Cynthia CoffmanAttorney General Cynthia Coffman represents the legal interests of the people of Colorado as well as the state’s interests, and was doing her job when she joined a federal lawsuit against the BLM’s overreaching hydraulic fracturing regulations that were recently implemented.

Yet the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel is all in a huff because she’s not bowing and scraping to Gov. Hickenlooper and acting as he, and only he commands.

“She’s an attorney without a client,” Jim Spehar wrote in an opinion piece Tuesday. “It’s an action the administration of Gov. John Hickenlooper does not support.”

Or, as Dennis Webb’s original story two weeks ago reported, it’s an action that Hick does not support.

We the people were not aware, that when we the people elected Coffman to represent we the people, that we were supposed to cast our votes for someone to serve solely as the governor’s lackey.

Both articles go on to quote Natural Resources Department Director Mike King explaining that Coffman “is exercising her own independent authority. She has every right to do that. We recognize that.”

Additionally, Coffman wrote a letter to the editor that appeared Sunday further explaining her position:

As a defender of state sovereignty, I stand up for Colorado’s rights as a state against overreach by the federal government. In issuing new regulations on hydraulic fracturing, I believe the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) exceeded its authority under federal law. The right to place parameters on the processes for underground extraction of minerals within Colorado’s boundaries is expressly reserved to the state. When federal agencies overstep their authority as they did here and try to impose additional layers of regulation on top of existing state rules, the state Attorney General’s Office has a responsibility to push back.

But that doesn’t satisfy the Sentinel, which remains adamant in its insistence that Coffman should not have joined the lawsuit because Hickenlooper does not approve. The governor, we are to presume, endorses the federal intervention.

Spehar even goes so far as to defend the burdensome regulations as mere “common sense.”

However, common sense would be an unprecedented departure from the federal government’s historical role of adding multiple layers of redundant bureaucratic complications to cripple private industry while charging excessive fees for the privilege.

We support Coffman’s efforts to defend our state’s right to conduct oversight of oil and gas operations without the added interference of federal bureaucrats from Washington, or the Daily Sentinel.