Akaka Favors Updating Hatch Act
Sen. Dan Akaka is a co-sponsor of legislation to update a 1939 law that prohibits federal employees from running in partisan elections “but also places the same restriction on state and local government workers whose jobs are connected to federal dollars.”
That’s according to an article in The Seattle Times. Excerpt:
The law is named for its author, the late Sen. Carl Atwood Hatch, a Democrat from New Mexico who served from 1933 to 1949. It was aimed at ending patronage abuses on Depression-era public works projects — where people were sometimes coerced to work in a campaign as a condition for getting a job, or had to kick back a portion of their pay as a political contribution.
