To keep and bear arms. To be tried by a jury of one’s peers. To be secure against unlawful search and seizure. To party. The list of rights which are seen as universal and inalienable has been in flux since Locke and his contemporaries first hammered out the concept in the 17th and 18th centuries. This year, a number of ballot initiatives seek to make additions to Colorado’s own unique list of rights.
Attempting to amend Colorado’s constitution is not uncommon, and the two would-be amendments which are the focus of this week’s Muckraker ballot guide in-progress are not the only ones which will be vying for votes in November. Yet both stand out for just how odd and specific they are. I have grouped them together in this entry for both their similarities and their differences. Both seek to add rights to the constitution, and both have ties to the Advance Colorado political machine. But where one is mostly superfluous, doubling-down on rights which already exist, the other is more sinister, enshrining new rights for oil companies even as the toll of manmade climate change grows more dire every year.
Initiative 302 – The Right to Hunt & Fish
Initiative 302* seeks to enshrine a right to hunt and fish in Colorado’s constitution. Though the organization formally backing the initiative is named the International Order of T. Roosevelt (IOTR), the attorney attached to the filings is Suzanne Taheri, whose law office is also the headquarters of Advance Colorado. The same address is used for the campaign to back Initiative 302.
And Taheri isn’t the only connection between the initiative and right-wing billionaires: IOTR’s executive director, Luke Hilgeman, previously served as CEO of the Koch Brothers-founded Americans for Prosperity.
But what interest do various networks of plutocrats have in the right to hunt and fish? The text of the initiative is fairly anodyne. At first blush, it is difficult to see how the issue dovetails with the kind of bottom-line interests which usually attract billionaire funding. Thankfully, as conservation organization Wildlife for All pointed out, a June op-ed by Hilgeman in Outdoor Life gives us a better idea of the strategy.
“These amendments aren’t just words on paper,” Hilgeman wrote. “Their real power lies in the case law they create — solid, precedent-setting barriers that make it far harder for groups to erode hunting and fishing, either through the next wave of emotional ballot initiatives or through overreach by city councils and state wildlife commissions.”
In other words, the point of attempting to wedge this language into the state constitution is to conjure a legal wedge to use against future environmental regulations.
As it stands, the right to hunt and fish has not been infringed in Colorado, nor are there any plans to infringe upon it any time soon. So the initiative is not a response to a clear and present danger, or even policy trends – it’s an attempt to insert language into Colorado’s constitution which would serve, in Hilgeman’s language, as “precedent-setting barriers” against future efforts.
In that context, the plutocratic interest in the seemingly anodyne initiative makes all the sense in the world: industrialists like the Kochs and their contemporaries have spent decades funding climate change denial and opposition to conservation efforts in order to protect the profit margins of their manufacturing interests.
When advocating for a similar initiative in Ohio earlier this year, Hilgeman told a reporter that the other benefit of this kind of initiative is that it “could help mobilize Republican-leaning voters.”
Verdict: At best, Initiative 302 would weigh down the state constitution with language which has no need to be in the state constitution. At worst, it is a Trojan Horse to complicate future efforts against climate change. Vote no.
Initiative 177 – The Right to Natural Gas
Where Initiative 302 appears to be a covert effort to protect oil companies and corporate polluters with constitutional language, Initiative 177* is a frontal assault to achieve the same goal. The initiative would grant consumers the right to purchase natural gas, and would grant companies and utilities the right to sell natural gas. No other state has ever enshrined the rights. The initiative is being backed by Advance Colorado, and, true to form, it is a naked giveaway to corporate interests in defiance of every available bit of climate science. One of Advance Colorado’s major funders, Phil Anschutz, is heavily invested in natural gas.
The initiative is self-evidently absurd. Putting language in the constitution to guarantee in perpetuity that specific commercial interests have a constitutional right to sell their product – an effort which, if passed, could protect billions of dollars in profit for oil and gas companies in coming years – would be the height of cronyism. Add to that picture the fact that the product in question is regarded by the settled science of climate change as a significant contributor to global emissions, and it becomes clear that Initiative 177 is nothing but a callous attempt to generate short-term shareholder profits at the cost of your grandchildren’s lives.
Though I am bracing myself for the bad faith arguments Advance and the initiative’s other backers will bring to the table, in this particular instance my trepidation about how the initiative will be communicated to the voting public centers more on the local news than on the local propagandists.
Mainstream media’s coverage of the politics of climate change got stuck in time somewhere around a decade and a half ago and never came unstuck. As a result, anchors and pundits tend to still treat the issue as a hard-fought, 50-50 battle between those who believe (or understand, as the case may be) climate science and those who do not. In reality, according to a 2026 Gallup poll, 64% of American adults understand that human activity has caused climate change. Only 33% evade that fact.
And that’s precisely why I’m worried about the role the mainstream media will play in informing Colorado voters about Initiative 177. Taken at face value, it’s likely that a majority of adults would reject the pro-climate-change initiative. After the initiative is filtered through the both-sidesing whatabout machine of the mainstream media, though, it’s not hard to imagine voters coming away with more equivocal feelings about it – after all, they will have just had it presented to them not as a bald-faced corporate giveaway in defiance of settled science but as a he-said-she-said issue where all views are equally valid.
Verdict: A truly ludicrous attempt at law-making, Initiative 177 should not just be rejected, it should be disdained. Vote no.
* In the coming weeks, as the ballot is finalized, the ballot initiatives will change numbers. Initiatives 302 and 177 will each become Amendment [something]. I’m sure there’s a good reason for this, but it’s confusing every year. After the ballot is finalized, I will update this piece to reflect the final names.
