Promising that the fight has just begun, Republican lawmakers today fired off a letter to the governor demanding that he wait 120 days before implementing his controversial executive order granting unions unprecedented power over state personnel. The Republicans also pledged additional steps, to be disclosed soon.

The order, signed by the governor late Friday, grants a form of collective bargaining for the first time ever to Colorado's state government workers. Business leaders reacted with alarm at the development, and the state's two largest newspapers the Rocky Mountain News and The Denver Post, denounced the executive order--the Post in a rare, front-page Sunday editorial. 

Republicans have decried not only the "budget-busting" effect that bargaining by unions will have on state government but also what they say is the back-door way in which the governor cut the legislature out of the debate altogether by issuing an order.

"The governor not only wants to drive up the cost of running our state government as payback to his allies in organized labor, but he also apparently wants to avoid any open debate on it," said Republican Sen. Shawn Mitchell, of Broomfield. "By sidestepping the legislative process, he has done an end-run on the public."