April 08, 2025 02:25 PM UTC

Colorado Republicans Don't Understand...Colorado

• 5 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

Republicans control the White House, the U.S. Senate, and the U.S. House of Representatives.

Here in Colorado, Republicans haven’t won a statewide election since 2014 (unless you count Heidi Ganahl winning a CU Regent race in 2016…which we don’t) and have been exiled to micro minority status in the state legislature.

Yet somehow Colorado Republicans seem to think national election results override the blue wave that has overtaken our state in the last decade. Prominent current and former GOP elected officials — including Rep. Lauren Boebert and former Senator Cory Gardner — are clearly turning their fire on the state legislature, despite the fact that Republican blockheads at the State Capitol are completely incapable of accomplishing anything relevant.

In the last week, Fox News has conspicuously joined the fray as well, highlighted with this breathless bit of nonsense on Monday:

The Colorado Democratic House majority pushed through a slate of controversial gender and abortion bills on Sunday, curtailing floor debate in what Republican lawmakers called an “unprecedented” tactic.

“It should alarm every American that Colorado’s Majority used a Sunday — a day typically reserved for family and prayer — to force through four of the most extreme bills of the session,” Republican House Minority Leader Rose Pugliese told Fox News Digital on Monday.

Pugliese said while “weekend work” is a “tactic the majority uses to punish the minority,” it was especially “unprecedented” this time because of the highly controversial nature of the bills…

…The bills that were passed include SB25-183, which requires taxpayers to fund abortion services; HB25-1309, mandating insurers cover transgender procedures regardless of age; HB25-1312, which imposes state-mandated gender policies on schools and considers it “coercive control” in child custody cases when a parent does not affirm a child’s gender identity; and SB25-129, which prohibits cooperation with out-of-state investigations on transgender procedures and abortion services.

According to state House Majority Democrat Leader Monica Duran, the four bills were debated on the floor for more than 12 hours last week. [Pols emphasis]

Of course, the reason that the state legislature needs to work on the weekends is because Republican lawmakers keep wasting everyone’s time with ridiculous delay tactics. Republicans don’t want to have an honest discussion about any piece of legislation and have focused their attention for the last two years on merely trying to stop Democrats from accomplishing anything.

What Republicans don’t seem to grasp, no matter how many times you bash them in the head with this fact, is that voters WANT Democrats to be driving the bus in Colorado. For example, Republicans are whining about SB25-183, which necessarily modifies Colorado statute to reflect the will of the voters from the 2024 election; last November, Coloradans approved Amendment 79 with 62% of the vote statewide, electing to enshrine abortion rights in the Colorado Constitution and removing a prohibition on using public funds to cover these medical services. The voters of this state spoke loudly on their opinion regarding this issue. By opposing SB25-183, Republicans were trying to ignore the will of Colorado voters.

Democrats, meanwhile, are doing EXACTLY what voters told them they wanted…which is sort of the point of this whole “democracy” thing.  

Republicans will yell until they are blue red in the face that Colorado voters fully understood the ramifications of the complicated TABOR decision when it was approved in 1992…but those same voters can’t possibly have grasped the complexities of abortion rights in 2024? Good luck with that argument.

Not only are Republicans ignoring Colorado voters — they’re speaking publicly as though they live in an entirely different state. Take a look at this recent Newsmax interview between giant-headed talking muppet Todd Starnes and State Rep. Jarvis Caldwell (R-Colorado Springs), who dials up the silly transphobia to another level in discussing HB25-1312 (while also making sure to complain about being forced to work on a Sunday):

STARNES: And just so we all understand here, your little son Johnny comes home from school and he’s wearing a dress and says that you have to call him Julie — if you don’t do that as a parent, the state can come in and take your child away from you. Is that what we’re talking about here?

JARVIS: Yes. It’s more specific to custody situations in which you have two parents on separate sides of this issue. But you’re exactly right, and the question I kept bringing up was, ‘How do you treat your child, if you’re in this situation? How do you get treatment for your child to get them through this if this bill becomes law?’ Because what it’s saying is if you deadname them, if you misgender them, then you’re abusing them. And there’s just no way to treat a child in this situation unless the treatment is affirming their delusions?

As you might have guessed, this is absolutely NOT what HB25-1312 actually says. Here’s the official language for the bill titled, “Legal Protections for Transgender Individuals”:

Section 2 provides that, when making child custody decisions and determining the best interests of a child for purposes of parenting time, a court shall consider deadnaming, misgendering, or threatening to publish material related to an individual’s gender-affirming health-care services as types of coercive control. A court shall consider reports of coercive control when determining the allocation of parental responsibilities in accordance with the best interests of the child.

Section 3 prohibits a Colorado court from applying or giving any force or effect to another state’s law that authorizes a state agency to remove a child from the child’s parent or guardian because the parent or guardian allowed the child to receive gender-affirming health-care services.

Section 4 provides that, if a local education provider, an educator, or a contractor chooses to enact or enforce a policy related to chosen names, that policy must be to make the policy inclusive of all reasons that a student might adopt a chosen name that differs from the student’s legal name.

What this bill really does is protect transgender kids from a custody battle based solely on their gender beliefs. The legislation also defines “deadnaming and misgendering as discriminatory acts in the “Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act”, and prohibit these discriminatory acts in places of public accommodation.” In other words, Republicans are mad that you might not be able to discriminate against transgender people in Colorado.

Republicans have been trying to scare Coloradans about schools “transgendering” their kids for years; Colorado voters have responded by electing Democrats by increasingly-wide margins. But with Donald Trump once again serving as President, these Republicans seem to think that our state has fallen in line with the rest of the MAGA morons. It’s a curious calculation.

Colorado Republicans have every right to believe whatever they want, but it’s bizarre that they seem to have convinced themselves that what they say out loud is actually what the rest of the state’s voters want as well. The math doesn’t lie: They’re wrong.