So with the Democrats stamping their feet and threatening to hold their breath until they turn - er - blue, Governor Owens found time to meet with them yesterday about the proposed immigration special session. Since the Republicans are backing the governor on this one, the Dems really have no leverage. They'd need 15 Republicans to support their call rather than the governor's and that's not going to happen.
The Dems, in the meantime, sound less than sincere in their discomfort with the Court's decision:
Fitz-Gerald questioned whether the legislature has the authority to overturn a court decision. She said she didn't think it was the legislature's role to rubber-stamp flawed ballot questions.
No word on what she thinks of flawed Supreme Court decisions. In a statement that was in the initial Rocky report last night, but later edited out, Romanoff said that they could spend all summer overturning State Supreme Court decisions they didn't like.
So which is it, guys? You don't have the authority, or you don't like the idea?
Since the call defines the parameters of the special session, Owens ostensibly called the meeting to find out what the Dems wanted included. When they asked to include employer enforcement, he pointed out that, along with a number of other Republican bills, the Democratic leadership had killed this one on a party-line vote in committee. (Committee votes are significant precisely because they're a way of killing a bill without a floor vote that might put vulnerable members on the record with an unpopular position.)
The Rocky's reporting on this was less-than-stellar. Initially, they stated as fact that the governor was considering including Republican bills that the Dems had committee-killed. A call to the governor's press office revealed that that was only Fitz-Gerald's interpretation of the conversation. The governor's point was that the Dems had the chance to deal with these issues, and decided not to, so to come back now with a raft of half-baked ideas smacks of playing catch-up.
The Rocky took out that paragraph in this morning's draft, but reporting Sen. Fitz-Gerald's comments as fact without attribution is just sloppy at best, and credulous as worst.
