February 09, 2011 07:13 PM UTC

GOP Arizona Copycat Immigration Bills Fizzle

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• by: Colorado Pols

As the Durango Herald’s Joe Hanel reports:

Rep. Randy Baumgardner, R-Hot Sulphur Springs, said his Colorado House Bill 1107 had too many problems to continue.

“After many drafts and hours of deliberation and meetings with entities, we had come to some agreement with agencies out there,” Baumgardner said. “(But) we couldn’t seem to get away from some parts of it that could be possibly unconstitutional.”

…The bill had been scheduled for its first hearing in the House Agriculture, Livestock and Natural Resources Committee next Monday. But Tuesday morning, the panel’s chairman, Rep. Jerry Sonnenberg, R-Sterling, announced that the hearing would be today and legislators would quickly dispose of HB 1107.

Hanel reports that a companion measure from Sen. Kent Lambert, Senate Bill 54, meets its fate next Wednesday in a Senate committee. Thus ends the much-balleyhooed push by the Republican Study Committee of Colorado, following their headline-grabbing trip to Arizona at the height of last year’s campaign season, to bring a version of that state’s hotly contested anti-immigrant law, SB 1070, to Colorado.

Since these bills never had a chance of passing both houses, let alone being signed into law by Gov. John Hickenlooper, our interest in them has primarily been their political value–to Republicans who view this is a base-pleaser, but also Democrats watching Republicans alienate an absolutely crucial and growing segment of the Colorado electorate. What we’ve heard is that GOP House Speaker Frank McNulty has been substantially more critical of the RSCC’s push for hard line immigration legislation in private than he feels at liberty to be in public, and McNulty’s fingerprints are indeed all over the bill’s early and quiet demise.

If that’s true, and you accept our premise on the long-term political problems that alienating Hispanics represents for the GOP, then you have to give McNulty some credit for doing the right thing here. You’ll want to make sure to do so, too, because the “Tea Party” probably won’t.