“These briefs are blockbusters,” said Institute President Jon Caldara, a radio and television personality who has been a firebrand speaker on the health-care law since long before it passed two years ago last week. “No one has gone after Obamacare this way before. This could literally spell the end of the [law].”

The briefs filed by Institute Research Director Dave Kopel are part of the wave of material related to the law that has swamped the high court in recent months.

In addition to deciding the fate of the Affordable Care Act, the case will influence presidential election-year politics and cast light on the ability of the legislative process as it stands in the United States to address issues vital to the American people.

Arguments around the law made in lower courts have centered on the Constitution’s Commerce Clause, which grants Congress the power to regulate business conducted across state lines. There is strong precedent supporting the legitimacy of the law from that standpoint and, in his main, first brief (pdf), Kopel seeks to shift the argument away from the Commerce Clause.

“What people… miss is that the Supreme Court itself tells us that issues like this– about purely intrastate activities such as buying health insurance– are really decided under the Necessary and Proper Clause,” Kopel said in a release, citing the clause that grants Congress the root authority to pass laws “necessary and proper” for exercising its other powers.

“There is new research just published by one of the top academic publishers in the world that shows the Necessary and Proper Clause was never meant to give the Congress the power to force you to buy something simply because the purchase would help ‘commerce’,” Kopel said. “The history of the Necessary and Proper Clause is very clear on that point. It’s just a matter of getting that history before the Court.”

Kopel’s second brief (pdf) concerns the expansion of Medicaid coverage guaranteed by the Affordable Care Act. Kopel said the law allows “federal bureaucrats, virtually at their uncontrolled whim, to bankrupt a state.”

He believes the law goes against a line of cases extending from as early as 1798, the latest being Alden v. Maine, was written in 1999 by Justice Anthony Kennedy, a likely key swing vote in the Affordable Care Act case.

The Supreme Court is considering several aspects of the law and whether or not the court at this point even has the authority to begin weighing the constitutionality of the so-called individual mandate, which will effectively require all Americans to buy insurance. The mandate goes into effect three years from now. The court is deciding that issue today.

Colorado Republican Attorney General John Suthers is in DC for the arguments. He joined the suit that was filed by 25 other state attorneys general opposing the individual mandate and that was accepted on appeal by the high court.

Should the case go forward today, a ruling isn’t expected until June.

The problems the Affordable Care Act seeks to address are well documented.

Prices for health care have skyrocketed in the last four decades in the United States. According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Kaiser Family Foundation, health care costs shot from 7.2 percent of GDP in 1970 to 18 percent in 2010, and those costs are on track to hit 40 percent of GDP in 2050. Annual spending on health care in the U.S. hit $2.6 trillion in 2010. Although health care for Americans with high-end coverage is among the best in the world, the system fails tens of millions of Americans in ways that see illnesses accelerate and costs rise. Mainly, care is shifted to emergency rooms and crucial preventative checkups and treatments are de-emphasized. Nearly 50 million Americans under 65 have no health insurance, including 30 percent of 19- to 25-year-old Americans. There are 8 million uninsured children in the country. There are also 800,000 uninsured American seniors.

[ Image: US Supreme Court via Flikr by Katieharbath. ]

Got a tip? Story pitch? Send us an e-mail. Follow The Colorado Independent on Twitter.

All eyes focused on Texas Gov. Rick Perry as he made his debate debut Wednesday evening at the fourth GOP showdown, this one hosted by Politico and NBC.

Surging in the national presidential polls, Perry joined seven other Republican White House hopefuls at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif. NBC Nightly News host Brian Williams and Politico’s John F. Harris grilled candidates on foreign policy, health care, national security and climate change, leaving social issues like abortion and same-sex marriage mostly out of the dialogue.

Moderators asked the governor to address Texas’ substantial lag in key areas when compared to other states, including its position as last in number of uninsured residents and its low high school completion rates. When questioned about the cause of the state’s staggering number of those without health care — 26 percent of those under age 65 — Perry pointed to the federal government as the culprit.

Perry also downplayed the consequences of public education cuts made this legislative session under his governorship — $4 billion slashed from K-12 classrooms, leaving an estimated 12,000 teachers out of work — calling them “thoughtful reductions absorbed by our schools.”

Perry jumped back into echoing his past controversial statements about Social Security, once again calling it a “Ponzi scheme” — a sentiment expressed in his anti-Washington book “Fed Up!” which has become an anchor for his campaign rhetoric.

“Anybody that’s for the status quo with Social Security today is involved with a monstrous lie to our kids, and it’s not right,” he said.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who many consider Perry’s most formidable opponent, shot back with a defense of the system and its benefit to senior citizens saying, “our nominee has to be someone who isn’t committed to abolishing Social Security but is committed to saving Social Security.”

Often evading direct answers to questions, Perry took the opportunity to swing his replies back to his jobs creation record, figures revealed to be misleading by previous reporting from the Texas Independent. Perry claims to have secured Texas as the hub for job growth nationally, though many of those jobs are low-paying ones.

“We’ve created 1 million jobs in the state of Texas at the same time America lost 2.5 million,” said Perry. But from 2007 to 2010, the number of Texans earning minimum wage or less increased 150 percent — 330,000 jobs — solidifying Texas as the nation’s minimum wage jobs leader, a fact moderators were quick to point out.

“95 percent of jobs we created were above minimum wage,” Perry countered — though his campaign’s justification for that statistic was a 2010 measure, that 5.3 percent of all Texas jobs were hourly minimum wage ones. Only hourly jobs — just over half the total jobs in Texas — can be factored into minimum wage measures, but of those, 9.5 percent of them are at or below the minimum wage.

Perry’s “95 percent of jobs” measure is misleading, then, because he’s not talking at all about jobs “we created,” but total jobs in Texas last year. Under Perry’s watch, the proportion of hourly jobs at or below the minimum wage rose from 5.8 percent in 2000 to 9.5 percent in 2010 — but as PolitiFact reported during the 2010 Texas governor’s race, increases in how much minimum wage pays complicate the question. It’s impossible to tell how many of those are new jobs added at minimum wage, and how many are old jobs drawn into the measure because the minimum wage was raised.

Without getting bogged down in his statistics, Romney took aim at other aspects of Perry’s job growth record, pointing to Texas’ lack of state income tax, its status as a “right-to-work” state and rich natural resources as contributing factors, opening up a heated exchange between the two presidential hopefuls.

“Gov. Perry doesn’t believe he created those things. If he tried to say that, it’s like Al Gore saying he created the Internet,” said Romney.

Perry went back to statistics, answering, “We created more jobs in the last three months in Texas than [Romney] created in four years in Massachusetts.” He said former Democratic Gov. Michael Dukakis created three times more jobs than Romney did. Romney charged back, claiming George W. Bush and his predecessor created jobs at a faster rate than Perry.

During his first presidential debate Perry said, “I kind of feel like the piñata here at the party,” but the GOP contender didn’t shy from swinging back at his opponents, including U.S. Congressman Ron Paul (R-Texas), who noted Perry’s support for Hillary Clinton’s health care plan while he was Texas Agriculture Commissioner. Perry responded with some old dirt of his own, bringing up a letter Paul wrote to Ronald Reagan in the late 80s, renouncing the former president after the country became mired in massive debt as result of his policies.

Perry did own what’s likely to be the night’s most remembered moment, late in the debate when he was asked if he has lost sleep over the 234 executions he’s presided over as Texas governor. Before he could answer, the question received a chilling, immediate round of applause from the audience. Perry said no, he didn’t lose sleep over it, “I think Americans understand justice.”

Crossroads GPS works in tandem with the 527 organization American Crossroads.

The web ad claims, in text: “Over 185 union waivers. All exempt from Obamacare mandate. If unions don’t have to comply with Obamacare, why should we?”

Watch the ad:

Politifact’s final assessment (read the entire post for more detail):

In ruling on this statement, we understand that the Obama administration would hardly admit to it if it were giving unions special treatment. But looking at the numbers of waivers that have been given to both union and non-union groups, we don’t see any pattern that would support a case for special treatment. The number of waivers are a small sample of all health plans, and many more waivers were given to big companies and corporations. We looked for additional information or evidence on this point and didn’t find it.

But there are additional problems with the ad. The ad doesn’t mention that the waivers only apply to annual coverage limits, that they’re intended to be in place only until 2014 and that many for-profit companies have received the same waivers. It gives the impression that unions are entirely exempt from the health care law, which they are not.

Because the ad gives the impression that unions are exempt from the entire law, and because it’s evidence for special treatment is so thin, we rate this claim Pants on Fire.

Last fall, the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent collected an impressive list of instances in which Crossroads GPS or American Crossroads was taken to task by independent fact-checkers for blatantly inaccurate or misleading claims in their anonymously funded campaign ads.

<

“Suthers believes that, in this case, the federal government is acting within the authority it is granted through the commerce clause,” Saccone said, dismissing criticism as a predictable product of state right-left politics. “None of that [criticism] comes as any surprise.”

From Suther’s op-ed:

[W]hether the Defense of Marriage Act is good policy is irrelevant to my legal position in that case. Congress has the authority to define who may receive benefits under federal programs. Massachusetts’ lawsuit seeks to conflate the proper role of state and federal governments. Massachusetts’ lawsuit also provoked the federal trial court to declare that Congress had “no rational basis” for defining marriage as between a man and a woman. Colorado’s voters, like Congress, have chosen to define marriage that way. To pretend that this suit poses no threat to Colorado’s constitution may serve Justice Dubofsky’s goal of implementing same-sex marriage through court challenges, but it is disingenuous. I admire Justice Dubofsky’s long-standing commitment to the political cause of same-sex marriage, but in advocating for it, she owes it to the people of Colorado to be more forthright.

It is not my job as Colorado’s attorney general to determine public policy when it comes to health care or same-sex marriage. That is the prerogative of the legislature and the voters. It is my job to protect federalism, the U.S. Constitution and the Colorado Constitution.

At the end of January, Suthers joined an amicus brief on the side of the federal government appealing a ruling striking down parts of the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). The ruling came when a federal judge agreed with groups who argued that DOMA unconstitutionally denied benefits to gay couples legally married in Massachusetts. The Denver Post reported that Suthers believed the case was relevant to Colorado because Colorado’s Amendment 43 bans gay marriage here and that rulings against DOMA could force Coloradans to recognize gay marriages performed in other states. Suthers joined with attorneys general from Indiana, Michigan, South Carolina and Utah in supporting the Obama Justice Department in the Massachusetts case.

That explanation came quickly under fire, however, prompting Suthers representatives to concede that the Massachusetts case didn’t directly concern the sections of DOMA that protect state’s rights to accept and reject the legitimacy of out-of-state marriages. Suthers critics gained authority last week when former Supreme Court Justice Jean Dubofsky published a scathing op-ed in the Denver Post stating that the case would have no bearing on the power of Colorado to reject marriages performed in Massachusetts and that, if Suthers was concerned about state’s rights, then he joined the wrong side of the case, that he should have supported Massachusetts and not the federal government.

Suthers weathered attacks last year when he joined GOP attorneys general in a case targeting the federal health care reform legislation backed by Obama and championed by Democratic lawmakers. His critics then said the suit was less about the law than about politics and a waste of Colorado resources. That suit and the reasoning behind it has gained traction in the months since and in some form is speeding its way toward the U.S. Supreme Court.

In the health care reform case, Suthers argued that the federal government was overstepping authority granted by the commerce clause. In the case of the Defense of Marriage Act, Saccone said, Suthers believes the federal government is acting within its authority.

“They’re both cases about federalism,” Saccone said. “There’s no inconsistency… It’s about defining proper and improper readings of the law.”

—
The original version of this post reported that the Suthers response was still in the works. We regret the error.

Got a tip? Story pitch? Send us an e-mail. Follow The Colorado Independent on Twitter.

Majorities come and go. Health care reform is here to stay. As Saletan puts it, “a party that loses a legislative fight against a middle-class health care entitlement never restores the old order … In 30 years, Republicans will be accusing Democrats of defunding Obamacare.”

The full quote:

A party that loses a House seat can win it back two years later, as Republicans just proved. But a party that loses a legislative fight against a middle-class health care entitlement never restores the old order. Pretty soon, Republicans will be claiming the program as their own. Indeed, one of their favorite arguments against this year’s health care bill was that it would cut funding for Medicare. Now they’re pledging to rescind those cuts. In 30 years, they’ll be accusing Democrats of defunding Obamacare.

More:

Politicians have tried and failed for decades to enact universal health care. This time, they succeeded. In 2008, Democrats won the presidency and both houses of Congress, and by the thinnest of margins, they rammed a bill through. They weren’t going to get another opportunity for a very long time. It cost them their majority, and it was worth it.

And that’s not counting financial regulation, economic stimulus, college lending reform, and all the other bills that became law under Pelosi. So spare me the tears and gloating about her so-called failure. If John Boehner is speaker of the House for the next 20 years, he’ll be lucky to match her achievements.

Will Republicans revisit health care? Sure. Will they enact some changes to the program? Yes, and Democrats will help them. Every program needs revisions. Republicans will get other things, too: business tax breaks, education reform, more nuclear power, and a crackdown on earmarks. These are issues on which both parties can agree. Which is why, if you’re a Democrat, you deal with them after you’ve lost your majority — not before.

Got a tip? Freelance story pitch? Send us an e-mail. Follow The Colorado Independent on Twitter.

Division of Insurance Commissioner Marcy Morrison told the Colorado Independent that the federal cash will bolster the Division significantly and increase rate reviews like the one that forced Anthem to agree this month to a $20 million settlement.

“The $1 million coming from the Affordable Care Act will expand our ability to drill down on these reviews because it will fund six new positions,” she said. “The money comes with strict accountability, but if we’re accountable– telling the federal government who we hired and why and their qualifications and what they’ll be doing and how we’re spending the money– that funding will be renewed for four of five years.”

Upon inspection, the Anthem settlement (pdf) is a half victory, albeit a big half victory. The company settled to end the review and avoid a legal battle. According to the terms, Anthem will provide credit to policyholders affected by three rate hikes levied last year on individual market policies and pay cash to customers who canceled their Anthem policies after paying the new rates.

Yet Anthem admits no wrongdoing in the settlement and details of the review are sealed according to the terms of the settlement. Anthem will pay no fines and the three rates under question will remain in place. That means Anthem is paying the difference between the unhiked and hiked rates to itself as a way to, in effect, retain the higher rates. In other words, it’s losing a lot less money than it has to gain from the settlement.

Ideal from a consumer perspective would have been to cancel the elevated rates and for Anthem to pay back the money it has received from the hikes in addition to any fines. As it is, the rates remain high, and Anthem breaks even because it would never have received any of the money it is now being forced to credit to customers had the rates been rejected in the first place. What’s more, once Anthem hits the $20 million mark it is now paying partly in credits to itself and partly in cash to consumers who dropped Anthem– likely a little more than a year from now– then customers get walloped all over again with the nearly 20 percent rate hikes Anthem levied last year. At that point, the corporation’s profit margin in Colorado picks up where it left off.

Nevertheless, the feeling among the consumer groups and regulatory personnel involved here who spoke with the Colorado Independent is that you take victories, even half-victories, against large insurance corporations where you can get them.

“Fines or no fines, we think this is a good decision for Colorado,” Dede de Percin, executive director of the Colorado Consumer Health Initiative told the Colorado Independent. “This $20 million goes back to consumers this year, right away, when people really need it. We’re not having a drawn out legal battle. This means, say, $220 for people, and that makes a difference this year. It also puts insurers on notice that the [Division of Insurance] is doing its job.

“We know from similar cases in California roughly what Anthem was guilty of — those looking to solve the mystery can look there,” she said.

Morrison is similarly circumspect.

“In a big picture way, yes, you could say that Anthem is paying itself back this money. I don’t know how many people left Anthem. Those people will be taking the money and Anthem will not be getting that money back.”

She said that the lesson from the settlement is that consumer complaints matter.

“We had more complaints than ever before in the four years I’ve been here and I think that can be traced to the fact that there were three rate hikes in a year and on the individual market. People in that market pay higher premiums anyway, so it spurred them to complain and that made us look at the rates again.”

Morrison admitted that, as the Colorado Independent reported earlier this year, the division at first approved the Anthem hikes. Supervisor of Rates and Forms at the insurance division Tom Abel said the Anthem hikes came as little surprise when he reviewed them last fall because larger rate hikes have become the norm. At the time, de Percin noted, however, that state law, namely the FAIR Act which the Consumer Health Initiative was instrumental in passing a few years ago, makes Colorado insurance rate reviews extremely thorough.

Morrison said the FAIR Act was certainly helpful but that the federal Affordable Care Act cash for her division could not have come at a better time.

“It’s so challenging to hire new staff given the economy and the state budget. This is chance for us to do more, to do the very best job we can.”

Morrison will hire six new staffers on year-to-year contracts with the money and expand and improve the division’s online presence as part of an effort to increase transparency. She plans to hire a tech person to ramp up the website and post rate filings and reviews and so on.

“We’re also hiring an actuary and an attorney who will look at the new [health reform] regulations. Presently we use Attorney General’s office staffers and they don’t have much time.”

Morrison said her office reviews rates submitted by the 1200 health carriers in the state. De Percin guessed Morrison’s division looks at thousands and maybe tens of thousands of rates each year.

Like Morrison, de Percin was very upbeat about the changes she thinks will stem in Colorado from the health reform legislation. In fact, far from the “socialist government takeover” many warned against, de Percin thinks the reforms will partly serve to increase free-market competition.

“Colorado is a healthy and wealthy state, the kind of market in which insurers want to do business. We think competition will increase with the new exchanges provided by the federal law.

“I see the exchanges as a kind of mall that will actually provide more access to the market for smaller insurers. Everyone will get a storefront and we imagine there will be basic packages that consumers can choose from so, in order to win business, insurers will add extras, like better customer service, for example.”

Got a tip? Freelance story pitch? Send us an e-mail. Follow The Colorado Independent on Twitter.

Last summer he enraged progressives by forcing an amendment on the House version of the health bill, which prevented federal funds from paying for abortions. His profile shot through the roof; he became a household name overnight, drawing fans and enemies and scrutiny in the media– developments that have sent him sailing through the rocky rapids of political celebrity in an era of partisan extremism.

In February, he moved out of the infamous Christian C-Street house he stayed at in D.C. after the media reported the mere $600 rent he paid there and suggested that, in light of his stand on the health bill, the “in kind” gift of rent subsidy provided by the Christian anti-abortion owners of the townhouse raised ethical questions.

Later, the anti-abortion movement turned on him when he flipped his vote and supported health care reform. He did so after pressuring Pres. Obama to sign an executive order that promoted the goals of the Stupak Amendment, which had been tossed.

The conservative Susan B. Anthony List not only rescinded the “Defender of Life” award it had granted Stupak, but also announced plans to spend money trying to unseat him. The Michigan GOP followed suit and launched a campaign to defeat him.

Following that, the Tea Party movement announced Thursday it would spend $250,000 to also battle his reelection.

Although conservatives acted surprised by Stupak’s vote flip, he telegraphed the move in October at a town hall in Cheboygan in which he said:

“I offered an amendment that says no public funding for abortion that’s been the law of the land for many many decades and we lose that vote. Let’s say we lose that vote– we need 218 to win–let’s say we get 217 and we lose. Would I vote against health care? If I had a chance to vote my conscience I probably would not. I probably would still vote for the health care bill at the end of the day.”

The announcement comes as the Tea Party Express plans to rally throughout Stupak’s upper peninsula and northern Michigan district. His challenger on the right had a spot on the Fox News Sean Hannity show Thursday.

–
Hat tip to Todd Heywood at the Michigan Messenger, sister site to the Colorado Independent.

Got a tip? Freelance story pitch? Send us an e-mail. Follow The Colorado Independent on Twitter.

The Club for Growth has been vastly influential in moving the GOp to the right, at least on fiscal matters. It established the “RINO Watch” which works to monitor “Republican office holders around the nation who have advanced egregious anti-growth, anti-freedom or anti-free market policies.”

The pledge reads:

“I, Tom J Wiens, hereby pledge to the people of my state (Colorado) upon my election to the U.S. Senate to sponsor and support legislation to repeal any federal health care takeover passed in 2010 and replace it with real reforms that lower health care costs without growing government.”

Wiens signed it yesterday with at least two witnesses present.

As the Colorado Independent reported last month, if any organization can nudge Republicans toward a repeal pledge and keep them honest after they take it, it’s the Club for Growth. It launched the one-paragraph “Repeal It” petition in February, when many considered health care reform a dead letter. In the weeks since reform passed, the number of signatories who hold or are running for electoral office has surged past 400. In addition to the Colorado candidates who have at least verbally pledged to repeal– Ken Buck, Cory Gardner, Jane Norton– that number includes Senate candidates like New Hampshire’s Kelly Ayotte, Kentucky’s Trey Grayson and Illinois’s Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), who are warily viewed by Tea Partiers and conservative voters, but who have been able to use the repeal message to prove their bona fides.

So far it seems the only political mistake Republicans can make on health care is to signal to the base that full repeal might not be a priority. Rep. Mike Castle (R-Del.) opened himself to attack from a challenger in his U.S. Senate bid by arguing that Obama’s presence in the White House made repeal unlikely. That was worrying to some Republicans, whose best-case scenario in 2011 is a Republican Congress that would be unable to override Obama’s vetos.

“I see where Republicans are with this,” one GOP House aide told Washington Independent reporter Dave Weigel, “but it drives me insane. What happens if you run, win, and don’t repeal?”

Got a tip? Freelance story pitch? Send us an e-mail. Follow The Colorado Independent on Twitter.

Latest numbers after the jump.

Gallup’s Monday poll suggests voters are once again split on health reform, finding 47 percent of voters believe the new legislation is “a good thing” while 50 percent believe it’s a “bad thing.” That’s within the sampling error (+- 4 percent) but it’s a change from numbers that showed people slightly more positive than negative toward the bill the night it was passed.

The Gallup/USA today poll conducted March 26 to 28 suggested Democrats overwhelmingly supported the bill while Republican voters mostly opposed it. Almost exactly half, 54 percent, of unaffiliated voters thought the bill was “a bad thing.”

According to Gallup, 57 percent of Americans without health insurance like the bill. Old people are split: 45 percent liked it but a solid 52 percent of Americans 65 and older don’t like the bill.

The largest difference was between between income brackets where 60 percent of those who make less than $20,000 were pleased by health care reform but only 39 percent of those who make $50,000 to $75,000 like it.

Got a tip? Freelance story pitch? Send us an e-mail. Follow The Colorado Independent on Twitter.

Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput was the U.S. member of a five-man investigative team appointed by the Vatican last July to look into the allegations of abuse conducted by Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, the deceased leader of the Legionaries. What the team found, by all accounts, isn’t good news for the Church. Chaput, who has spoken out repeatedly on the moral failings of the health care bill and members of Congress and who recently expelled the children of a lesbian couple from a Catholic school in Boulder, has remained publicly silent on the abuse scandals and the Church’s willful failure to follow criminal and civil legal codes.

Although representatives of the Legionaries have admitted the guilt of Maciel– who reportedly molested at least a dozen underlings and fathered and surreptitiously supported a number of children– the official report of the Vatican investigative team has yet to be made public.

In addition to the tragedies of the abuse and the denial of justice, many observers and victims, see in the scandals the tragedy of an unchecked Church hierarchy, which has repeatedly worked to protect the abusers instead of the victims.

To his credit, Pope Benedict, when he was still Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, a leading Vatican official, insisted on at last looking into the Maciel allegations, reports of which had been passing through Church offices for years. But the Rev. Thomas Berg, a former Legionaries priest, said the admission coming now only underlines the fact that Legionary superiors had been misleading officials from the beginning.

One of the Maciel victims, Juan Vaca, said he had little hope for the small investigative team that included Chaput. It’s typical of the Church, he said. “They are communicating in secrecy and they will get everything [done] in secrecy,” he told the New York Times Saturday.

The Legionaries under Maciel wooed members of the business and government elite. The order enjoyed great success in fundraising and established high status and connections.

Analysts commenting on the recent round of scandals have said the Church philosophy on sex abuse has run against the grain of modern medical research in that the Church has viewed the abusers as sinners who must seek forgiveness rather as criminal addicts in need of treatment. The Church’s theological approach did not stop the abuse. On the contrary, it seems to have aided and abetted it. Dissenting voices were quashed.

In recent years, Chaput has been one of the strongest voices on the national stage demanding Catholics and Catholic organizations bow to the will of the Church hierarchy. In a recent essay castigating Catholics and Catholic organizations who supported health care reform in defiance of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Chaput suggested the pro-health reform Catholics were not Catholic at all. He placed the word “Catholic” in quotes and suggested that Catholicism was defined on some level by the willingness to submit to the will of Church leaders. In an essay published in the run up the health reform vote, he wrote bluntly that it is “Catholic bishops who speak for the believing Catholic community.”

This week is Holy Week, the heart of the Catholic calendar. Pews will be filled in churches throughout the state. The Colorado Independent called the archdiocese this morning to ask whether Chaput plans to publicly address the sex-abuse scandals and share what he learned in investigating Maciel. A representative said she would pass the message to the Archbishop’s communications secretary.

Got a tip? Freelance story pitch? Send us an e-mail. Follow The Colorado Independent on Twitter.