Author Archives: ColoradoPeakPolitics

As we reported this morning, Democrats from the Fiscal Policy Institute attempted to hijack Coloradans’ wallets via a wholesale repeal of TABOR, the taxpayer bill of rights, which requires a vote of the people in order to raise taxes. In short, it’s the one thing standing between Democrats and Colorado turning into California.

For those not interested in a terrible quality of life (minus the ocean), there’s great news.

Today, the title board denied these crazy liberals their pocket robbing. Apparently, repealing TABOR isn’t so easy. Simply repealing the amendment in the state constitution is not possible via ballot initiative (or any other process with which we are familiar) because it violates the requirement that ballot initiatives be single subject. If lefties want to repeal TABOR, they will have to do so the same way you’d eat any elephant – one piece at a time.

Sucks to be them.

For the rest of us, it’s a huge win. For now. Buckle up, PeakNation™, this isn’t the first assault on TABOR to gain greater access to your cash.

Sarcastic congratulations are in order to liberal education blog Chalkbeat Colorado for being the first to report that Denver voters strongly support the city’s teachers going on strike if union demands aren’t met:

“The telephone survey of 600 randomly selected Denver voters found that 82 percent of respondents side with the teachers over the school board on salary negotiations and that 62 percent would support teachers going on strike if there is no resolution by the end of January, the union said in a press release. Parents of Denver Public Schools students, those most affected by a potential strike, reported even higher levels of support.”

“The union did not release the actual questions asked in the poll. Though the results contrasted public support for teachers and the school board, district administrators like Superintendent Susana Cordova and Chief Financial Officer Mark Ferrandino are negotiating with the union, not the board.”

The U.S. Census next year may exclude a question regarding citizenship when it collects the number of residents to determine congressional seats.

A federal judge ruled against the question Tuesday, now the case is expected to go to the U.S. Supreme Court for a final decision.

Despite what many critics claim, the citizenship question is not new to the Trump administration, nor is it intended to round up illegal immigrants.

History of Census citizenship question.

The 2010 Census showed 17.5 million non-citizens living in the country, and 286.9 million U.S. citizens, and we failed to notice a crackdown then on immigration raids across the country.

The Justice Department says it needs the information to better enforce the Voting Rights Act.

And, the Census Bureau already conducts a monthly survey used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics for unemployment numbers, and since 1994 has asked about citizenship, country of birth, and year of arrival in the U.S.

But for some reason, liberal critics now claim asking the question will prevent some from filling out census forms, which are required of all residents who face a fine if they refuse.

State Senate President Leroy Garcia claims the question will have some form of chilling effect on Colorado.

Asking about citizenship on the 2020 #census would harm Colorado. Last year we spoke out on this issue. Every voice matters — I am glad to hear the courts have ordered this question be removed from the census. #copolitics https://t.co/acQ47tFMKP

— Leroy Garcia (@Leroy_Garcia) January 15, 2019

We suspect this is the real reasons Democrats want the question stricken from the Census.

For instance, if the citizenship question survives the long court battle, it could cost California several congressional seats by removing illegal immigrants from the re-districting population counts.

Uh oh. All those illegal immigrants Democrats have hungered for as voters, might actually cost them a congressional seat. And power.

Today, the title board, which is just an initial step for ballot initiatives, will weigh in on a proposal submitted by the Fiscal Policy Institute to repeal TABOR.

In case you’ve been living under a rock or are immune to whining by Democrats, TABOR is the Taxpayers Bill of Rights, and it’s the one thing standing in the way of Democrats turning Colorado into California. TABOR requires that politicians (or anyone, really) get a vote of the people before raising taxes. Seems like a great idea, right? Democrats hate it because it keeps their hands out of our wallets. On the other hand, voters love it because it keeps Democrats’ hands out of our wallets.

The proposal for today is relatively simple. It simply repeals the constitutional amendment. Some have dubbed this a nuclear option.

This isn’t the first time the Fiscal Policy Institute has proposed something insane. FPI was behind other tax hikes, including Proposition 103, which would have been a five-year, $3 billion tax increase. FPI leader Carol Hedges response when the initiative failed? We should have asked for more. Crazy town.

We can’t imagine voters, who absolutely don’t trust politicians, will cede their decision-making authority about taxes hikes to a bunch of politicians. Don’t worry, PeakNation, this is just the most extreme of attempts to repeal TABOR. TABOR will be under attack all session long at the state legislature. We’ll keep you posted.

Today, Democrat State Rep. Emily Sirota’s bill to set individual campaign contribution limits to candidates for county level office flew through the Democrat-controlled State, Veterans, and Military Affairs Committee.  The measure is wrapped in the age old battle cry “let’s get big money out of politics.”

Currently, there is no limit on what an individual can contribute to county level offices, which include commissioner, treasurer, clerk, assessor, coroner, and surveyor.  Sirota’s bill would set the combined primary and general limit at $1,250 for an individual, $12,500 for a small donor committee, and $22,125 for a political party.

Notice that there is no limit listed for independent expenditure committees.  This is not an accidental omission.

Democrats have massive infrastructure around well-funded organizations such as unions, which can provide both human and financial capital to campaigns.  They have also proven to have a deep bench of rich donors ready and willing to stand up shadow groups of dark money. This legislation does not impact that in the least.

Democrats don’t really want to take the money out of politics, they simply want to mute the effect that a Republican’s dollars would have on a race. All this bill does is send money underground without disclosure, which we imagine Democrats would claim they want.

Of course if they actually wanted to take money out of politics, they would simply endeavor to reduce the size and influence of government – but we know that is not going to happen under the current regime.

The good news for John Hickenlooper is the Colorado Independent Ethics Commission has shortened the list of ethical complaints it will investigate.

The bad news: There’s an actual list of potential law breaking by the former governor — secret gifts and favors that violate state ethics laws.

The Ethics Commission voted unanimously to begin the investigations.
Permit us to be the first to say, ouch.

The list was shortened to exclude complaints that were outside the commission’s time jurisdiction — only those occurring in the previous year.

They also took trips to Canada and Aspen off the list after Hick showed statements of payment, and some costs to Italy for the Bilderberg Meetings trip, but not all.

The ethics complaints were filed by former House Speaker Frank McNulty with the Public Trust Institute.

Here’s what Hick’s on the hook for ethically, as reported by Colorado Politics:

Turin, Italy: Who paid for Hick’s meals, car travel and other Bilderberg conference expenses? Was it Fiat Chrysler, the conference’s sponsor?

Groton, Connecticut: Who paid for Hick’s travel to the USS Colorado commissioning? Was it aboard a private jet owned by Larry Mizel of M.D.C. Holdings?

New Jersey: A private jet owned by Kenneth Tuchman, founder of an outsourcing company, flew Hick to be with his wife there for surgery, and back for his State of the State address.

Jackson Hole, Wyoming: American Enterprise Institute Conference, Hick traveled to the meeting aboard private aircraft owned his chief of staff.

Who knew government employees could afford their own planes?

This doesn’t bode well for Hick’s presidential or Senate aspirations. It will be a rocky campaign with all of these ethical allegations and investigations hanging over his head.

We reported earlier that non-essential government workers will still get paid for not working once the government reopens.

It’s like a paid vacation, only their paycheck will be a little late — four days and counting.
As it turns out, many park service employees — the biggest whiners during every government shutdown — will actually get paid double for their work at Yellowstone.

And at 17 other national parks across the country, including Rocky Mountain, volunteers have stepped in to do the government’s job.

Private businesses are dishing up thousands of dollars a day to pay park service employees to groom more than 300 miles inside Yellowstone to cater to snowmobilers and a major resort.

Ironically, snowmobile operators already pay a fee for those services. So businesses are paying twice for a service, and park employees will get paid twice for their work.

At Rocky Mountain National Park as well as the National Mall in Washington, D.C., Libertarians are picking up garbage and removing trash.

“As Libertarians, we advocate replacing federal taxpayer funding for many services with private charity or privatization,” said Libertarian National Committee Chair Nicholas Sarwark. “We wanted to show how this could be accomplished by volunteering in our local communities.”

And show us, they did. Some members of an environmental group actually had a flashback of their core mission, got off their lazy butts and pitched in as well.

It appears the National Park Service has actually done us a favor during this shutdown, and showed us that many of their workers are in fact, non-essential.

Five minutes after federal employees didn’t get their first paycheck Friday from the shutdown, the media meltdown about starving workers went full blast along with moaning and the gnashing of teeth over tax returns, food stamps and closed parks.

There’s been hardly any mention of the legislation Congress also passed last week to pay back all affected workers as soon as the government reopens, regardless of their scheduled pay dates.

That means the 420,000 federal employees deemed essential and still working will be paid for their work.

And, it also means the 380,000 employees not working because of the shutdown, will also get paid through that time period for not working.

The media likes to call them furloughed workers, but when businesses are forced to furlough workers, those employees don’t get paid.

So they’re not really furloughed workers so much as they are on paid vacations and their checks are three days late so far.

We are sympathetic to all the workers for getting late paychecks, and of course it means hardship for many, but it’s nowhere near the catastrophe being portrayed by the Trump-hating media.

As for the closed parks, sidelined recreation is not exactly the end of the world. And it turns out food stamps were actually issued earlier than usual, while tax returns will be handled per usual — about four weeks after we ask for our money back.

This morning, the Colorado Supreme Court unanimously reversed a split ruling from the state’s Court of Appeals regarding the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission’s approach to new energy development.

To make a five-year story short, in 2013, young Boulder activists linked up with out-of-state lawyers to sue the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC), the regulatory body that oversees the oil and gas industry. These folks would like for you to believe today that their concern was simply that the COGCC doesn’t sufficiently weigh health and safety concerns when issuing permits to oil and gas companies, which by the way, is a complete false narrative.

History tells a very different story. Turns out, their stated intention from the outset of this saga was to shutter Colorado’s oil and gas industry entirely. Don’t take our word for it, take their word for it:

If you are following tdday’s Martinez vs. COGCC ruling, let’s recall the goal of the litigation.
In a 2013 interview when the petition was filed, the lead plaintiff said the goal was “a statewide ban” not new regulations #copolitics pic.twitter.com/848dbr3AjS

— Simon R. Lomax (@simonrlomax) January 14, 2019

From that lens, we were hardly surprised that the state’s highest court decided to side with the literal and metaphoric adults in the room.

In the wake of the (again, unanimous) ruling, Colorado’s new liberal leadership has decided that the best way to circumvent a ruling on a law from the state Supreme Court is to… change the law. We wish we were kidding:

In response to the CO Supreme Court ruling in Martinez v. COGCC today: pic.twitter.com/OyO5OLgpCt

— KC Becker (@kcbecker) January 14, 2019

This, after Proposition 112 failed by double-digits on the very night that the Democrats won every major race in Colorado.

It’s getting tiresome to have to repeat that elections have consequences. Colorado’s Democrats have decided that your vote on Proposition 112 didn’t matter, and neither does a pesky ruling from the state’s preeminent arbiter of justice. They want to have their way in spite of these realities, and they’ll abruptly change our laws to get it done.

How very democratic.

Judge Laurie Booras showed herself the door after a panel recommended her removal for calling some folks nasty names, and revealing a decision four weeks before she issued a ruling.

We deem it necessary to point out, since the Denver Post did not, the Colorado Appeals Court judge was appointed to that seat in 2009 by former Gov. Bill Ritter, a Democrat.

She was retained by voters in 2012.

Her transgressions include referring to a fellow jurist as “the little Mexican” in an email.

In another email, she called her ex-husband’s wife a “squaw.”

The woman she referred to is Native American, and the term is considered offensive in many tribal circles. Some would argue S-Word=C-Word.

The judges unanimously determined Booras violated three canons of the Code of Judicial Conduct and asked the Colorado Supreme Court to assess Booras $5,442 to cover the costs of a lengthy investigation and a hearing carried out in secret.

Her conduct indeed was most unbecoming for a judge, not to mention shockingly insensitive and belligerent for a Democratic appointee.