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.
Wednesday, House Republicans killed a bill to offer greater civil rights protections to the employees of small businesses. The bill died in committee on a party-line vote as Republicans said the bill would stop small businesses from hiring more people.
During an emotional eight-hour hearing on same-sex civil unions at the capitol in Denver Thursday, a long list of witnesses on both sides of the issue told emotional stories of life as gay and transgender Americans. More than a few wept as they talked about shame, discrimination and systemic bias. Others quoting scripture warned of the end times the bill would surely hasten unto the Centennial State should it pass. The five committee Democrats took turns agreeing and disagreeing with witnesses, debating theology, Constitutional history and the horrors of the Jim Crow South and the Holocaust. The six members of the majority bloc Republicans on the committee, however, had little to say. They watched and listened and, without really elaborating their positions, voted as a bloc against sending the legislation to the full House for debate and a vote. They stone-cold killed the bill.
A bill that would have retroactively allowed those sentenced as juveniles to life in prison to be eligible for parole after 40 years was killed on concerns of constitutionality and victim’s rights.
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