January 24, 2012 12:28 AM UTC

House GOP Create Jobs Out of Thin Air...When They Get Done Wasting Time

•  
• by: Colorado Pols

We wrote last week that House Republicans got off to a rough start in the first days of the Colorado legislative session by demanding a vote on a Constitutional Convention that was never going to happen; the move was entirely political — intended to get folks like Rep. Sal Pace and Joe Miklosi on the record on federal health care reform — and so blatantly obvious that it was widely criticized around the state.

Yesterday the Editorial Page Editor at the Denver Newspaper, Curtis Hubbard, took House Republicans and Speaker Frank McNulty to task for ignoring their own pledge to focus on jobs instead of endless political games. Hubbard goes on to write that one of McNulty’s featured pieces of legislation is an attempt to fix a problem that quite literally does not exist.

McNulty has been pushing a bill sponsored by Republican Rep. Laura Bradford that would theoretically add jobs by eliminating local regulations that he says prohibit Colorado communities to use timber produced in the state. But as Hubbard notes, no such regulations appear to exist. Neither the Colorado Municipal League nor the West Coast Lumber Inspection Bureau seem to have any idea what in the hell McNulty is talking about.

McNulty says the legislation would let a Colorado sawmill add 80 jobs — a number that is oddly specific given the fact that the bill in question wouldn’t actually do anything.

This begs the question: If a tree is cut down in a forest, and Frank McNulty isn’t around to hear it…can you still draft unnecessary legislation from the paper it produces?