March 10, 2009 05:56 PM UTC

Penry Nails His Own Problem

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• by: Colorado Pols

Without even knowing it, as the Greeley Tribune reports:

State Democratic legislative leaders said Monday that they’re working under the premise that removing a cap on state general fund spending through legislation is constitutional despite Republican cries that it is not.

Senate President Peter Groff said if other branches of government decide to challenge a bill that would lift the 6 percent growth cap on state government General Fund spending, then the legislature can’t stop them. But lawmakers have to move the bill forward anyway to help the state spend dollars coming to it, he said…

State Republicans have called the bill – Senate Bill 228 – unconstitutional. They have mounted efforts to attempt a filibuster on the bill, including having the bill read in its entirety and threatening to bog the process down with potentially thousands of amendments. The bill is sponsored by Rep. Don Marostica, R-Loveland, and is up for final reading in the Senate possibly today before moving to the House.

Senate Minority Leader Josh Penry, R-Grand Junction, said Monday that the nonpartisan office of legal services said the bill is unconstitutional, but that it’s not even the most important problem with the bill.

More important, Penry said, Democrats are playing a “shell game” with the budget and SB 228 will actually cut funding for transportation more than Gov. Bill Ritter’s signed FASTER bill will increase funding for transportation. [Pols emphasis] Penry said the bill will decrease transportation funding by $500 million over the next three years.

FASTER is expected to raise more than $700 million in that time…

We love it–truly, we do–when reporters dispassionately reveal a politician to be completely full of crap the very next sentence after they quote him. Golly, friends, $700 million is more than $500 million, isn’t it? One should strongly consider fact-checking all Jon Caldara-supplied talking points before reciting them to reporters, since reporters tend to, you know, fact-check.

Leaving aside questions of constitutionality (here’s a brilliant opinion from former Supreme Court Justice Jean Dubofsky that says otherwise), we find Minority Leader Josh Penry’s choice of words to describe Democrats’ work on the budget this year–a “shell game”–to be a remarkable slip. Because that is exactly the opinion Democrats have of the way Republican-dominated Colorado governments have turned our annual budget process into an inflexible, barely comprehensible collection of limits and spending mandate “buckets” like the one Penry is describing for transportation funds. This inflexibility is a major part of why Colorado is chronically unprepared to deal with either the present economic crisis, or even much milder downturns as the state experienced in 2002-03.

The thing to keep in mind through this process is a simple philosophical difference that guides all parties: Democrats (along with sensible Republicans like Don Marostica and Al White) see a crisis and look for solutions, while Josh Penry and his crew of increasingly unrepresentative hard-liners see a crisis and look for ways to politically exploit it. Penry isn’t interested in a solution, for him the crisis is the solution. It’s not that different from when Sen. Nancy Spence appeared on camera early this session, warning in ominous tones what an “insult” it would be to reduce the senior homestead exemption this year–after she personally voted to do the same thing during the last budget crisis.

At some point, even the most easy-going bipartisan compromiser will be forced to conclude the obvious: these people are not acting in good faith, and it’s time to respond like a…well, like a majority should in that situation.