April 26, 2019 02:11 PM UTC

Lawmakers' Final Weekend Gets Pulled

• 9 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

UPDATE: The heart-shaking drama goes on:

Update: Lawmaking slowed to halt from a snail's pace after a Republican senator asked that a bill be read at length because the rule mandating everyone in the chamber wear a sport/suit coat has not been relaxed. #copolitics #coleg

— Jesse Aaron Paul ☀ (@JesseAPaul) April 26, 2019

Finally, Republicans have found their hill to die on. The coat rule.

—–

Colorado Public Radio reported this morning on the legislative logjam at the Colorado State Capitol with just one week left before the body is constitutionally obligated to adjourn–and with literally hundreds of bills left either to consider or allow to “die on the calendar,” options are quickly narrowing:

Colorado’s 2019 legislative session has already seen its fair share of drama: graphic debates lasting in the wee hours of the morning, a committee hearing in the middle of the bomb cyclone, the Senate’s minority caucus suing Democratic leaders for using a robot choir to read a bill.

And to cap it off: the first weekend session in more than a decade.

Theatrics aside, lawmakers have managed to pass several major Democratic priorities. Despite a well-funded and vocal opposition, Gov. Polis signed the most significant update to Colorado’s oil and gas regulations since 1951. He also approved a controversial “red flag law,” which gives judges the power to temporarily remove firearms from people believed to be a threat to themselves or others. Not to mention a bill that could someday award Colorado’s electoral votes to the presidential candidate who wins the national popular vote.

As it’s become increasingly plain in recent weeks that an end-of-session pileup was likely, minority Republicans in the Colorado Senate tried to shift the blame:

Not So Fun Fact #1: Despite 130 fewer bills than last year, there are 139 fewer bills that have been acted upon compared to this same time last session. What does this mean? It means we’re prepared to be here very late for the next few weeks. #COpolitics #COleg pic.twitter.com/qPBlLlzpw9

— Colorado Senate GOP (@ColoSenGOP) April 22, 2019

The problem is, there’s only one reason for the huge number of bills left to be debated in the session’s final week: an unprecedented campaign by minority Republicans in the House and Senate to jam up the works by slow-walking through every debate and forcing bills and journals to be needlessly read at length. The GOP obstruction campaign reached its peak on March 22nd when Republicans forced debate to continue late into a Friday night, only to discover that five Republican Senators had already left the building–resulting in a brief State Patrol search for the missing Senators before an agreement was reached between the parties to mark them absent. Since that embarrassing spectacle for Republicans, the standoff has cooled enough to allow for the passage of major Democratic priorities like oil and gas regulation and the “red flag” law.

Given the huge amount of unfinished work remaining, this weekend’s legislative overtime might not be enough to prevent a mass calendar die-off one week from today. But even though one of the chief obstructionists this year in the Senate, Republican Sen. Owen Hill of Colorado Springs says he has “no desire to work on Saturday,” the GOP minority’s actions are the only reason it’s happening.

So we’ll save our pity for the staffers and reporters there through no fault of their own.