April 05, 2016 11:54 AM UTC

Get More Smarter on Tuesday (April 5)

• 4 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

Enjoy your day, Wisconsin; tomorrow we’ll go back to not caring about you. It’s time to Get More Smarter with Colorado Pols! If you think we missed something important, please include the link in the comments below (here’s a good example).

TOP OF MIND TODAY…

► Voters in Wisconsin take center stage today as they make their choices in the race for President. Why is Wisconsin such a big deal? First and foremost, it’s the only Primary contest on the calendar until New York voters go to the polls on April 19, so today will be the only concrete information we learn about the horserace for some time. Wisconsin is also being touted as a litmus test for Republican frontrunner Donald Trump.

On the Democratic side, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders appears to be surging in Wisconsin, and a win tonight would give him his seventh victory in the last eight statewide contests. Unfortunately for Sanders and his supporters, Wisconsin voters can’t change the math in the Democratic Primary; because Democrats do not assign delegates in a “winner take all” fashion, it is still virtually impossible for Sanders to become the Democratic nominee instead of Hillary Clinton.

► Monday was the deadline to submit petitions to the Secretary of State’s office for the purpose of making it onto the June Primary ballot. In the crowded Republican race for the U.S. Senate nomination, Robert Blaha and Ryan Frazier submitted their petitions on Monday (Jack Graham and Jon Keyser turned in their signatures last week). Each candidate needs 1,500 signatures in each congressional district — only registered Republican voters can be counted — in order to make it onto the June 28th ballot.

► Texas Sen. Ted Cruz appears to be the favorite to capture Colorado’s 37 delegates when Republican voters meet in Colorado Springs on Saturday for the GOP State Assembly. Cruz is scheduled to speak at the convention on Saturday, and Republican frontrunner Donald Trump is also expected to make an appearance.

Get even more smarter after the jump…

IN CASE YOU ARE STANDING NEAR A WATER COOLER…

► “Brokered convention” seems to be everybody’s favorite phrase these days, but if the Republican Party really ends up going that route in Cleveland in July, what happens next? How does it work? Our friends at “The Fix” talk to political scientist Josh Putnam for some answers:

The biggest thing at this point in time is that there is a very definite sequence to this process and most folks are giving in to the temptation to jump to literally the last order of business on the national convention delegates’ agenda: the presidential nomination roll call vote. Standing in the way of that endpoint to the process are a number of very important steps.

First, who are the delegates? We are only now getting an answer to that question and will continue to gather more information as the selection process picks up steam in April and into May…

…It is that step that is most important and perhaps most shrouded in mystery. Until those pieces are in place, though, we really have nothing to go on except the temporary rules that are currently in place as holdovers from the Tampa convention in 2012. Without knowing the 2016 rules, it is difficult to assess how any roll call vote, first or 101st, will go.

► Vice President Joe Biden will be in Boulder on Friday to speak about sexual violence on college campuses. Tickets are available for students and faculty at the University of Colorado beginning this morning.

► The Republican candidates for U.S. Senate in Colorado will face off in the first televised debate of the campaign tonight on 9News. As John Frank reports for the Denver Post, all of the candidates are trying to claim that they are outsiders and not typical glad-handing politicians. For candidates such as Jon Keyser, Darryl Glenn, and Peggy Littleton — all of whom have been elected to office in Colorado — this is a tougher sell. Tonight’s one-hour debate will be televised at 7:00 pm on Channel 20. If you can’t watch yourself, don’t worry; we’ll be covering the event with another one of our “Debate Diaries.”

► The State House rejected a proposal dealing with more local control of oil and gas operations in Colorado. As Joey Bunch explains for the Denver Post:

A Democratic bill to give local governments more authority over fracking failed to make it out of the Democrat-controlled state House of Representatives Monday.

Reps. Paul Rosenthal of Denver and Ed Vigil of Fort Garland joined with Republicans to defeat  House Bill 1355. Facing tough odds, Democrats had amended the bill Monday morning to clarify that local governments can regulate only noise, lighting and traffic issues.

► Rural school districts in Colorado appear to be spared from feared cuts in the current state budget proposal.

► Frackenlooper!

► Ed Sealover of the Denver Business Journal reports on the ongoing political battles over air quality regulations:

Funding for Colorado’s air-quality division is out of the state budget again, though Senate Republicans emphasized that most of it will be put back later this week.

In a continuing battle over Colorado’s efforts to implement the federal Clean Power Plan, Republicans on the Senate Appropriations Committee on Monday stripped $8.5 million from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment — the amount needed to fund the entire Stationary Sources Control Program that distributes and enforces air-quality permits…

…Republicans don’t want to close down the entire division, which would leave the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in charge of air permitting in Colorado, likely increasing costs and reducing turnaround time for companies like oil-and-gas drillers and manufacturing plants that need such permits.

But they do want to remove the amount of money that CDPHE would put to the Clean Power Plan — a federal carbon-dioxide-reduction program whose implementation has been stayed by the U.S. Supreme Court. Department officials have declined to identify a specific amount of funding that they are putting toward that plan.

► Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin turns the crazy pants setting all the way up to 10 in a surrogate appearance promoting Donald Trump for President.

► A bill designed to cripple labor unions has once again been defeated in the state legislature.

► The state Senate on Monday honored former Sen. Jim Isgar, who died on March 4 after battling a rare form of leukemia.

OTHER LINKS YOU SHOULD CLICK

► The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in a Colorado case about jurors expressing racial bias during deliberations.

► At Least You’re Not the Prime Minister of Iceland.

ICYMI

► You can cancel that vacation in Mississippi you weren’t planning. Republican Gov. Phil Bryant signed a law on Tuesday that allows businesses to deny services to gay and lesbian couples because of their “religious beliefs.”

Get More Smarter by liking Colorado Pols on Facebook!Get