Was the 2015 legislative session as bad as 2014?
Hello,
As the 2015 Colorado legislative session comes to a close, the often-asked question will be “was it as bad as last year for small business?” If one followed the 2014 session, they found a very anti-business sentiment among the majority party—comments such as “business does not care about their employees” or “I wasn’t elected to worry if businesses survived or not,” and the famous “employer mandates do nothing to affect a business remaining solvent.”
So in comparison I would say no, the 2015 session was not nearly as bad for NFIB membership as the previous session. But, there was a distinct difference in the 2015 session over 2014. In 2014, the legislature was under one-party rule. In 2015, the Republicans managed to capture control of the state Senate, creating split houses. So what effect did this change have, one may ask? Had it not been for the legislature being split, businesses would have suffered more damage than the 2014 and 2013 sessions combined. Having the House controlled by one party and the Senate by the other allowed extreme legislation from both houses to be introduced as freely as water flowing through a creek, knowing that the check and balance created by the split houses would provide the necessary backstop preventing damaging legislation from ever seeing the light of day. So to sum it up, the 2015 session was a better session for small business than 2014 but not because there were fewer anti-business pieces of legislation, but because in November of 2014 Colorado voters looked back on the consequences of one-party control over the legislature and choose to restore balance to the process. The real winners turned out to be the citizens of Colorado.
Sincerely,
Tony Gagliardi, NFIB/Colorado State Director
