March 12, 2024 12:33 PM UTC

Brandi Bradley Says House Republicans Plan to Waste Even MORE of Everyone's Time

• 6 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

Republicans in the Colorado House of Representatives waste a MASSIVE amount of time talking about ridiculous ideas, making utterly disgusting speeches, and allowing folks like Rep. Ken “Skin” DeGraaf to mutter big words he recently gleaned from a thesaurus. No subject is too far out of bounds for the GOP micro-minority.

Democratic House Speaker Julie McCluskie has been doing a pretty good job of pulling back on these nonsensical outbursts. During a discussion about Black History Month in early February, for example, McCluskie asked DeGraaf to make sure his comments were actually relevant to the subject at hand; when it became clear that DeGraaf would make no effort to moderate himself, McCluskie called for a brief recess so that the other 64 members of the House of Representatives could move on with their day.

McCluskie’s quick gavel hand has been a welcome sight after House Republicans rambled away much of the second half of the 2023 legislative session. There are 46 Democrats and just 19 Republicans in the House; there is no logical argument for why the GOP micro-minority should be allowed to bogart the majority of the available time in a 120-day legislative session. That isn’t to say that Republicans aren’t trying to waste more time. As of this morning, the House had engaged in about 36 total hours of debate on the House Floor; DeGraaf has spoken for roughly 6 of those hours all by himself.

After a relatively-quiet first legislative session in 2023, Republican Rep. Brandi Bradley of Littleton has decided that she doesn’t want to sit by and watch The Unambiguously Lame Duo of DeGraaf and Rep. Scott “There is No” Bottoms account for the majority of the GOP’s gibberish. Bradley is only in her second legislative session after first winning election to HD-39 in 2022, but she wants her share of the crazy pie and she wants it NOW. Bradley has publicly boasted about how the House GOP wastes hours of time talking about transgender terrorists running around forcibly injecting people with the COVID vaccine, or whatever; she is adamant that this nonsense be allowed to continue.

Bradley was a guest on something called “The Colorado Show” on Sunday, during which she made it clear that House Republicans — and Minority Leader Rose Pugliese — are already planning new ways to waste more time:

BRADLEY: So I think the more that they do it and the more we can call them out, the better it looks for us. I think that they think that they’re winning because, you know, government is their god…

…I think that they are worried, you know, now with Minority Leader Pugliese in there and really fighting for us. And there’s been definitely a shift. And I don’t think that they know what to do because the long bill is coming up and we will read the long bill at length multiple times on second reading and third reading. And this, that will take 26 hours. So we’re willing to fight. And I don’t think that they know what to do with that.

The “long bill” is the annual state budget bill that the legislature is Constitutionally mandated to complete each year. The fact that it is called “the long bill” should tell you that it will take a considerable amount of time to read it aloud.

Bradley is crazier than a bag of squirrels, so it’s hard to know how much of this “plan” is really supported by Pugliese. Regardless, Bradley just put the new Minority Leader on blast. If Pugliese does NOT demand that the “long bill” be read at length, she’ll be seen as a traitor to the lunatic right-wing. But if she does make that demand, then she’ll be showing that she is no more capable of controlling the nuts in her micro-minority than the former House Minority Leader, Mike Lynch, and will be signaling to Democrats that she is not a serious person intent on having serious discussions about governing.

There are 65 members of the House of Representatives. Only 19 of them are Republicans.

This is why.