An update on the current special session. Of course the Democrats don’t pay a price for what they do in Colorado: neither by their voters or many in the media.
The special session on property taxes is a couple days old by this point and already several of the bills on the table are dead.
After a series of closed-door meetings that included stakeholders (not you) the governor called a special session to see if a deal could be struck to offer property tax relief and avoid the two property tax measures from being on the ballot.
There's a ton of drama here: if you're not on twitter and/or watching other political and media social media channels you'll just have to take my word for it. Angst, hand-wringing, accusations, you'll see a hint of it in a subsequent post today.
Let's stick closer to policy here. Quoting the Sum and Substance article linked first below:
"Colorado legislators winnowed 13 property-tax bills down to just four during the first day of a special session Monday but put a bill at the center of a governor-negotiated deal on a collision course with a constitutional amendment that could upend that deal."
My summary (and you can read up for more detail in the Sum and Substance article or the Colorado Sun's progressive oriented take linked below that) on what's coming out so far is as follows:
--There are a handful of "important" bills that are advancing. I say important here because they are the ones that the governor and his party faithful are hoping to get across the finish line so the property tax initiatives stay off the ballot. See screenshot 1 attached, a chopped up picture taken from the Sun article.
--I say important too because if you look at the the one at the top of the list you see one that will be monkeying with our state constitution. Anything tinkering with the constitution needs extra care and attention.
--There is some, though not entire, bipartisan agreement on these bigger bills. Some Republicans are holding out and some of the more progressive Democrats are too.
Things will happen quickly as they often do with our legislature and so by the time I get around to another update on it, it will be post-passage.
If you want to keep more abreast of changes, I might recommend Free State Colorado. Mr. Wark tends to do a better job than I of current moves in the legislature. Complete Colorado's aggregator is another good one: you'll see lots of links there.
As I was writing this, I got an email from Liberty Scorecard with their recommendations for property tax relief and a call for contacting your state rep and/or senator. Their list is attached as screenshot 2 if you want to speak up and find some talking points helpful in getting you started.
https://coloradosun.com/2024/08/27/special-session-progressive-property-tax-bills/
Of course the Democrats don’t pay a price for what they do in Colorado.
Quoting the op ed below:
"Democrats at the Colorado Legislature are increasingly hostile to open government, and they have learned that they will pay little or no price for drawing a curtain around their work."
No s**t huh?
Last week saw a couple of pretty high profile op eds about the Democrats making full use of their newly-minted government secrecy law, Senate President Fenberg's law that exempted the legislature from Colorado Open Meetings law.
While I'm grateful for them speaking up, I wish those that wrote the op eds would have been a little more proactive in their tough words for Colorado Democrats.** Op eds and articles are a good start, but they should have come to the hearings with me and CFOIC and told the legislators directly that this was crap.
Not the point here, however. My first point is there in the quote above, specifically the part about the Democrats paying little to no price for their rewrite of a decades-old law about government transparency.
Of course they won't. This is Colorado. What are these people going to suddenly start voting Republican or something?
Tribalism demands that those voters who are paying attention stick with Democrats because the other side, well, they're crazy!
That is the fist point. You hear a relentless drum beat about Republicans and their tribalism from the left-leaning media, but what you don't often hear is the other half of the story. Just as Republicans stick by their candidates despite bad behavior, Democrats stick by theirs despite THEIR bad behavior.
Don't forget it. Tribalism is not something that one side of the political aisle indulges in exclusively. It's a human condition and thus cuts across party lines.
My second point is probably best exemplified with yet another quote. This one from Democratic Rep Steve Woodrow in the commentary: "As a legislator, we were involved in the process, if you can call it a process, very late, so much so that I think there's a sentiment on both sides of the aisle that we're viewed as a rubber stamp."
He's not the only Democrat expressing this sentiment, but his encapsulated the feeling well.
Sorry Steve, but I have difficulty in feeling sympathy for you or anyone else that aided, abetted, and benefited from the construction/operation of the Democrat political machine in this state.
You kept your mouth shut when the machine was doing what you wanted. You voted in lockstep. Now, likely due to fears about how they'll be labeled, your fellow machine parts are not working like you think they should and you're upset?
Now, when it's YOU that suffers from lack of transparency, lack of process it's a crisis?
Give me a break.
**This measure passed on an almost entirely party line vote.
It's different when it's the Democrats though!
Remember the national flap when Sun reporter Sandra Fish got kicked out of the private GOP meeting she was told not to attend? A meeting where internal Republican business was discussed? A meeting that involved no decisions on state policy?
See below if you've forgotten.
I'm old enough to remember the huge flap this caused, something hinted at by the fact that the link below is from national press outlet.
Democrats recently held a couple of closed caucus meetings where they almost certainly had some policy discussions (though they vigorously deny this), something now legal due to their passing Senate President Fenberg's exemption of the legislature from Open Meetings Law.
Sandra Fish try to get in? Did any reporters try to get in?
Best I could find was that the Sun tried to log on to a virtual one and was denied, and possibly a Denver Post reporter tried to log on (or physically get in, I'm less certain as to whether this meeting was virtual). Outside of them, I'm not sure if any other reporters tried.
They took to Twitter to discuss their attempts. See the attached screenshot from the Denver Post reporter Klamann's account to see both simultaneously.
Good on them that they tried to. This is, after all, a meeting where important decisions affecting your wallet are almost surely being discussed in secret.
Did you catch what's missing, however? The widespread outrage. The outrage that raised such a stink that it got all the way to the Washington Post.
Care to make a quick guess as to why? It starts with D and ends in emocrat.
That is, the reason this isn't national news, the reason why I've not seen Sandra Fish speaking out in favor of the First Amendment and Freedom of the Press, is that this is Democrats doing it.
After all, it's not a threat to democracy when they do it!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/04/09/colorado-gop-assembly-reporter/