The three Republican women in the Colorado state Senate this year have voted as a bloc in support of at least two big family-protection bills that their male Republican colleagues have opposed. Weeks ago, Sens Ellen Roberts, Nancy Spence and Jean White argued passionately from the right in favor of same-sex civil unions as a way to bolster families headed by gay couples. The senators argued again passionately this week in favor of legislation that would combat school bullying, which can sink child confidence with tragic results and tear up families.

HB 1254 (pdf) passed in the House in March and in the Senate on Thursday. It is now headed to the governor’s desk for a signature.

In voting for the bill Senator White from Hayden said the fact that thousands of bullied kids avoid attending classes in Colorado in 2011 is “ridiculous.” In casting her vote, she said her own children, like so many, were bullied for things they had no control over.

“I think that every single day children are bullied to the point of turning into hypochondriacs because they need an excuse to stay home from school,” she said. “They’re bullied for all kinds of reasons at all levels. They’re bullied for their sexual orientation, for being fat, for being too tall, for having pimples. Our children were bullied for being adopted. Our children were bullied for living in a big house. It’s ridiculous. Kids need to know that when they go to school they have a safe environment that they can learn in and they don’t have to feel like they need an excuse to stay home from school.”

Centennial Republican Nancy Spence said the move to put more responsibility on adult school faculty and staff to prevent bullying was long overdue.

“[W]e heard testimony in committee where teachers ignore instances of bullying, such as hitting and kicking and shoving and pushing,” she said. “That’s another reason this bill is important. There needs to be a message given to staff at our school that bullying is no longer acceptable, if it ever was…. This bill is going to protect children and get a message to teachers that bullying will not be tolerated.”

A bipartisan problem

The bipartisan bill was sponsored in the House by Reps Sue Schafer, D-Wheat Ridge, and Kevin Priola, R-Henderson, and in the Senate by Pat Steadman, D-Denver. Its authors introduced it in the wake of a spate of tragic news stories from around the country detailing the fact that bullying was an ongoing source of youth suicide coast to coast. Schafer and Priola told the press they wrote the bill in order to head off a “sensational suicide” in Colorado.

Sens Roberts, Spence and White were joined by all of the Senate Democrats and Republican Steve King in voting in favor of the bill. The Republican-controlled House passed the bill with 47 aye votes and 18 nays.

Colorado has led in the nation in working to limit bullying ever since the 1999 Columbine shootings. Among the programs put in place is a successful phone and texting hotline that encourages kids to anonymously report trouble.

Supporters of HB 1254, however, say putting much of the onus on kids to intervene isn’t good enough. The bill puts more responsibility on adults to directly work to solve the problem. It establishes school codes of conduct and reporting and it establishes an interim committee of lawmakers to study school bullying in the state. It also creates a board to award grants to promising anti-bullying programs and to evaluate those programs

According to a 2009 Healthy Kids Colorado survey (pdf), roughly 19 percent of all Colorado high school kids report being bullied. Roughly 30 percent say they have gotten into fights. Roughly 7 percent have been threatened with weapons. Last year more than 5 percent of all Colorado high schoolers stayed home from school for fear of bullying, which translates to 12,000 teen students. Among certain demographic groups, the percentages soar. Linda Kanan, director of the Department of Public Safety’s School Safety Resource Center, told the Independent that roughly 37 percent of gay and transgender kids avoid school for fear of bullying.

New-style conservative family values

Months ago voting in favor of same-sex civil unions, Ellen Roberts spoke for the women Republicans in the Senate when she said that the fact is gay people are having kids and that current state law does not protect them. There is no law providing for arrangements in the case of break ups. There are no child support and visitation laws that cover gay couples, she pointed out. She told the Colorado Independent she tried to talk about these reasons to support the bill among the Senate GOP caucus but to mostly no avail.

The men, she said “had different ideas.”

Forty-one women were sworn into the Colorado legislature this year, making up the largest percentage of women serving at any state capitol in the nation. There are 17 women in the 35-member Senate. There are 24 women serving in the 65-member House.

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As the federal government prepares for a disastrous shutdown pinned largely to a House Republican amendment that would defund Planned Parenthood, Colorado Republican Senators attempted to mimic the legislative strategy that has led to the Capitol Hill standoff. Weeks of tense negotiations in Denver produced a budget plan tentatively embraced on both sides of the aisle. Then on Friday in stepped social conservatives in the Senate who during floor debate inserted a hot-button “defund Planned Parenthood” amendment into the budget negotiation.

In Colorado, however, there were three brave Colorado Republican Senators– women– who refused to join in steering the state down the economy-tanking banana republic path being taken on Capitol Hill.

In Washington, Democrat and Republican Congressional leaders have roughly agreed to around $38 billion in spending cuts. That’s up from Thursday’s $33 billion. That’s a lot of cutting and much more than the Democrats had counted on, but it doesn’t look like it will make a difference. The two sides only have till midnight to come to some agreement.

“Republicans want to shut down our nation’s government because they want to make it harder for women to get the health services they need,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. He added that he was “personally offended” by the Republican position. “This is indefensible and everyone should be outraged, men and women should be outraged.”

For the past 48 hours, Republican House Speaker John Boehner has been unconvincingly saying the impasse is not about the Planned Parenthood rider. Arizona GOP Senator John Kyl spelled out the Republican position more frankly.

“Planned Parenthood is not the only entity that can provide medical care in this country. It gets a subsidy of something like $300 million a year. To shut down the government over that would be absolutely unthinkable,” he said, arguing that Democrats were being irresponsible in not simply passing the rider for the good of the country.

“If you want an abortion, you go to Planned Parenthood… [Abortion is] well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does,” Kyl said.

That may be what many conservatives believe, given the slanted media campaign waged on the right against Planned Parenthood over the last weeks, but, as the women members of Colorado’s Senate can tell you, it’s just not true.

Senators Ellen Roberts, Nancy Spence and Jean White wouldn’t sign on to the GOP attack on Planned Parenthood. Spence reportedly said the organization was vital to supplying poor women with reproductive health services.

Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Moutnains President Vicki Cowart decried the negotiations in Washington as radical and based on propaganda.

“It’s an outrage to shut down the government over an extreme proposal that would deny millions of women Pap tests, breast cancer screenings and birth control,” she said in a release. “Attacking Planned Parenthood’s preventive health care hurts women, does not cut the deficit or fix the economy, and must be stopped.”

More than 93 percent of the health care Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains provides is preventive, she noted.

Planned Parenthood has 23 health centers in Colorado. Although Planned Parenthood in Colorado receives only limited federal funding, spokesperson Monica McCafferty said there are 62 clinics in Colorado that rely heavily on Title X funding for family planning services. She said these clinics provide health care to about 60,000 people and that the state would lose about $4 million in Title X funding if the federal bill became law.

Roughly one in five American women have visited a Planned Parenthood clinic to receive treatment.

The U.S. House Planned Parenthood amendment was added to the Continuing Resolution (H.R. 1) to fund the federal government through September.

If the resolution goes into law as is, the 95-year-old health care provider will lose federal funding that goes strictly to family planning and reproductive services under Title X– none of which goes to abortions.

The amendment will also eliminate the entire Title X program, which was founded in 1970 and is the only federal grant program dedicated solely to providing comprehensive family planning and preventive health services, particularly to low-income families, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Population Affairs. Preventive health services include breast and cervical cancer screenings, HIV prevention education, pregnancy diagnosis and counseling.

[ Top image: Sen. Kevin Lundberg, a leading senate social conservative. ]

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The bill provides in-state tuition to students who attended and graduated Colorado high schools and are accepted within a year of their graduation to a Colorado college. They would not receive Colorado Opportunity Fund dollars, which provides $62 per credit hour for Colorado residents who are documented citizens.

Sen. Rollie Heath, D-Boulder, opined on the need for students to receive in-state tuition because of the threat of Chinese economic domination. While Republican Senator Nancy Spence said that she is supportive of children but does not want to turn them into criminals when they graduate college and apply for jobs illegally.

Part of the provision of the bill is that students taking advantage of in-state tuition would be required to sign an affidavit of their intent to file for legal status.

Senate Concurrent Resolution 01 passed second reading today with bipartisan support in the Senate. The vote, though, appeared to open a rift in the Republican caucus.

“The uprisings of the last year where citizens are beginning to wake up and push back on their government create a different context. The question arises, will government continue to do as it pleases and go where it wants or will citizens create effective checks on the political class.” Sen. Shawn Mitchell, R-Broomfield, explained, after noting he had voted for a similar bill in the past. “In that high moment, I know what side I have to support, I know what side I have to cheer for, I know what side I believe in. We can work on creating a different standard for constitutional amendments at another time, but right now there is a near existential battle between citizens and their government. I know which side I am on in that battle and I ask you to vote ‘no’ on this measure.”

Republicans including Sen. Mitchell, Bill Cadman, Colorado Springs, Scott Renfroe, Greeley, and Ted Harvey, Highlands Ranch, voiced their opposition to the referendum, which if it makes its way to the ballot and is passed by voters, would increase the number of votes needed to change the state constitution through a ballot amendment from 50 percent plus one to 60 percent.

The concurrent resolution includes a provision that in order to get on the ballot the initiative must have gathered enough petition signatures in general and have gotten a certain amount from each congressional district. According to the Legislative Council using the 2010 figure, the total number of votes needed to get an initiative on the ballot is 85,854 while if SCR 001 passes at least 8,585 signatures will be needed from each of the state’s seven congressional districts.

Due to that restriction, some Republicans argued that only the very wealthy would be able to get their initiatives on the ballot. And they further argued The Taxpayer Bill of Rights was being targeted because of a grandfather clause in the referendum requiring only a 50 percent plus one vote to repeal constitutional amendments that were approved before 2013.

Sen. Greg Brophy, R-Wray, however, joined with supporters in making his appeal for the change. He said the resolution was a way to protect Eastern Colorado and the whole of Colorado’s agricultural community. He said it would limit special interests’ ability to level constitutional changes such as one in California he said would likely eliminate hog farming and egg production in the state. He said that in speaking to agricultural companies who are interested in moving to Colorado, they have told him that the ease of the initiative process Colorado uses is one of the main reasons they remain apprehensive.

The Wall Street Journal noted that the California initiative prohibits confinement of hogs, veal calves and poultry “in a manner that does not allow them to turn around freely, lie down, stand up, and fully extend their limbs.”

Sen. Harvey said the provision in SCR 001 forcing signature gatherers to go to eastern Colorado would stop initiatives that did not have a broad-based appeal.

Sen. Ellen Roberts, D-Durango, agreed with Brophy. She said she was in support of the bill because it protected rural Colorado from Denver and its shopping malls. “When you live in rural Colorado and you know that signatures for a constitutional amendment can all be found right here in the metro area, that makes us feel like we are not part of the state.”

Roberts said Referendum O failed because it was lost in the shuffle of other amendments and because supporters couldn’t raise money. She said this year, the business community is behind the bill and will be providing resources for its passage.

The legislation, Sponsored by Nancy Spence, R-Centennial, and Brandon Shaffer, D-Longmont, must pass the Senate and House with a 2/3 majority. In addition to other provisions, it contains measures that would make it more difficult for legislators to eliminate statutory laws put in place by voters.

“Freedom and our form of government are a two edged sword.” Cadman said as he stood in opposition. “It is a tough vote, it is a tough concept because we all want to protect our liberty, our freedom from those who we think would do something deceitful and dishonest, destructive.” Cadman said his vote was about protecting the people.

Spence, however, told the Senate the legislation was simply about taking it to the people and not allowing special interests to use the state as a testing ground for ballot measures.

“Let me just remind you that we are taking this to the people. This is not about special interest groups,” Spence said. “This is about taking the question to the people of Colorado, to the voters. Let them decide if this is exactly what we are going to do.”

Whether the rift on this issue will create a greater divide among Senate Republicans is yet to be seen.

Forty-one women were sworn into the state legislature in Denver this week, strengthening Colorado’s long standing as the women-lawmaker capital of the nation. The state gained five women in the Senate and lost one in the House. There are 17 women in the 35-member Senate. There are 24 women serving in the 65-member House. That’s the largest percentage of women serving at any state capitol across the country and it’s also the largest number of women ever to serve at the Colorado capitol. The Colorado Legislative Women’s Caucus is proud of these facts. It’s also not sure exactly what these facts mean on the ground for constituents.

“I think we’ll know more next week. We’re just getting organized,” Women’s Caucus Program Director Laura Hoeppner told the Colorado Independent. “The caucus has been running for only really two years. This week we’re getting together and deciding how we can be most effective and decide on goals.”

Hoeppner acknowledged that women lawmakers certainly don’t vote as a bloc and not even on what might be perceived as “women’s legislation.” She said the health insurance gender-equity bill passed last session, for instance, didn’t draw all of the women lawmakers’ support.

“The caucus has so far been more focused on networking and providing that kind of support, recruiting women to run for office and supporting them while they’re here.”

The women’s caucus is working fertile ground. Women have been a relatively outsized force in Colorado politics for more than a century.

In 1893 women in Colorado won the right to vote at the ballot box. Colorado was the first state where women won that right through a popular vote. Women in Wyoming won the right to vote first but that came about through an act of the legislature. In 1894, Colorado voters elected three women to represent them in Denver.

The National Conference of State Legislatures reports that the percentage of women serving in state legislatures in the country is down from 24.5 percent in 2010 to 23.4 percent this year. The percentage of women serving in Colorado dwarfs those figures at 41 percent.

The Colorado Legislative Women’s Caucus is funded by the Women’s Foundation of Colorado and the Metropolitan State College of Denver. Reps Jeanne Labuda (D-Denver) and Marsha Looper (R-Calhan) and Sens Nancy Spence (R-Centennial) and Suzanne Williams (D-Aurora) serve on the caucus board.

[Image: Marsha Looper, Nancy Spence, Jeanne Labuda ]

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Bill Ritter

The bill aims to thin the ranks of underperforming teachers. When fully implemented, it will create a new regime of assessments mostly evaluating teachers and principles according to the progress being made by their students. Teachers who fail to meet standards will be placed on probationary status after two years of failure and could be dismissed after three years failing to achieve successful scores. Successful teachers will be encouraged to pursue leadership positions.

Implementation is yet to be worked out and the program will be revisited next year. Lawmakers two years from now will vote on whether or not to continue the program. Ritter said he expected the tests to move away from CSAP one-day testing and toward a program that depends on year-long bench marks.

“This bill is about one thing,” Ritter said. “It is about children.”

Ritter pointed to an executive order he signed in January which created the Council on Educator Effectiveness, part of the effort to win Race to the Top federal funding this year. He said the group has been working toward finding accurate methods to assess teacher performance and said SB 191 put that executive order into law.

“We didn’t do this for the sake of doing it We did it because this is what is necessary to be competitive in a global world,” he said.

Ritter noted the controversy that followed debate about the bill. For the majority of the discussion on the bill. The Colorado Educators Association was staunchly opposed to it, for example. Ritter said that throughout his tenure, the CEA has been behind teacher reform and, though the group only recently came to a neutral stance on the legislation, Ritter said that he felt teachers will come to understand that the new expectations come with greater tools that will enable them to become effective.

“The wisdom behind this bill is not a punitive measure but a way to lift teachers up to a place of effectiveness.” Ritter said he recognized the bill represented a shift in thinking for the teacher’s union but that he and others would be working with them to ensure that everyone was moving in a positive direction.

Sen. Mike Johnston, D-Denver, a former principle who sponsored the legislation along with Sen. Nancy Spence, R-Centennial, both worked doggedly to create the bi-partisan legislation.

“We know that the two most important variables affecting the success of a child are the effectiveness of the teacher and the effectiveness of the principal,” Johnston said. “This bill ensures that every child in Colorado has a great teacher and a great leader, and starts a collaborative, deliberative process for defining and measuring educator effectiveness.

The process by which the state will create the assessment tests will be developed by the governor’s Colorado Council on Educator Effectiveness and is scheduled to be delivered by March 2011 for legislative approval in 2012. The assessment system will undergo a year of beta testing, where various elements will be worked out before the program is put in place. The system is to be fully functioning by 2013.

“This bill is not about getting money for Race to the Top. It is about our children being in a race for the future of our country,” Spence said.

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“The bill’s a juggernaut,” said Sen. Pat Steadman, D-Denver, who serves on the Senate Education Committee that approved the measure by a 7-1 margin April 23.

Co-sponsored in the Senate by Sen. Michael Johnston, D-Denver, and Sen. Nancy Spence, R-Centennial, SB 191 (pdf) links teacher tenure, a key issue for the Colorado Education Association, to academic achievement and student growth. The bill is likely to face tougher debate in the House.

“There are strong arguments on both sides of the bill,” Steadman told the Colorado Independent. “There are strong constituencies on both sides of the bill. And so it’s high stakes all the way around.”

Democrats usually back the unions on tenure issues, while Republicans have pushed performance-based evaluations.

“This is one of those right-side-of-history votes,” Sen. Josh Penry, R-Grand Junction, said, according to the Denver Post. “I want to commend the senators who have had the courage on the Democratic side to stand up and do the right thing.”

Johnston is a results-based educator and reformer who served as a campaign adviser to the Obama administration on education issues.

Sen. Evie Hudak, D-Westminster, who was the sole dissenting vote on the Senate Education Committee, was thwarted Thursday in her efforts to make more changes to the bill that would have made it more palatable to the CEA.

On her website, Hudak calls the bill “the biggest ‘hot potato’ in the education community since Gov. [Bill] Owens’ SB 186 (which mandated CSAPs every year from grades 3 to 10 and used the tests to rate schools on the SAR, School Accountability Report – causing widespread dread and loathing of CSAP).”

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Sen. Chris Romer

Romer threatened to introduce such a bill earlier, before the legislative session began, sending shock waves through the medical marijuana community, which was stunned by the proposals partly because Colorado’s medical marijuana law is not statutory but derived from a Constitutional amendment, which includes by comparison tough language that protects the rights of patients and caregivers here. Romer scotched that bill but made clear that he would be working to introduce new legislation soon. His latest version, Senate Bill 109, nevertheless seems to also tread on rights. Medical marijuana advocates are calling it “The first of the Law Enforcement bills designed to restrict patients’ access to medical marijuana in Colorado.” The bill goes first to the seven-member Senate Health and Human Services Committee, made up of four Democrats and three Republicans.

The legislation would see the term “Bonafide physician-patient relationship” redefined to require physicians prescribing marijuana to have completed a review of the medical history of the patient, an assessment of the patient’s current medical condition and a full physical examination. The legislation would also regular follow-up care to determine the effectiveness of the treatment.

Many dispensaries currently look to provide in-house medical evaluations. That would be difficult to maintain under Romer’s law, where the “caregiver” or “provider” dispensaries would be barred from providing payment to prescribing physicians. The new restrictions would also require physicians to create a separate record-keeping system for pot patients. Also deeply controversial is the panel the law proposes to establish that would evaluate medical marijuana prescriptions to all individuals under 21, save for military veterans. Detractors are referring to the panel as a “pain panel,” pointing to the fact that Romer’s panel would be tasked with somehow determining beyond the opinion of a doctor whether or not any given patient is truly in pain or otherwise requires his or her prescription.

The Cannabis Therapy Institute issued a press release an hour ago attacking the legislation as restrictive, costly and invasive. The Institute opposes the “Medical Marijuana Review Board” on the grounds that the state should not be allowed to override recommendations of a physician.

Prominent medical marijuana attorney Rob Corry performed a line by line critique of an earlier draft of Romer’s bill and earlier decried the pain panel idea.

“The specter of these vulnerable young patients facing a Governor-appointed board of overseers for ‘permission’ to access his or her constitutionally protected, physician-recommended medicine does not belong in a free country. This board’s very existence [would be] unconstitutional.”

The Institute notes that the new regulations requiring full up front physical examinations and follow-up exams at least once a year would cause sharp increases in the cost of using medical marijuana. An exam can cost up to $500, the Institute notes, arguing that such increases would seriously limit access for patients already struggling to pay the state’s $190 annual pot permit renewal fee.

The group also pointed out that many primary-care physicians are presently unwilling to provide prescriptions for medical marijuana registry cards. As a result, the Institute says that Romer’s bill would force patients to find new doctors who will not readily be able to draw upon medical histories and exams as evidence of chronic need.

“Physicians who specialize in medical marijuana shouldn’t be required to perform a new physical exam each year and perform follow up care on patients, many of whom may already have had these exams performed by their primary care physician,” the release stated.

Romer was not available for immediate comment. Spence said she was unaware that the bill had been introduced today, explaining that she had agreed to be added as a sponsor weeks ago on principle. She said she was currently reviewing the legislation and looked forward to addressing concerns advocates have with the bill.

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Jones recently returned $940 to the state, to cover 2 ½ years of personal phone calls made on his state-issued cellphone. That’s nearly half the $2,227 charged to his phone since he took office.

“He knew about the policy, and he just hadn’t done it,” said department spokesman Mark Stevens. “It was an oversight.”

Jones recently fielded questions after a news investigation into his department’s spending. At the end of last fiscal year, the Colorado Department of Education spent $12,000 on new furniture, $13,600 on plasma televisions—all while Commissioner Dwight Jones treated employees and colleagues to $80-a-head dinners at some of Denver’s fanciest restaurants.

Revelations about misused funds at the Colorado Department of Education come as school districts across the state are renegotiating teacher contracts because of a threatened take-back of state funding. In three of the state’s largest districts, Greeley, St. Vrain and Boulder, contract negotiations have broken down completely, and strikes may be looming.

Responding to Jones’s oversight in the Denver Post, Colorado State Sen. Nancy Spence, R-Centennial, reprimanded him for apparently not realizing the state is in a recession.

“He has a very high work ethic, and I appreciate that,” she said. “He has to be mindful of the fact that our fiscal situation doesn’t permit charging the state for personal expenses.

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Senate Majority Leader Brandon Schaffer, D-Longmont. (Photo/Bob Spencer, The Colorado Independent)

Heated exchange preceded today’s debate on Colorado Senate Bill 228, which seeks to repeal the the so-called “6 percent solution,” the long-established and controversial cap on General Fund growth. The new bill would give lawmakers increased flexibility to decide how to allocate Colorado’s shrinking state budget.

Animated members of the Republican minority trolled the speaker’s podium this morning, taking turns calling out House Majority Leader Brandon Shaffer (D-Longmont) on his decision to move debate on the bill to later in the day and for threatening to invoke procedural gag rule 9-C, which would limit discussion to five hours.

Sen. Nancy Spence (R-Centennial) said that she hadn’t seen the use of the gag rule in her 11 years as a member of the state legislature.

Sen. Shawn Mitchell (R-Broomfield) reiterated what many members of his caucus had been saying at the podium — that this is the most important legislation lawmakers will consider in this General Assembly and beyond.

“Why cram it into the dark of night?” he said. “We should be allowed to debate the constitutional questions involving this blow off of crucial spending limits… this [proposed delay in the debate] is a midnight charade.”

After nearly an hour of back and forth, Shaffer, clearly frustrated, blurted out from the floor that his motives were being maligned. After it was suggested again that he wanted to silence debate and put it off till the cover of darkness, Shaffer shouted, “Where’d that come from? … “I never proposed that!”

If nothing else, Shaffer’s proposed delay seemed like political tit for tat. Senate Republicans had pushed the debate from Friday to today to have the weekend to better prepare.

“We were ready to debate Friday, in the light of day, during business hours,” countered Shaffer.

Republicans are now proposing the bill be submitted to the Transportation Committee for review because the de facto effect of the bill would be to repeal laws that ensure transportation funding.

“But Republicans gutted that funding when they cut sales and income tax in 1999 and 2000,” said Sen. John Morse (D-Colorado Springs), sponsor of SB 228, his hoarse voice rising with emotion. “There was a public hearing before the Senate Finance Committee and no representatives of the Transportation Committee came,” he said.

Spence is one of three Republican members of the Transportation Committee.

“This money doesn’t come from transportation. It comes from the people. From taxpayers. It’s not your money. It’s the people of Colorado’s money, which we decide how to spend in every other area, except for transportation…,” Morse said. “No, gutting transportation happened a long time ago … You decided to turn off the spigot and now you say ‘You’re gutting transportation.’ Vote no to send this to Transportation Committee… This affects everyone. We’re all here. Let’s debate it.”

Listen to the ongoing debate here.

Supporters of SB 228 believe it is crucial to regain the ability to send funds where they are most desperately needed, namely to health and human services and education programs.

“This bill merely places transportation funding on the same playing field with other programs,” said Morse.

Meanwhile, Gov. Bill Ritter is scheduled to sign the FASTER bill today that raises $250 million from increased vehicle registration fees, which he contends will create thousands of jobs and pay to fix the state’s roads and bridges.