Grand Junction Daily Sentinel

2/4/07

There were a variety of reasons why Colorado Democrats, after their completely unexpected 2004 takeover of both houses of the state Legislature for the first in some 40 years, managed to increase their majority control of the Statehouse in 2006.

      High among the reasons why Democrats consolidated their control of both the House and Senate was the fact that a large majority of Colorado voters believed Democrats governed responsibly in their first two years back from the political wilderness.

      Had they believed otherwise, Colorado voters wouldn’t have returned them to power by even greater numbers in 2006 over 2004.

      Over the past two years, Democratic leaders like House Majority Andrew Romanoff and sober-minded lawmakers like Grand Junction Rep. Bernie Buescher did a very good job suppressing the natural “Let’s toga!” instincts of a party surprisingly returned to power. And — to the extent that such instincts were manifested in the not-so-infrequent piece of loopy legislation — there was always a center-right, fiscally conservative Republican governor around to wield his veto pen.

      Now, in the early days of the 66th Colorado General Assembly, there are indisputable signs that the Democrats’ ingrained, left-wing, “Let’s toga!” instincts are supplanting the sound judgment the party routinely displayed throughout much of 2005-2006. That wouldn’t, ipso facto, be a cause for undue concern but what makes the situation more worrisome is that there is no longer a GOP governor in office to act as a counterweight to the party’s worst impulses.

      Among the primary cases in point is House Bill 1072, a sop to organized labor that would make it easier for unions to establish closed shops and give union bosses more power to dun employees a part of their weekly paychecks even though those employees might not desire any union representation. The bill would essentially undo a key labor law that has served the interests of both workers and their employers reasonably well over the past 60 years.

      The bill has already sailed through the House and a Senate committee. (It deserves note that Grand Junction’s Buescher was among the few Democrats who voted against the bill.) Should the legislation manage to gain Senate approval, Gov. Bill Ritter has all but said that he intends to sign it.

      Now that’s a real smart way to maintain the support of the business community, so much of which found little to like in GOP gubernatorial candidate Bob Beauprez and instead opted to invest its considerable financial support in the Ritter campaign.

      Perhaps even more troubling is Senate Bill 46, sponsored by Democratic Sen. Ken Gordon, which proposes to assign all nine of Colorado’s presidential electoral college votes to the candidate who wins the popular vote nationally.

      In effect, Gordon and like-minded Democrats are proposing that the nominal influence that Colorado now has on presidential elections be completely vitiated and, in effect, tied to the voters’ presidential preference in highly populated, and overwhelmingly Democratic-leaning states, like California and New York.

      In 2004, Coloradans rejected by a 2-1 margin an electoral college ballot reform question that was far less sweeping than that proposed by Gordon. Under the ballot question rejected by Coloradans just two years ago, the state’s nine electoral votes would have been divided on the basis of votes each candidate receives.

      In other words, if Sen. John McCain were to be the GOP presidential candidate in 2008 and received 55 percent of the Colorado presidential vote to, let’s say, Democratic candidate Sen. Hillary Clinton’s 45 percent, McCain would get 5 of the state’s electoral votes and Clinton 4.

      It’s remarkable to us that Gordon and his Democratic brethren in the Statehouse are so willing to flout the will of Coloradans expressed in the 2004 vote.

      Moderate Democrats would do well to put an end to their party’s “Let’s toga!” bacchanal very soon because such excesses will ill serve their guy in the governor’s mansion or their own political prospects in 2008.