DENVER — Colorado’s 2012 Legislature may not have achieved greatness. It may not have risen above partisan divide to solve complex problems and unify a state. It may not have addressed the state’s economic malaise or found a way to reliably fund education for the long term.
DENVER– Outmaneuvered over the last six days in a legislative chess game centered on a gay-rights civil unions bill here, the Colorado Speaker of the House on Tuesday, the second-to-last day of the session, effectively turned over the board. Frank McNulty, a Republican from Highlands Ranch, walked out of the House at roughly 9 p.m. and stayed away for more than two hours, letting a recess run all the while and killing the civil unions bill and nearly 40 other bills in the process.
The Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR) has been part of life in Colorado since 1992. Today TABOR was tested in court for the first time in Kerr v State of Colorado. Today’s hearing–on a motion by the state to dismiss the suit–may be the end, or it may be the first step in a long hard road.
The Colorado Legislature acted quickly and in bipartisan fashion today to require biweekly campaign finance disclosures in advance of this year’s primary elections in June.
If Gov. John Hickenlooper has anything to say about it–and he will–most of a potential increase in state tax collections this year and in 2012 will go to restore some of the money cut from K-12 budgets in the past few years.
DENVER– On Tuesday afternoon, Colorado Springs Republican Rep. Bob Gardner set off a firestorm on the House floor and in the Twittersphere when in the last hours of the 2011 legislative session he amended the annual rules bill to strip out regulations passed last year on payday lending. It was a surprise move sure to generate rancor and just the latest battle in the ongoing war over payday lending in the state.
The Aurora Sentinel today editorialized against the back-again legislation that would set a legal limit for THC in the blood, beyond which a driver is considered impaired.
A bill that would have allowed Walmart and other big-box grocery stores to carry full-strength beer died in the House Thursday. On the House floor legislators said the doubling of stores selling beer would compromise the promise liquor store owners were given by the state when they decided to invest in the industry.
Rep. Claire Levy, D-Boulder, told the Colorado Independent Thursday that she was calling Secretary of State Scott Gessler’s bluff to purge individuals who may or may not be improperly on Colorado’s voting rolls.
A recent survey of Mississippi Republicans conducted by Public Policy Polling (pdf) found that a majority of them believe inter-racial marriage should be illegal. According to the poll, 46 percent of the Republicans told PPP staffers that interracial marriage should be illegal and 14 percent of them said they weren’t sure. Only 40 percent of Mississippi Republicans believe interracial couples should be allowed to legally marry. The poll comes a week after Colorado Republicans voted down a bill that would have granted Colorado gay couples domestic partnership rights already granted automatically with marriage to straight people. The Republican lawmakers said the issue should be left to voters to decide.
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