March 08, 2023 10:59 AM UTC

Who's The Hardest Right Of Them All?

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• by: Colorado Pols

With the 2023 session of the Colorado General Assembly well underway, a conservative group known as Colorado Liberty Republicans has released a scorecard of all 100 Colorado House and Senate members ranking their “vote[s] according to Constitutional Principles: Individual Rights, Free Markets and Limited Government.” A fair amount of work went into tracking each lawmaker’s status on an exhaustive list of bills, so whether you agree with their slant or not it’s a wealth of data worth a glance at least.

So who, you ask, is the most unshakable liberty-loving conservative Republican in the Colorado legislature today? The answer might surprise you based on the recent headlines:

It’s no coincidence that these lawmakers have been involved with some of the greater embarrassments so far this session, like turning the debate over a resolution in support of the Equal Rights Amendment into a circus of transphobia. Reps. Ken “Skin” DeGraaf and Scott “There Is No” Bottoms have emerged as the leading public faces of the House GOP minority caucus by turning the incendiary rhetoric up to 11 at every opportunity. But while DeGraaf and Bottoms hog the spotlight, it’s Rep. Stephanie Luck easily besting all of them as the ideological pole star of the caucus–and it’s not close.

Rep. Luck was one of only two non-freshman lawmakers to vote in support of Bottoms’ failed and widely-criticized bid for House speaker, which was also a vote of disloyalty to GOP House Minority Leader Mike Lynch. Together with DeGraaf and Bottoms, Luck represents the “next generation” leadership of the former hard-right GOP caucus faction once led by ex-House Minority Leader Patrick Neville.

And making Neville proud, they’re the tail wagging the dog. When the time inevitably comes for the caucus to get publicly upset about the lack of spirit in the House micro-minority’s resistance, here’s where the belly-thumping will begin.