March 23, 2009 09:00 PM UTC

What Morgan Carroll And Don Marostica Have in Common

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• by: Colorado Pols

That would be an uncomfortable level of frankness with their peers, as the Denver Post reports:

A state senator vented on her blog after a committee killed her prescription drug bill.

That’s not unusual.

But lawmakers tend to go after the other party, not their own colleagues, and Sen. Morgan Carroll of Aurora ripped fellow Democrats, including the Senate president and the committee chairwoman.

“I knew it would be a difficult bill,” she wrote, “but what did surprise me was that the Democratic leadership was so complicit in spiking the very health care reform we all campaigned on.”

Democrats say the hubbub over the post, which appeared last month, has died down. But they admit they were unhappy at the time with Morgan…

Senate President Peter Groff, D-Denver, said Carroll “has a right to say what she wants to say – but that doesn’t mean there aren’t consequences down here for what you say.”

Carroll stands by her blog entry and her bill.

“We didn’t get elected to make friends,” she said. “I like and respect the people I work with, but when I think we can do better, I will say so.”

The measure in question is Senate Bill 166, which sought to ban drug companies from giving gifts to doctors or reselling patient prescription information for marketing purposes…

Post reporter Lynn Bartels goes on to describe Sen. Carroll’s version of events, which includes curious committee assignments by Senate leadership and singling out Sen. Jennifer Veiga for “refus[ing] to even entertain a vote on an amendment – something I have never seen in 5 years.” Here’s Sen. Carroll’s February 19th blog post in full.

We’re sorry to say it, but you can’t praise Rep. Don Marostica for bucking his party’s leadership and condemn Sen. Carroll for bucking hers. The fact is that the handling of Senate Bill 166 was a little curious–we’ve heard this from a few sources, though not anything we’d call unheard of–and this isn’t the first time that generally progressive Sen. Jennifer Veiga has helped kill a bill opposed by business interests with less than a fully adequate explanation.

What? It is what it is, folks. Sen. Carroll may not have won many friends among her new Senate peers by going off publicly, but the facts of the story don’t exactly leave her looking bad. Kind of like Don Marostica.