A top adviser to House Speaker Dickey Lee Hullinghorst was forced to leave the Capitol today for violating House rules that prohibit someone from holding a staff position while simultaneously running for partisan office.
Jenise May – staffer by day, candidate by night
Former state lawmaker Jenise May, who lost her Adams County House seat in a major upset last year, was hired by Hullinghorst to work for the House Democrats in an attempt to warehouse her for a run for Senate. Her new job was announced in a Denver Post political blog on Dec. 11, 2014 and she filed to run for Senate District 25 on Jan. 2, 2015.
We get it… May lost her seat and needed a job to tide her over until she could run again. It’s so obvious it makes our brains hurt.
So when Hullinghorst told The Durango Herald: “It was a mistake. It was a complete surprise, I think, to both of us,” nobody can seriously believe her.
It is such an obvious conflict of interest that we’re kind of shocked they are pretending like they were unaware of the issue. As a legislative staffer, May served as a gatekeeper to the Speaker and the rest of the Democratic caucus. That kind of leverage shouldn’t be allotted to someone with a political agenda of her own.
After being confronted about the violation, May told the Herald she would close her campaign:
“I’m just going to go home,” May said, as she was walking to her car to leave the Capitol. “I’m just going to close my candidacy. What else can I do? It’s a policy, I didn’t even know. I just found out. … All I can do is say I left, what more?”
“What more?” she asks? May and Hullinghorst could actually try reading the rules. Ignorance is never a viable excuse, and in this case, not even a believable one.
As a long-ago former high-level, partisan legislative staffer myself, now "retired" and writing books while I still am able, I occasionally visit the Capitol and am invited by one GOP lawmaker or another to be a quiet, respectful guest sitting on the side bench on the House floor. As I've sat there three times this session, I was appalled to see this same former rep act as an extra "Member" in her very-forward manner of "advising" Dem freshmen, parading around the chamber doing almost everything her elected former colleagues do except vote. Now that the move to campaign, to compete for what will be an open Senate seat in 2016, coupled with her simultaneous, paid, non-elective House advisory role, has been exposed by Colorado Peak Red Alert Politics, she should be released permanently from the latter, not just go home for the day.