Five years into Obama’s high unemployment and anemic economic growth, it’s difficult to imagine that lawmakers would enact rules to frustrate private sector hiring.  But once again, Colorado Democratic lawmakers target small business owners in a year they dedicated to creating economic opportunity and prosperity.  The latest affront comes under the farcically-named Employment Opportunity Act that Governor Hickenlooper signed into law on April 19th.

This new law allows the government to pull up a chair beside the hiring manager, and  forbids a small business owner from running a credit check on a potential new hire.  True to form with a lot of these types of restrictions, the government writes itself out of the bill, by listing numerous government jobs that do not have to comply with the law. Well-funded special interests such as banks and financial institutions earned passes as well.

But not exempted were mom-and-pop retail stores and restaurants.  In fact, the law goes straight after those businesses by explicitly stating that access to customer financial information that would be customary in a retail transaction would not be grounds for an exemption to this law.

This law was jammed through both houses of the Colorado legislature on straight party line votes. It says a lot when not a single Republican would vote for this bill, and not a single Democrat voted against it. It’s just another example of unnecessary regulation that causes businesses to think twice about setting up shop in Colorado.