Archive for category Colorado Politics
Jon Hotaling & Ted Harvey
Posted by Joshua Sharf in State GOP Chair on March 19th, 2011
For some people, you just can’t be socially conservative enough to vote for. Not Jeff Crank:
Jeff, of course, is the head of the Colorado branch of Americans for Prosperity. Hardly RINOs, that’s one of the national organizations that’s help Tea Parties achieve success.
Not Ken Buck.
And now, apparently, not Mark Waller. Yeah, that Mark Waller, the Representative who’s held down the fort on little things like taxes, TABOR, spending, and coming from Colorado Springs, doesn’t exactly have the social views of Arlen Specter.
And it’s all over a bill that isn’t even about abortion.
Rep. Waller introduced HB-1256, which was intended to provide legal recourse to women whose unborn children were killed in automobile accidents. It was intended only to address this lacuna in the law, had nothing whatever to do with abortion, and went out of its way to make sure that was understood. It’s a gap in the law that even pro-choice Democrats understand, and the bill, according to Waller, had broad bipartisan support.
The architects of this fratricidal strategy are Mark and Jon Hotaling, the social absolutists’ less-effective answer to the Koch brothers. Mark headed the Colorado Christian Coalition at the time they produced the above flyer about Crank, and Jon has a long association with Colorado Right to Life, a group that was effectively tossed out of National Right to Life for being too radical.
Colorado Right to Life, the Judean People’s Front (or is it the People’s Front for Judea?) of Colorado politics, decided that since the bill didn’t address abortion, it had to be killed.
RTL issued the following mailer, calling the bill “monstrous:”
They then went on to say that the correct bill would have just implemented the Personhood Amendment, leaving this letter for Rep. Waller:
Since the bill was written not to touch existing abortion law in any way, it also didn’t touch parental notification. But that didn’t stop RTL from using that inaccuracy to whip up opposition to the bill, creating such a political hot potato that Rep. Waller finally had to pull it.
If that’s all it was, it would be another self-defeating act by Colorado Right to Life.
But here’s where it gets interesting. Remember, Jon Hotaling has a long history with Colorado Right to Life. The same Jon Hotaling who:
was manager of (State Senator Ted) Harvey’s short and unsuccessful race against 6th District Congressman Mike Coffman and Wil Armstrong in 2008.
Sen. Harvey still owes Hotaling almost $20,000 for his work on that campaign.
And here’s what he recently had to say about Mr. Hotaling:
Rumors persist that Harvey, if elected chair, will hire the Hotaling brothers to run the state party office. That, his detractors fear, would also mean the party’s candidates would be screened to pass ultra-conservative principles. If so, that might doom the party to failure in more moderate races.
“If only we could be so lucky to hire Jon Hotaling, nobody has a better track record for winning campaigns than he does. Jon would have to take a pay cut to work for the party”, said Harvey.
Look, politics, especially in a middling-size state like Colorado, is a small pond. And the higher you go up the pyramid, the more people know each other. There’s nothing the matter – necessarily – with Harvey using a friend of his to manage his campaign.
But this is absolutely not the sort of thing we want out of a State Political Director. There is a legitimate debate to be had about abortion, but state level-politics requires coalition-building and teamwork, not casting out everyone who doesn’t agree with you 100% on particular issue.
I know plenty of people who, unlike me, voted for the Personhood Amendment, and still voted for me – twice – for State House of Representatives. They don’t want to purify the party, or use good bills like Rep. Waller’s to push their position, to the exclusion of progress on another front.
So, given that, I think it would benefit the party, in advance of next Saturday’s vote for State Chairman, to know his answers to the following questions:
I’m on record in this space arguing that parties are coalitions, and that coalitions need to be big enough to win majorities. Not every election, not all the time. But big enough so you have a chance to implement your ideas and promote your ideals.
Moreover, Ted Harvey has secured considerable – although far from universal – Tea Party support, by focusing not the social issues, but economics and the promotion of liberty. He has a chance here to make a concrete promise that would give credibility to that campaign claim, and to show that those really are his priorities for the state.
The Denver City Council Wants Your Money
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Colorado Politics, Denver, Denver Mayor, PPC, Taxes on March 15th, 2011
Well, that shouldn’t be any surprise to anyone living in Denver over the last few years. But usually they have the decency to pretend that it’s for someone else. This time, the Denver City Council wants your money for themselves and the office some of them hope to occupy come May.
At last night’s City Council meeting, they voted themselves (10-3, the Denver Post article neglects to mention who the three were) a 6.6% pay raise, starting two years from now:
Denver is the only large city in Colorado that pays its council members a living wage — $78,173 a year, plus about $30,000 in benefits.
The raise would give the council members an annual salary of $83,332 by July 2014. The council president makes about $10,000 more.
The mayor’s salary will grow to $155,211 from its current $145,601. The salaries of both the clerk and recorder and the auditor would be $134,235, up from their current $125,924.
Right now, the seasonally unadjusted unemployment rate for Denver is 10.9%; a seasonal adjustment might bring that down to 10.4% or so. This is the highest that it’s been going all the way back to 1994, when the CDLE numbers begin.
In addition, Denver is looking at a $100,000,000 budget gap this year, slated to get worse over the next decade. To City Council chairman Chris Nevitt, this may only be “symbolic,” but it’s pretty clear what it’s symbolic of.
An Oldie But Goodie
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Colorado Politics, Denver Mayor, PPC, Taxes on February 27th, 2011
With the Denver Mayoral race starting to heat up, and with Chris Romer trying to position himself as a ‘pro-business’ candidate, it’s good to revisit exactly what he means by that.
This comes from a conversation he had with the DaVita CEO who remarked that Coloradoans don’t know what investment means. Apparently, aside from normal infrastructure spending, it means getting taxpayers to fund businesses.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
All Parts of the Constitution Are Equal
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Colorado Politics, PPC, Taxes on February 21st, 2011
But some are more equal than others.
I’ll be writing a lot about SCR-001 in the next few days and weeks. It’s an attempt to make it harder to amend the state Constitution, and the way it’s written, its target is TABOR.
The giveaway is the provision concerning repeal thresholds. Here are those provisions:
- It will take 50% to pass this amendment
- It will take 60% to pass amendments in the future
- It will take 50% to repeal amendments passed before 2013
- Except for this amendment, which it will take 60% to repeal
Got that? If something was passed with 60%, it takes 60% to repeal. If something was passed with 50%, it takes 50% to repeal. Except for this amendment itself, which takes 50% to pass and 60% to repeal.
Under the Colorado Constitution, not all portions of the Constitution would be subject to the same rules. Some parts of the Constitution would be more equal than others.
As nearly as I can tell, this is without parallel in the United States. I made a quick review of the 50 state constitutions this evening and their amendment processes. None of them has different thresholds for different parts of themselves.
Massachusetts, in provisions that only a lawyer, or a Puritan, or a Purtian lawyer, could love, does restrict the subject matter than initiative-based amendments can address, but doesn’t set separate thresholds, and doesn’t separate merely by date.
Mississippi does say that certain sections of its constitution can’t be amended by initiative, including:
(a) For the proposal, modification or repeal of any portion of the Bill of Rights of this Constitution;
(b) To amend or repeal any law or any provision of the Constitution relating to the Mississippi Public Employees’ Retirement System;
(c) To amend or repeal the constitutional guarantee that the right of any person to work shall not be denied or abridged on account of membership or nonmembership in any labor union or organization; or
(d) To modify the initiative process for proposing amendments to this Constitution.
And Florida does have a 2/3 requirement for raising or initiating new taxes or fees.
But as far as I can tell, that’s it. While the initiative and referendum process varies significantly from state to state, states use subject matter, not the manner of adoption, as the standard for whether or not it’s subject to repeal. And they don’t set different thresholds for those sections, they just say that it has to come from a referred measure or in a state constitutional convention, and can’t be addressed by initiative.
Colorado, by adopting this idea, would be unique in the country in this regard.
A History Lesson for Sen. Bacon
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Colorado Politics, PPC on February 14th, 2011
This afternoon, the Senate State, Veterans, and Military Affairs Committee took up SCR11-001, what will likely become yet another referred measure from a legislature desperate to keep you, the citizens, from exercising any sort of oversight. So much so that when it came time for the committee to comment, after grassroots organization after grassroots organization testified against, while a number of large, mainstream lobbying groups had argued in favor, Sen. Boyd argued that there was considerable grassroots support for the Referendum.
She also praised Sen. Bacon’s “history lessons.” In this case, Sen. Bacon made an interesting point – that many witnesses were claiming that the original meaning of the right to petition the government meant something quite different from the right to citizen initiative to amend the Constitution. He noted – accurately – that many of the western states added citizen referenda during the Progressive period in the early part of the 20th Century. Colorado did so in 1910.
I’m not usually a fan of the Progressives, either historical or contemporary, but in this case, I think they were onto something. The reason that it was difficult to amend the federal Constitution was largely that federal powers were weak, and its powers enumerated. The likely effect of amendments was to expand the central government’s power.
From the ratification debates, it’s clear that it was generally understood that state constitutions were different. It was believed that state constitutions were inclusive: the state could pretty much do anything except what was forbidden explicitly. So while state constitutions generally didn’t include an initiative process until the Progressives, as a means of preventing governmental overreach, in their case, they make sense.
We’ll have a lot more to say about the policy and the politics of this mistake as we go along. For the moment, though, given the obvious motivations of the Democrats who will vote unanimously for this referred measure, it’s tough to argue with the logic of the folks who passed and voted in favor of this in the first place.
…and Ryan Call Enters
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Colorado Politics, PPC, State GOP Chair on February 8th, 2011
As Dick Wadhams bows out – hopefully to pursue managing a winning Senate or even Presidential campaign – outgoing Denver County Chairman Ryan Call enters the race. Ryan will be touting Denver’s success in the last elections, its return to relevance after a brief hiatus, and experience gained from being the legal counsel for the state party over the last few years.
I will point out that Ryan is a friend of mine, and that we worked closely together in the 2009-2010 election cycle, when he was Denver Chairman and I was one of the Vice Chairmen, as well as our candidate in HD-6. I saw how hard Ryan worked to make this election cycle a good one for Denver’s Republicans, and to leave us with a basis to build on.
Probably the most important point for me is that in my own discussions with Ryan, I’ve come to believe that we share a basic conception of what the party chairman’s job is. I’ve elaborated on that before, so I won’t go over it again, and Ryan’s more than capable of making the case for himself. But I will mention that his emphasis on politics as a “team sport,” and the need to build coalitions around ideas and issues is something I place a lot of stock in:
It’s no small challenge to be a principled Republican in Denver, but that experience has taught me that while we may not always agree on everything, politics is a team sport….
One of the strengths of our Party is that we are all a group of principled and independent-minded individuals. That sometimes makes it a challenge to build consensus and agreement, but I believe we need a broad and welcoming Party in order to win elections and govern effectively – the stakes are just too high for us to be divided. Although there is room within our Party for certain disagreements on specific matters of legislative policy, we share certain common values about what is right and wrong, and a commitment to those core Republican principles of limited government, personal responsibility, and freedom and opportunity that unite us as Colorado Republicans.
The only way that can happen is if the chairman isn’t perceived as being a part of one faction or another, and I think Ryan’s managed that well here in Denver. I know of both Tea Party members and old-timers who were impressed with the way he handled the job. The party’s vote totals – with some percentages the highest they’ve been since the early 90s – should be read as a broadening of the coalition here in town.
Now, some of Ryan’s hard work can be seen in a different light, and when I put the question to him, he responded that he knew that he’d have to delegate responsibility at the state level in a way that he didn’t at the county level. Certainly, he’ll have resources and institutional memory to draw on at state that Denver just didn’t have available.
The circumstances facing the state party are substantially different from those facing Denver: the new chairman will be expected to deliver victories, not merely let the party compete in a dignified manner. A chairman can only deliver those victories with recruiting and building a staff he can rely on, and it would certainly be reasonable to ask how he intends to go about building and leading that staff, not only serving on it.
Of course, these would be fair questions for any of the candidates. There are two other prominent candidates for state chair right now, State Senator Ted Harvey and Larimer County Chairman Larry Carillo. Being State Chairman is fundamentally different from being an office-holder, and state is much bigger than Larimer County.
Between now and the State Central Committee meeting in March, there will hopefully be a number of candidate forums. I understand that R Block Party will be hosting two, details below, at which all three candidates are confirmed. I don’t think readers here need any urging from me to show up and ask questions.
Wadhams Bows Out
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Colorado Politics, PPC on February 7th, 2011
Dick Wadhams has withdrawn from the race for Colorado GOP Chairman, sending the following email to members of the State Central Committee:
It has been an honor and privilege to serve as Colorado Republican Chairman but after much reflection I have decided to not seek reelection.
I am very grateful to a clear majority of the members of the Colorado Republican State Central Committee who offered their support and encouragement over the past several weeks.
I entered this race a few weeks ago looking forward to discussing what we accomplished in 2010 and to the opportunities we have in 2012 to elect a new Republican president; to increase our state House majority and win a state Senate majority; and to reelect our two new members of Congress.
However, I have tired of those who are obsessed with seeing conspiracies around every corner and who have terribly misguided notions of what the role of the state party is while saying “uniting conservatives” is all that is needed to win competitive races across the state.
I have no delusions this will recede after the state central committee meeting in March. Meanwhile, the ability of Colorado Republicans to win and retain the votes of hundreds of thousands of unaffiliated swing voters in 2012 will be severely undermined.
For the past four years, I have devoted all of my professional time and energy to serving as state chairman and am very proud of what we accomplished in the face of unique and unprecedented challenges in both the 2008 and 2010 election cycles.
I will always remain humbled and grateful for the opportunity to travel this magnificent state where I was born and raised and to work with Republican leaders and elected officials in all 64 counties as state chairman.
This leaves the race open to a number of conservative candidates who have declared, and perhaps opens up the race to couple of new entrants. In any event, the race is no longer simply a referendum on Dick Wadhams’s tenure, but a ballot on what sort of leadership the state Republican party wants. So unless explicit, please don’t read anything below as a direct criticism or praise of Dick’s tenure.
Denver’s New Leadership May Be More Important Than It Knows
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Colorado Politics, PPC, President 2012 on February 5th, 2011
Congratulations to the new leadership of the Denver Republican Party, Danny Stroud as Chairman, Michelle Lyng, Jeff Krump, and Pauline Olvera as Vice Chairmen, and Brett Moore as Secretary. I had the chance to get to know them all during the last two election cycles, and they all bring unmistakable strengths to their new roles. Today, we also elected new District Captains (or re-elected current ones). I wonder if this new leadership understands exactly how important it can be.
This cycle, the only statewide election will be for Presidential electors. If we start by applying the new electoral votes to the states that Obama and McCain won in 2008, the Democrats start with a 359-179 lead. But while pretty much any state that went red is likely to stay that way, it’s reasonable to bet that Florida (29 EV, Obama by 3), North Carolina (15 EV, Obama by 0.32%), Virginia (13 EV, Obama by 6, but having gone hard R in the interval), Ohio (18 EV, Obama by 5, also hard R in the interval), and Indiana (11 EV, Obama by 1, Republican since Lincoln) will return to the Republican fold. Should that happen, and should the voters in Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional district regain their senses, the Dems have a 272-266 lead.
Of the states with the chance to flip back, Obama won New Hampshire by 10, and despite big wins in the US Senate race, the US House, and the state legislature, re-elected a popular Democrat governor.
Next on the list – you guessed it – Colorado. Obama won 53-46, but the failure to capture the Senate seat should rightly be seen as a failure of the candidate. Republicans took three other statewide offices. And did so because their candidates won 30% of the vote (or close to it) in Denver. Which means, that Colorado could be the battleground state par excellence in 2012, and Denver’s turnout will be critical.
Truthfully, two years before the election, we really don’t know where the battleground states will be. Those will be determined by the issues of the day, the state of the economy, possibly by our foreign policy position, as well as the relative strengths of party organizations, the Republican nominee, and what statewide elections and ballot initiatives are going on around the country. It would be a little presumptuous to believe that Denver will be the center of the national political universe.
But it’s not impossible.
SEIU, not AFL-CIO
Posted by Joshua Sharf in ACORN, Colorado Politics, Labor, Media Bias, PPC on January 25th, 2011
Kudos to Shawn Mitchell and Ted Harvey for voting against Ellen Golombek to head the State Department of Labor and Employment. After all, it’s what she advocated when opposing Bill Owens’s appointment of Vicki Armstrong in 1999.
But the Denver Post story more or less missed the point. Again. Not all unions are created equal. She headed up the state AFL-CIO, sure. But that’s an organization that’s been declining in membership and importance for pretty my entire lifetime. It did damage in its day, but can do far less now, given than less than 7% of the private workforce is unionized. There’s a case to be made against unions in general, but that case has been already been won.
Golombek is far more dangerous because of her political strategizing as the SEIU’s director of government affairs, which goes completely unmentioned in the Post report. Public employees can do valuable work, but their unions are designed to use your tax dollars to pick negotiating partners willing to make you work until 70 so they can retire at 55.
Colorado WINS’s efforts to unionize state employees have thus far been a bust. Expect them to get a boost from political advocates with their hands on the levers.
I Volunteer Cheri Jahn
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Budget, Colorado Politics, PPC, Regulation on January 16th, 2011
Governor Hickenlooper has deservedly won praise for his idea of a “regulatory impact statement” for new regulations. Such a statement would estimate the costs to business of new regulations, and be a good step towards an actual cost-benefit analysis of new rules. Legislative Council already does something similar in the form of fiscal notes to new legislation. (Such a statement would only really be of use if the processes for determining the costs were as open as the results; it might be all to easy for a bureaucracy to game the system, or for large businesses to underestimate the costs to smaller competitors.)
So it was particularly interesting to see the following statement in this weekend’s Denver Business Journal from State Senator Cheri Jahn:
“When legislation comes through, the very first thing I am going to look at is: How will it effect my business and my ability to operate and to expand and to maintain what I am doing.”
“And if it is going to hurt me, I am not going to support it.”
Leaving aside the furor that would erupt if a Republican were to have said this – maybe only Jahn can go to China, so to speak – the sentiment is fine one.
Sen. Jahn serves on the Business, Labor, and Technology Committee, which has a 4-3 Democrat majority. If she really wants to have the information necessary to make the calculation she claims to want to make, perhaps she could sponsor the legislation required to make this happen. If she can’t be persuaded to do that, perhaps Sen. Shawn Mitchell could get her to vote for it. If it were to pass committee 4-3, it would certainly Senate Democrats in a bind on a floor vote.
As for the House, in the past, Democrats have balked at even estimating the cost of new health insurance mandates. This year, they wouldn’t have the votes.
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