Maybe I’m off base here, but I can’t help but notice a theme. Democrats in charge of our state government don’t want the people of Colorado to be in control of their own state.
Hell, the elected Democrats in charge of Colorado don’t even want themselves to be in charge of Colorado. They’re hell-bent to get out-of-staters to do the job.
Maybe that’s great delegation skills because it certainly isn’t expedient to push a leftist agenda.
Let me offer just three examples.
First, just before he moved out of the governor’s mansion, President-elect John Hickenlooper signed an executive order condemning Coloradans to follow the dictates of the governor of California. He “adopted” the California low-emission vehicle standards.
Fortunately, the Colorado Automobile Dealers Association has challenged this unconditional surrender in court, arguing that if Hick wants our car choices to be limited by Gavin Newsome’s whims, he needed to at least get the permission of our state legislature first.
In my quixotic quest to find the three remaining principled liberals of yore who still believe “the ends don’t justify the means,” I’m waiting for the Dems now in control of the legislature to support this legal challenge. While they may love the idea of forcing Coloradans to replace their pickups with Telsas at gunpoint, you’d think they’d want to do it themselves, via their legal authority.
If they’re fine with the governor giving their power away to another state’s governor, then Colorado lawmakers can’t whine when a future Republican governor lets Texas regulate our oil wells.
Second example. Our new Attorney General, Phil Weiser, plans to join other Democrat AGs to appeal a federal judge’s ruling in December that Obamacare cannot remain in place now that Republicans have removed the tax penalty for those who don’t have health insurance.
It wasn’t that long ago when former Colorado Attorney General John Suthers went to bat for Colorado, suing the feds on the principle they couldn’t control the insurance and health care policies of Colorado — that was up to our state lawmakers.
Fast forward to today and now our new AG is suing to make sure that bureaucrats in Washington control both our health-care policies and how the state spends our Medicaid funding.
This is particularly odd given our new governor’s love of socialized medicine, warmly called “Medicare for all.” Should the ruling by this federal judge t
hat Obamacare is unconstitutional hold, it could give Jared Polis and his leftist legislature the legal and political room to socialize Colorado’s health care their way.
Third example. Our Democrat-controlled state Senate passed a bill to change the way we in Colorado vote for U.S. president, endorsing the “national popular vote.” If ultimately successful, this would force Colorado’s nine (likely to be ten after the next census) electors in the Electoral College to cast all their votes to the presidential candidate that received the most popular votes nationwide.
Or to put it differently, our electors could no longer vote for the president that the majority of Coloradans supported. This bill disenfranchises Colorado voters and makes us subservient to large population centers of New York and Los Angeles.
It creates a system the Founders wished to avoid where states race to inflate their vote counts. Today that could mean a state allowing 16-years-olds, felons, and undocumented immigrants to vote.
The bill goes even further. In order for the Colorado Secretary of State (SOS) to count who “won” the national popular vote, she must accept the vote counts reported by other state’s secretaries of state by a date certain. Even if some of the reports are uncertain or obviously falsified, she can’t wait for the matter to be legally resolved. She must use the vote count another secretary of state tells her to use.
Imagine a crooked Texas SOS (since we’re beating up on Texas) who “officially” reports 99 percent of all Texans, living and dead, voted for Trump. Before the courts might officially reverse his lie, our secretary of state must order our ten electors to cast their votes for him.
I get that the progressives now in charge of our state want what they want in the fastest, most expedient, heavy-handed way they can get it. Power is intoxicating.
But I ask them to take a step back and see they are disempowering all the power-hungry Colorado politicians to come. Oh. And the people too, if that matters.
Jon Caldara is president of the Independence Institute, a free market think tank in Denver.
