supreme Court, IJ referenced the case Zelman v. Simons-Harris, wherein the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the arguments of an Establishment Clause challenge to a K-12 scholarship program which IJ called “legally indistinguishable from Douglas County’s.” In a decision very similar to the Colorado Supreme Court’s Americans United (1982) decision, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the program in question with its Zelman decision, saying the program was “neutral with respect to religion” and a matter of “true private choice.”

The U.S. Supreme Court also ruled in the Zelman case that providing a benefit “to a broad class of citizens who, in turn, direct government aid to religious schools wholly as a result of their own genuine and independent private choice” effectively “severs” the link between state funding and religious institutions.

Any “incidental advancement of a religious mission,” the court concluded, “is reasonably attributable to the individual recipient, not to the government.”

In light of Zelman, IJ asserted ”it is now settled that the Establishment Clause permits evenhanded funding of education – religious and secular – through student scholarship.”

Citing further federal precedents, the IJ brief noted that the U.S. Supreme Court has held that excluding religious schools from aid programs is inconsistent with its decisions “prohibiting governments from discriminating in the distribution of public benefits based upon religious status or sincerity.”

The nation’s highest court has repeatedly refused to create religious tests for public benefits that involve discrimination based on an organization’s religious mission, zeal or the sincerity of their held religious beliefs. According to the IJ brief, any such test “violates the constitutional requirement of neutrality toward religion embodied in the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses.”

According to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Everson v. Board of Education (1947), the Free Exercise clause prohibits government “exclud[ing]…members of any…faith, because of their faith, or lack of it, from receiving the benefits of public welfare legislation.” IJ pointed out that just as the Establishment Clause “prohibits the government from favoring religion,” so too does it prohibit government from “discriminating against religion.”

IJ insisted the suit against Douglas County’s CSP rejects precedent, and the cases cited appear to leave the ACLU and other CSP opponents with little ground to stand on.

As such, IJ urged that the case be denied hearing because the ACLU is petitioning the Court “for the very purpose of ignoring Zelman and the other federal post-Americans United cases [...] As the Court of Appeals recognized, ignoring these federal developments was not an option: not only is the religiosity of schools participating in student aid programs constitutionally irrelevant, its consideration is constitutionally forbidden.”

Now that both sides have had the opportunity to present initial briefs, the Colorado Supreme Court will decide whether to take up the case against CSP at some point later this year.

Senate Bill 252 requires rural electric cooperatives to derive 25 percent of their electricity from specially designated renewable sources by 2020. Under current law, which the legislature passed in 2007, rural electric cooperatives must derive 10 percent of their electricity from specially designated renewable sources by 2020.

Colorado Rep. Max Tyler (D-Lakewood)

Consumers Protest Rate Hikes
In the weeks leading up to the committee hearing, alarmed consumers expressed concern about having to shoulder the burden for high-priced renewable power. In testimony before the committee yesterday, however, several legislators and renewable power advocates claimed a rate cap in the law precludes the renewable power mandates from raising electric bills by more than 2 percent.

Illusory Cap
Senate Bill 252 Section 1(g)(I)(A) requires the Colorado Public Utilities Commission (PUC) to “establish a maximum retail rate impact for the applicable renewable energy standard of two percent of the total electric bill annually for each customer. The retail rate impact shall be determined net of new alternative sources of electricity supply from noneligible energy resources that are reasonably available at the time of the determination.”

The bill gives the PUC sole discretion to determine what the comparative costs of applicable renewable power are relative to conventional power alternatives. However, the PUC has substantial wiggle room in making such a determination. Renewable power advocates routinely inflate their wind power and solar power productivity projections, while simultaneously underestimating construction and maintenance costs. Accordingly, if the PUC chooses to accept the renewable power industry’s self-serving production and cost estimates, PUC can justify approving expensive renewable power projects while still claiming to abide by the two-percent rate hike cap.

Gov. John Hickenlooper (D) and former Gov. Bill Ritter (D) appointed the three Public Utilities Commissioners. Hickenlooper and Ritter are both strong advocates of renewable power mandates.

Perhaps more importantly, Senate Bill 252 will require the construction of costly new electricity projects that are not needed to meet electricity demand. Colorado electricity demand is rising at a pace of less than one percent per year, yet Senate Bill 252 requires rural electric cooperatives to construct sufficient renewable energy projects to increase electricity output by 20 percent over the next seven years. Adding all this new renewable power to the electricity mix will require electric utilities to shut down perfectly good conventional power plants.

The PUC, however, is unlikely to consider the unnecessary nature of these mandated renewable power projects. The language of Senate Bill 252 allows the PUC to compare the expected rate impacts of the new renewable power projects to the expected costs of conventional power projects. However, few such new conventional power projects are necessary. Comparing the projected cost estimates of renewable power projects to the projected cost estimates for conventional power projects is an apples-to-apples comparison only if a similar amount of new conventional power generation is necessary and likely to be built. That, however, is not the case in Colorado. Because few new electricity projects are needed by 2020, the estimated costs of the new renewable power projects should be compared to zero rather than compared to the hypothetical cost of new conventional power projects that are not likely to be built under most foreseeable circumstances.

Denver Post Raises Similar Concerns
Even the Denver Post, which has long championed renewable power subsidies and mandates, published an April 10 staff editorial questioning the effectiveness of the asserted rate-hike cap and urging lawmakers to reject Senate Bill 252.

Prices Rising Despite Existing Rate Cap
The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) documents the high real-world costs of Colorado’s existing renewable power mandates. According to the EIA, since the Colorado legislature first enacted renewable power mandates in 2007, electricity prices in Colorado have risen more than twice as fast as the national average. Colorado electricity prices rose more than 20 percent between 2007 and 2012, even though the 2007 law contains a similar ‘two-percent rate hike’ cap.

During Wednesday’s hearings, when House Transportation and Energy Committee Chair Max Tyler (D-Lakewood) was presented with the EIA’s objective data regarding Colorado’s rapidly rising electricity prices, Tyler held up some of his own personal electricity bills and claimed the EIA statewide numbers must be wrong because his own personal electricity bill rose only modestly during the past few years.

The bill, entitled the “Job Protection and Civil Rights Enforcement Act of 2013″, would make it easier for employees to sue their employers or places of business for alleged discrimination. Additionally, as described in the legislation, the bill “would allow the additional remedies of compensatory and punitive damages in employment discrimination cases brought under state law.”

The measure would be a boon for lawyers not only in that it would allow for a greater number of employment and discrimination lawsuits to be filed, it would also provide compensation for attorney fees and costs to be covered if the plaintiff were to prevail in the case.

The bill notes that “[c]urrent law does not permit an award of compensatory or punitive damages or attorney fees and costs to a plaintiff who prevails in a complaint before the Colorado civil rights commission or in a lawsuit alleging a discriminatory or unfair employment practice under state law”. HB 1303 would change this precedent.

Senator Carroll previously worked in employment law at a firm with her mother after she graduated and became an attorney. As of January 1, 2013, Carroll was hired by Bachus & Schanker as a practicing lawyer and as such would stand to benefit financially from the legislation. Carroll would handle cases directly associated with the types of suits that would be allowed if HB 1136 were to be passed. A press release from her law firm confirms this: “On January 1, 2013, Bachus & Schanker welcomed State Senator Morgan Carroll as an attorney in the law firm, working in the areas of mass torts, employment law, and social security.”

As outlined by both the Colorado Constitution and Senate Rules, legislators with conflicts of interests are expected, if not required, to recuse themselves and not vote on the measure before them.

Under Colorado Constitution Art. V, sec. 43, House Rule 21(c), Senate Rules 17(c) and 41, and Joint Rule 42, a member of the General Assembly who has a personal or financial interest in pending legislation is required to disclose the fact of that interest and may not vote on the legislation.

Specifically, Senate Rule 17(c) states that, “Any Senator having a personal or private interest in any question or bill pending, shall disclose such fact to the Senate and shall not vote thereon, and if the vote be by ayes and noes, such fact shall be entered in the journal.”

Ethical principles set forth in statute, such as C.R.S. 24-18-107, also provide guidance in matters of conflict of interest.

For example, former Speaker of the House Frank McNulty (R) recused himself earlier this year on HB 13-1121, a pharmaceutical bill, because he wife is a registered lobbyist for the pharmaceutical industry. Representative Garcia also excused himself from a vote on legislation in the current session. In other recent legislative sessions, Representatives Scott, Weissmann, and Baumgardner have all recused themselves on votes with potential conflicts of interest.

Despite statues and rules which provide ethics guidance, and historical precedent in the use of the same, Morgan not only plans to vote on the bill, but is a primary sponsor listed on the legislation and has spearheaded the debate in the Senate.

Sources inside the capitol have informed Media Trackers that Morgan Carroll will likely vote on the bill this evening in the Senate and may prove to be the deciding vote on the controversial measure.

Aside from her current role as a paid trial lawyer, Carroll’s political campaigns have, without fail, been supported by lawyers associations and lobbyists. Carroll has received nearly $3,000 directly from the Colorado Trial Lawyers Association. Lawyers and lobbyists are the number one financial backer of Carroll’s political campaigns, with the industry contributing $53,177 to her House and Senate races since 2004.

Morgan Carroll's top industry backers, according to Follow the Money.

A total of 502 lobbyists have signed on to the bill, according to 30 pages of online filings with the Colorado Secretary of State’s office. All of the major lawyers associations are in favor of the bill including the Colorado Trial Lawyers Association, the Plaintiff Employment Lawyer’s Association, and the Colorado Bar Association.

In addition, key union groups such as 9to5, AFL-CIO, AFSCME, and the United Transportation Union have rallied behind the measure. One Colorado, the Bell Policy Center, and nearly a dozen other liberal advocacy organizations across the state have also hired lobbyists to argue in favor of the partisan legislation.

Those in opposition to the the bill are regional business alliances and chambers of commerce from all across the state including Denver, Aurora, Colorado Springs, Douglas County, and Jefferson County.