July 25, 2024 10:10 AM UTC

Swashbuckling Transphobe Eli Bremer Offers To Save Colorado Republicans From Themselves

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• by: Colorado Pols

UPDATE: Once again from Ernest Luning at the Gazette, Dave Williams’ ally El Paso County chair Vickie Tonkins takes a swipe at her vice-chair, leading anti-Williams insurgent Todd Watkins in the latest round of high-dudgeon low-impact retaliation:

A censure resolution pushed by El Paso County GOP chairwoman Vickie Tonkins and approved Tuesday night by the county party’s executive committee calls on county vice chairman Todd Watkins to “resign immediately” after having “lost all trust of the Chair,” but Watkins told Colorado Politics he’s staying put.

“I have watched as my Vice Chair, over the past few months spiraled out of control and it has not only effected my office but the entire Republican Party in the State of Colorado,” Tonkins said Wednesday in an email to county Republicans.

None of these people have the power to compel the other to do anything, but it’s a distracting sideshow while Dave Williams makes the rules and writes himself checks.

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As Ernest Luning at the Colorado Springs Gazette’s political blog reports, an alternative slate of proposed leadership for the controversy-mired Colorado Republican Party led by previously unsuccessful U.S. Senate candidate Eli Bremer is taking shape as a meeting of the party’s central committee convenes this weekend to consider the question of whether to oust current chairman Dave “Let’s Go Brandon” Williams and his deputies–after their “great experiment” with primary election favoritism this year ended in humiliation for Williams and the vast majority of party-endorsed candidates:

Members of the state party’s central committee plan to meet at a church in Brighton on Saturday to consider whether to oust Williams and the other elected party officers, Vice Chairwoman Hope Scheppelman and Secretary Anna Ferguson. If they’re unseated, the agenda also includes electing replacement officers to serve through the November election until next spring.

Williams last week sued to block the meeting from being considered official party business, but the lawsuit has yet to be heard in court. State party officials have urged Republicans not to attend Saturday’s meeting, calling the gathering “illegal” and “fraudulent.”

In addition to Bremer’s bid to chair the Colorado Republican Party, the slate of former GOP officials Bremer is proposing to run the party also includes former Weld County chair Scott James to serve as state vice chair, former Mesa County chair Kevin McCarney as secretary, former Jefferson County chair Don Ytterberg to chair the party’s independent expenditure committee, and former Park County chair Dick Elsner to hold the treasurer position. Bremer also proposes hiring political operative Riley Scott as the party’s executive director and naming former party attorney Chris Murray to handle the GOP’s legal matters.

It would be a return to a prior generation of leadership before Williams and his crew of MAGA-addled screwballs took control of the party last year, and immediately redirected the party into a vehicle for settling Williams’ longstanding political vendettas. Replacing the Colorado GOP’s current scandal-plagued election denier attorney Randy Corporon and his disbarred coup-plotting friend John Eastman with any other attorney in the state seems like a step in the right direction.

While Williams has set the competency bar for the position of party chairman very low, we wouldn’t expect major messaging changes for the Colorado GOP if Bremer were to get the job. Bremer’s U.S. Senate campaign in 2022, which ended at the state assembly when Ron Hanks held all of his opponents under the 30% needed to advance to the ballot, was uninspiring and came to be dominated by Bremer’s fixation with the issue of trangender people in sports. While Bremer might not be as deliberately offensive as Williams was in his scurrilous attacks on LGBTQ+ Coloradans during Pride Month, Bremer would definitely continue to prosecute the culture wars if he succeeds Williams as party chairman.

Of course, none of this matters if the meeting scheduled for this weekend doesn’t count, which the current leadership insists is the case and is ordering their loyal central committee members to stay away from. Unless there are actual laws being broken, the party is generally allowed to make its own rules to govern these kinds of disputes, and even to change them on the fly as the party has under Williams. Unless a court rules differently, it’s the party leadership who decides what meetings and votes are legitimate.

As we’ve said before, the mistake was letting someone as unscrupulous as Williams take control of the party to begin with. Once installed, people who don’t care about the rules–or are proficient in bending them–become very hard to dislodge.