On Saturday, Democrats finally used the rules of procedure in the Colorado House of Representatives to say to Republicans what those of us who put Democrats in charge of seventy percent of the lower chamber of the state legislature have been hoping they’d say for a pretty long time, “enough.”
Silverii Dick Wadhams, chair of the Colorado Republican Party from 2007-2011 and I have never met. When I moved to Colorado, he was known as Colorado’s Karl Rove. That is to say, a cynical but effective operator, and he had the record to back it up. Wadhams also had a penchant for coining (or hijacking) insulting nicknames (i.e., “Boulder Liberal Mark Udall,” “Lawyer Lobbyist Tom Strickland” ) and working for racist candidates (i.e., former U.S. Sen. Conrad Burns (R-MT), who said a deplorable anti-Black racial slur to a newspaper editor, and former Gov. George Allen (R-VA) of “Macaca” infamy). Ironically, this makes old Dick quite a bit like the man he accuses of destroying nearly everything Wadhams built in Colorado over his career, one Donald J. Trump.
Silverii In January, 2020, the Pew Research Center released one of the most depressing pieces of public policy research I’ve ever seen. Titled “What Americans Know about the Holocaust,” the research showed more than a few things that prove the right wing project of eliminating quality public education that even remotely grazes uncomfortable topics has been at least moderately successful. There are some glimmers of hope in the survey results, for instance, almost 70% of respondents correctly identified the 1930 -1950 period as when the Holocaust happened, 63% knew that ghettos were the parts of town where Nazis forced Jews to live, and 66% correctly said, “annihilation of Jews” when asked “as far as you know, what does ‘“the Holocaust’” refer to?”
On Tuesday, I had the distinct honor of accompanying my wife, who also happens to be my new congresswoman, to President Biden’s State of the Union address. Congressman Jason Crow, an Army Ranger, brought Richard Fierro, himself an Army veteran and Colorado Springs beer magnate who heroically stopped the anti-LGBTQ hate-fueled shooting spree at Club Q last November. Rep. Joe Neguse brought Ellen Mahoney, who lost her husband Kevin in yet another numbingly routine mass shooting in Colorado in 2021. Even Rep. Lauren Boebert had the good sense to bring luminous Colorado Mesa University President John Marshall as her guest for the evening. I, whom the Colorado Sun described as a “political consultant,” felt pretty underqualified to be sitting alongside these Colorado heroes.
Conservative policies presume that if you get government out of the way, the magic of the free market will create enough prosperity that the demand on government services will be reduced or eliminated and that the market will also somehow handle social services like homelessness, substance use disorder, and the other negative externalities that bedevil society.
Congresswoman Lauren Boebert (R-CO) humiliated herself, her district, and indeed the whole state of Colorado last week. Again.
Republicans are mounting a comeback in Colorado. You wouldn’t know it looking at the election results from the past few years, but really, they’re trying.
The United States of America is a country that exists today in large part because of the genocide of roughly 55 million people indigenous to this continent, as well as the enslavement of at least 4.4 million kidnapped or trafficked Africans.
Georgia Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene will be the headline speaker at this year’s Lincoln Day Dinner fundraiser for the El Paso County Republican Party on August 6. If you’re not familiar with “MTG,” she’s the deplorable Holocaust trivializer, “big lie” enthusiast, anti-Muslim racist elected to Congress in 2020. And, thanks to Colorado’s Lauren Boebert, Greene is also known as the “other” QAnon conspiracy theory promoter in the House Republican caucus.
It’s becoming increasingly clear that there are two types of politicians these days: the performative obstructionists and the representative workhorses. The performative politician evaluates their success or failure based on how much attention they get on social media, cable news, or partisan radio programs. The latter worries more about constituent services, the bills they pass, and how well they represent the constituents of their district.
