Virginian-Pilot

DATE: Monday, July 7, 1997                  TAG: 9707040010

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B8   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Editorial 

                                            LENGTH:   46 lines




ALLEN EDICT LIGHTEN UP

Does accepting a political patronage job in Virginia mean you forfeit your First Amendment rights to free speech?

Apparently so, according to Bruce C. Morris, former director of the Department of Criminal Justice Services. Morris announced this week that he'd rather give up his $87,000 a year job than his right to support the political candidate of his choice.

Morris' boss, Gov. George F. Allen, has made a point of remaining neutral in intraparty affairs during his term in office. Much to the chagrin of moderates in his party, Allen stayed above the fray in the spring of 1994 when Ollie North and Jim Miller were slugging it out for the party's nomination for U.S. Senate. He did so again this spring during the hotly contested four-way race for the Republican nomination for attorney general.

But Allen apparently is not content with his own noninvolvement. Through his chief of staff, Jay Timmons, Allen has decreed that other members of his administration must follow his lead. According to reports in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Timmons last Tuesday told the staff that if they contributed to any Republican candidate during the primary, they were bound to make equal contributions to other Republican candidates seeking the same office.

That was a rude surprise to Morris, who had contributed $100 on June 10 to help former Secretary of Safety Jerry W. Kilgore pay off the debt on his unsuccessful campaign.

Timmons' announcement last week put Morris in the position of being forced to contribute like amounts to Mark Earley, Ken Stolle and Gil Davis or to somehow retrieve his contribution from Kilgore.

That prospect was so unpalatable to Morris that he resigned his job in protest.

How ironic that the governor would order appointees - who secured their positions, after all, through political activism - to remain apolitical in the recent Republican races for fear their partisanship would somehow reflect badly on him.

Morris says the edict is unconstitutional. He's probably wrong, since political appointees serve at the pleasure of the governor and can be terminated for almost any reason.

We applaud Allen for continuing the tradition of the commonwealth's chief executive refusing to meddle in primary politics. But Timmons' after-the-election edict is overly intrusive.



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