local politics, home-town edition

Colorado Lawmaker Censured for Kicking

Normally, I would say, oh, national media only put Colorado in the news to make fun of us for being hicks or if we're on fire (we = national forests) or something. That may indeed be the case here as well, but Douglas Bruce is an idiot. He used to be one of those right-wing crazies from Colorado Springs, but he was worse than most because he introduced a string of dumb Citizens' Initiative ballot measures that were generally bad. The one he's famous for is called the Taxpayer's Bill of Rights (TaBoR, sharing its name with a 19th-century silver magnate/senator from the state). Basically, it says that if, in any given year, the state collects more in tax receipts than it has budgeted to spend, the money MUST be returned to all taxpayers forthwith; the maximum allowable budget is indexed to the previous year's budget plus inflation. This doesn't sound terrible in the one-sentence version, but, practically speaking, it doesn't reflect the reality of state financing, which often carries money over to compensate for lean years, etc etc. It screws up one-off costs and led to consistently decreasing revenue for the state. A (hostile) measure, passed about a decade later, required state education spending to increase every year relative to the year before by at least the rate of inflation, and so the two measures combined left the state in a dire budgetary situation, which was remedied in 2005. Basically, Douglas Bruce is an "all taxes are bad taxes" libertarian who used poorly-worded and poorly-though-out referendums to advance his agenda.

And now that the state Republican party picked him to serve in the State House of Representatives to fill a vacant seat, he's part of the government itself. This is bad for him, since the people he basically decided were too dumb and irresponsible to either 1. exercise fiscal restraint or 2. pass his measure on their own are now his colleagues. But this is probably worse for his party, who picked him because, well, they wanted controversy? Basically, unless they get John Elway to run for governor next election (and I hear they already have the signs printed), they have
1. Tom Tancredo, the failed GOP Presidential candidate and general embarrassment (see: his thoughts on Miami, his breaking of his original promise about term limits, etc)
2. Wayne Allard, aka "The Invisible Man" (named by Time magazine), who is stepping down in 2008 rather than face a primary challenge from within his own party
3. Marilyn Musgrave, who introduced (more than once) the Federal Marriage Amendment (to the Constitution), and one of the few Congresspeople to win her district by a narrower margin with every re-election
4. none of the Governorship, State House of Representatives, State Senate, and a minority of Federal Congressional Representatives for the first time since 1983

I'm sure John Elway is getting sick of the calls.