July 30, 2008 08:09 PM UTC

The Political Death of Josh Penry and Cory Gardner

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• by: Colorado Pols

We wrote earlier this week about Republican Sen. Josh Penry’s bizarre comments about his plan to divert state money to speed up a section of I-70 in his district. Penry’s quote basically amounted to saying that he thinks voters would prefer to see an improved I-70 than to preserve their water resources.

The plan devised by Penry and fellow “wunderkind” Cory Gardner is basically an “earmark,” which is something that is normally reserved for members of congress and less often seen by state legislators. Whether it passes or fails – and it’s almost certainly going to fail – Penry and Gardner just irrevocably damaged their future political careers. For a quick primer, see how The Denver Post rips into their idea today:

Coloradans deserve reasonable solutions to our state’s transportation problems.

Instead, we’re left with either nothing, which has been the governor’s plan the past two years, or schemes, including this latest Republican plan that actually drains funds from Colorado water projects into a single pork-barrel project on Interstate 70. [Pols emphasis]

Yes, politicians who long promoted urban sprawl with the slogan “Drive until you qualify” (for a home loan) are now telling our embattled motorists to “Drive until you die of thirst.”

Unfortunately, the initiative’s sponsors, Republican state Reps. Cory Gardner of Yuma and Frank McNulty of Highlands Ranch, as well as the usually sensible Sen. Josh Penry of Grand Junction, already have turned in their petitions to the Colorado secretary of state. That office has not yet certified whether they met the necessary legal requirements.

We hope they fall short. But if Initiative 120 does make the ballot, we urge Coloradans to crush this return to the 19th century pork-barrel politics that once disgraced the Colorado legislature’s handling of state highway funds. [Pols emphasis]

In the bad old days, the legislature appropriated state highway funds with the same gay abandon Congress still does with federal highway funds – building bridges and roads to nowhere in home districts of powerful politicians while more pressing needs elsewhere were neglected.

Voters rebelled against that corrupt system and in 1952 created a state Highway Commission to fairly allocate road and bridge funds. The system has worked so well that, with minor changes, it is still operating today on a broader stage as the state Transportation Commission.

Now, Initiative 120’s backers want to bypass our constitution by earmarking new severance tax revenues to a single highway project in their districts. This is a doubly dumb idea. First, as earlier noted, it would actually rob money now earmarked for water needs to highway projects. Second, and worst of all, it would open up the highway fund to similar pork-barrel raids in the future.

This is a monumentally stupid idea, and Penry has only made it worse by making monumentally stupid quotes to follow it up. Penry and Gardner have long been touted as the GOP’s next great leaders, and both have been biding their time waiting for a bigger seat to open up. Penry’s rise has been delayed in part by John Salazar’s entrenched position in CD-3, while Gardner has faced the same problem with Marilyn Musgrave in CD-4. But neither may have much of a future after this debacle.

It wasn’t long ago that the disastrous Referendum A, otherwise known as the “steal the Western Slope’s water” plan, permanently damaged Republican bigwigs who unwisely supported it. But this idiotic creation from Penry and Gardner not only potentially harms water supplies, it opens them up to forever being labeled “pork barrel” legislators.

Neither Penry not Gardner can claim to be fiscal conservatives after this — not when they are willing to mortgage the future in a poor economic environment just to make some road improvements that only directly affect a small population. But perhaps most harmful is the “pork barrel” label that both will now be eternally stuck with. Colorado has a lean budget, and both of these boneheads thought it would be a good idea to start making earmarks??? And for what? To say that they made I-70 run a little faster?

Perhaps Penry and Gardner have been “rising stars” for so long that, to quote George Costanza, “they flew too close to the sun on wings of pastrami.” They may both look back on this fall as the year that they lost any future chance at higher office.