January 25, 2011 07:58 PM UTC

The Latino-Alienating, Budget-Busting Arizona Copycat Bills

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• by: Colorado Pols

As the Durango Herald’s Joe Hanel reports, it’s as bad as you thought:

Colorado Republicans have imported more of the Arizona immigration law into the Legislature, including parts that a federal judge has already struck down in Arizona…

House Bill 1170 would direct local police to try to determine whether a person entered the country illegally, require immigrants to carry their alien-registration documents and make it a crime for illegal immigrants to work or apply for a job in Colorado.

The language is nearly identical to parts of the Arizona bill that U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton blocked last July, saying they pre-empted federal law. The state has appealed Bolton’s ruling in the lawsuit filed by the U.S. Department of Justice and several advocacy groups…

Colorado Republicans broke the Arizona law into several sections, of which Baumgardner’s bill is the largest.

Sen. Kent Lambert, R-Colorado Springs, introduced a short Senate bill that allows police to stop people they suspect are illegal immigrants. Federal courts blocked that part of the law as well.

Republicans in the Colorado General Assembly have now committed themselves to a package of legislation that will not only alienate, as we’ve warned countless times, the fastest-growing group of voters in the United States–no, folks. It’s even better. In addition to inviting grave political damage on themselves for years to come at the polls, and despite promises to be careful not to set the state up for a massive expense defending their proposals in court, they’ve brazenly included some of the very same language from Arizona’s embattled SB-1070 that judges in that state tossed, and the federal government insists is not constitutional.

We note that this is a House bill, separate from Sen. Kent Lambert’s bill we talked about last week. While that might appear to make the bill a greater threat, if GOP Speaker Frank McNulty has any sense of self-preservation about him he will route it to the nearest “kill committee.”

Because at the end of the day, these bills are threats only to Republicans.