April 08, 2026 12:49 PM UTC

Get a Load of These Budget Proposals from House Republicans

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• by: Colorado Pols

The Colorado legislature has a Constitutional requirement to balance the state budget every year. The debate on the “Long Bill” usually takes place in late March or early April, but things got off to a later start than usual this year because of the unusually-large cuts needed to be made as a result of a weak economy and President Trump’s “big, beautiful, bullshit bill” last July.

As Sara Wilson reports for Colorado Newsline:

It is the second year in a row that lawmakers are tasked with filling a massive budget deficit, not counting an emergency special session last summer to plug another budget gap caused by federal tax code legislation. This year, the bipartisan Joint Budget Committee faced a $1.5 billion shortfall between how much it would cost to fund state programs at current levels and how much the state has available to spend.

In addition to denying some departmental funding increases, the proposed budget, represented in the so-called long bill, makes cuts to existing programs, transfers money from various cash funds, and trims spending for the state’s Medicaid program…

…The House will likely take the rest of the week to debate the budget, which includes the 200-page long bill and over 60 related bills, and then send it to the Senate. The Legislature is constitutionally required to pass a balanced budget every year.

Legislative Democrats will be doing the bulk of the difficult work in finding $1.5 billion in cuts all on their own, because, once again, Republicans are proudly demonstrating that they are completely unserious people with no intention of having realistic discussions about anything.

State Rep. “Boxwine” Brandi Bradley (R-Littleton) began the day by complaining about their own Minority Leadership trying to speed things along by not requiring bills to be read at length — a practice that the GOP has demanded in recent years just to be obstructionist assholes. The discussion on the House Floor also featured an early appearance by Rep. Ken “Dildo” DeGraaf (R-Colo. Springs), who demonstrated yet again how this is all just a dumb game for the GOP:

DeGraaf started by voicing his displeasure at the idea that House leadership wanted to try to get through the budget bill discussions in two days, which is a completely reasonable request given that the BIPARTISAN Joint Budget Committee has already spent weeks combing through the numbers in order to expedite this final process. But DeGraaf has a compulsive need to show off big words and phrases that he has learned:

DEGRAAF: We’ve offered many times to do some zero-based budgeting…to go into the nitty gritty of this, to get into this to find the fraud, waste, and abuse that we know is there because it’s been found.

So…DeGraaf wants to spend an inordinate amount of time combing through the state budget in order to find “fraud, waste, and abuse” that…has already been discovered? Great plan.

DeGraaf has lots of other incoherent grievances to air:

DEGRAAF: We have billions of dollars of deficit again, and that’s not counting the deficit that identifies as not deficit. The trans debt that identifies as not debt. The certificates of participation. The $4 billion out there, of government-industry collusion, also known as fascism.

If you can explain what DeGraaf is talking about here, please feel free to translate in the comments below.

Before we move on from DeGraaf’s typical nonsense, here he is putting a finer point on…something:

DEGRAAF: And I think it’s also telling that you should pay attention to what funds cannot be cut. You need to understand what funds cannot be cut if you truly want to understand the priorities of Colorado. 

Yes, let’s have a detailed conversation about budget items that we can’t eliminate. Look at the big brain on Ken!

House Republicans are salty that many of their “ideas” for balancing the budget are being ignored. It’s hard to blame Democrats for not having any interest in discussing this sort of pointlessness:

It’s a great use of time to discuss a $200,000 proposal that won’t even be a rounding error in the context of $1.5 BILLION in required cuts.

State Rep. Chris Richardson (R-Elbert County) has a couple of genius ideas. Richardson tried to introduce an amendment to reduce the number of days in the legislative session — something that is outlined in the State Constitution and couldn’t be changed during debate on the “Long Bill” anyway. Richardson also has a proposal to eliminate half of the funding for disease control prevention programs in Colorado even though we’re in the middle of a measles outbreak.

State Rep. Ron Weinberg (R-Loveland) is proposing cutting off funding for Universal Pre-Kindergarten programs in order to fund construction of an air traffic control tower in Loveland. Sorry, kids, but rich people with private planes can’t be expected to drive long distances to an airport! Would it surprise you to learn that Weinberg owns his own small plane? Of course not.

State Rep. Matt Soper (R-Glenwood Springs) has an amendment idea to slash behavioral health funding in order to…well, just to get rid of it. Soper also wants to eliminate funding for preschool so that we can build a new fence around a prison in Delta, Colorado.

Seriously, read that last sentence again.

House Republicans could use this opportunity to demonstrate to voters that they are fiscally-responsible people who should be given more of an opportunity to make sound policy decisions on behalf of Coloradans. But that’s not who they are.

We’ve said it again and again: Colorado Republicans are simply not serious people interested in doing serious things. They prove this out on a weekly basis.