Nash Hwerman

Colorado lawmakers in denial over self-inflicted budget wound

Nash Herman January 22, 2026

Legislators blame the OBBBA and TABOR for this year’s revenue shortfall, rather than their own self-inflicted wounds.

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The border skirmishes are increasing, and we could be looking at full-blown combat. The simmering civil unrest inside Colorado’s Democratic ranks is heating up, and during this legislative session it might boil over into all-out civil war.

If it does, Colorado news media might actually have to interrupt their regularly scheduled Republican-bashing to report on it.

Airing dirty laundry

Inner-party squabbles are the price of admission into politics; they’re unavoidable. However, a well-disciplined party keeps its dirty laundry from being aired publicly.

Take the open secret among Washington Democrats and insiders about President Joe Biden’s mental decline. Thanks to party discipline and an all-too-complicit media, it took a nationally televised debate and the political equivalent of elder abuse for them to come clean.

In Colorado, the secret isn’t mental decline (I’m resisting about a dozen jokes here) so much as the growing hatred under the Gold Dome between Democrats and the socialists in their own party.

So far, the state’s Democratic Party has been very disciplined in keeping the ugliness behind closed doors. And thanks to the legislature voting to exempt themselves from the state’s open meetings law, they can pull hair and go all “Real Housewives” in private.

Then there’s Colorado’s media. They are enthralled by the Three-Stooges-like antics of the state’s Republican Party. Be it the gubernatorial clown-car team racing to be beaten by either Bennet or Weiser, or the plans to tunnel Tina Peters out of jail, our crack squad of TV news “truth-tellers” just can’t get enough of Republican dysfunction.

The problem is Republicans have absolutely, positively no power in Colorado politics. Broadcasting their squabbles is meaningless. It’s beating up toddlers just for the sport of it and calling it journalism.

Blue on blue violence

The fights among Democrats over construction defects, AI regulation, crazed woke policies and attempts to remove fellow Dems from office in primaries are bringing them close to fisticuffs.

No wonder leadership didn’t want video streaming of their committee hearing rooms. Democrats are about to start slapping each other, Korean-parliament style.

Reports are flying some Democratic socialists will not co-sponsor a bill if the “wrong” person in their own party is already a sponsor.

If some Democrats have sinned by joining the Opportunity Caucus — a group of Dems who don’t hate all businesses all the time — they might find themselves primaried by their good friends, the Democratic socialists. Basically, it’s socialist-on-progressive violence.

Business-friendly progressives helped defeat unhinged leftists like Reps. Elisabeth Epps and Tim Hernandez. And the communists are about to return the favor this year.

You might remember when Republicans went through this insanity. Crazed people like charlatan Dudley Brown of Rocky Mountain Gun Owners would run smear primary campaigns against decent incumbent Republicans who wouldn’t tow their extremist line. Fanatical Republican challengers might win a primary only to lose to comparatively sane Democrats in the general election. (This was a big reason Republicans lost the legislature.)

We could be seeing that happen again — only with the other party. So, grab your popcorn.

How did the communists — sorry, democratic socialists — get such immense power in the legislature in the first place? A lot of it came from vacancy committees appointing them to fill the seats of legislators who have had enough and left. More than 20% of our legislators got there by appointment, not election.

Ungrateful socialists

Remember when Colorado Democrats were not communists? I mean, Colorado has been under Democratic control before — Dem governors, Dem legislatures. But that was back when Democrats understood you can’t redistribute wealth until wealth is first created by industry.

Our current governor has been a venture capitalist — and a damn good one — but not a day-to-day business owner.

Previous Democratic governors who had run businesses, be they restaurants or John Deere dealerships, had a better instinctive sense of how corrosive government controls can eviscerate our state economically.

Though a capitalist — thus the term “venture capitalist” — Jared Polis has ushered in an unworkable, unsustainable worker’s paradise regulatory state.

You’d think the socialists in the legislature would be throwing roses at him. Instead, the socialists are in open contempt of the governor who’s given them 95% of everything they’ve wanted.

There are still Democrats in the state legislature who see the world like Roy Romer, John Hickenlooper, and even Jared Polis. But will they survive the systematic Soviet purge their socialist party colleagues are planning?

Jon Caldara is president of Independence Institute, a free market think tank in Denver.

Colorado’s carefully contained blue on blue violence spilling over

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Nash Hwerman

Colorado lawmakers in denial over self-inflicted budget wound

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