January 25, 2024 09:26 AM UTC

Carpetbagging Rose Pugliese Wins Colorado's Suckiest Political Job

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• by: Colorado Pols

Updating the state of disorder in the Colorado Republican House micro-minority today, where Assistant Minority Leader Rose Pugliese of Grand Junction Colorado Springs was just elected to be the next leader of the smallest and most fractious minority caucus in our lifetimes so far. The Colorado Sun’s Jesse Paul reports:

Rose Pugliese, a Colorado Springs Republican, is in just her second year as a state representative, but she had been serving as assistant minority leader in the House.

She beat out state Reps. Matt Soper, R-Delta, and Ken DeGraaf, R-Colorado Springs, for the job in two rounds of voting by secret ballot. DeGraaf was the lowest vote getter in the first tally, which meant he was dropped from the contest. Pugliese beat Soper in a final, 11-8 vote…

Pugliese, a former Mesa County commissioner, is taking the helm of a 19-member caucus that is bitterly divided between more moderate and more conservative factions even as it contends with a 46-member Democratic supermajority in the House.

Rep. Pugliese, who served in Mesa County government roles before transplanting to Colorado Springs ahead of her run for a seat in the legislature, has been warming a seat on the GOP bench for years awaiting her opportunity to move up to higher office. As a Mesa County “parent activist,” Pugliese led a campaign to teach “the other side” of climate change to students, claiming there “is no evidence” to support the theory of human-caused climate change. As a Mesa County Commissioner, Pugliese was a friend and political ally of now-indicted Clerk Tina Peters. Pugliese more recently led the failed opposition to Colorado joining the National Popular Vote compact, and pushed for criminal prosecution of librarians over “obscene” books in libraries even though she admits she never read any of the books in question.

Pugliese clearly has designs on higher office, but it’s an honest question whether taking the job of House Minority Leader under the present circumstances will boost Pugliese’s career or help wreck it. Pugliese’s job is now to direct the hopeless campaign to obstruct a supermajority with the power to shut down the minority when they’re tired of 1/3 of members hogging 60% of the debate time. Pugliese must now answer for the antics of the extreme members of her caucus, which could be worse for her than simply letting the “DeBottoms” faction lead outright. And at worst, she’ll be forced to join in their pointless obstruction antics–or face the wrath of her hard-right members is she doesn’t.

If it all sounds like the same intractable conflict plaguing Republicans in the U.S. House, that’s because it is. The same paradigm of leadership trying and failing to appease their own insatiable chaos agents is playing out under both domes. And now, one of Colorado’s last Republican upward hopefuls has hitched her wagon to their falling star.

Good luck with that.