February 23, 2024 10:26 AM UTC

It's Getting Pretty Ugly Under The Dome

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• by: Colorado Pols

Colorado Public Radio’s veteran Capitol correspondent Bente Birkeland reports on seething acrimony from certain excitable members of the GOP House micro-minority, over bills this year that pertain to the decidedly not intertwined issues of protecting LGBTQ+ rights and penalties for crimes related to human trafficking and sexual assault on minors. The fact that we are talking about these separate pieces of legislation together is a pretty good indicator of where Republicans are dragging all of these debates.

To the gutter.

Bills that touch on trans rights — especially those of trans youth — are politically fraught at the state Capitol. These floor debates come on the heels of a week of acrimonious social media back-and-forths over an entirely separate bill related to child prostitution, which has served to further increase tensions.

“We continue to work on our decorum,” said Democratic Speaker of the House Julie McCluskie…

The trouble began late last week when legislation sponsored by far-right Rep. Brandi Bradley, House Bill 24-1092 imposing mandatory minimum sentences for a variety of child sex crimes was killed in the House State Affairs Committee. This prompted an inflammatory response from Rep. Bradley on social media, in which Bradley seems to excuse the death threats Democratic lawmakers were receiving:

The eight democrats on state affairs voted to let pedophiles roam the streets and prey on our children. They could have voted yes to protect our children but they didn’t and now they have opened Pandora’s box. If you are receiving death threats for the way YOU voted, that has nothing to do with me… [Pols emphasis]

Speaking to CPR, Rep. Bradley shows no remorse, and even doubles down on the mob-style deflection:

Bradley defended her posts and said if Democrats are receiving death threats it’s because of their votes, not her comments. [Pols emphasis]

“We have people on social media that advocate for dangerous things. I haven’t liked a single comment that was calling for a wood chipper or a noose,” Bradley told CPR. “I don’t think I was inciting threats. I think that you can publicly speak out about a vote that was horrific and is not going to do justice for children.”

So, we don’t want to offend anyone who recently watched Sound of Freedom and came away from its questionable premise ready to charge the nearest Comet Ping Pong, but what we have here is a policy disagreement over what all sides agree is a problem, not the final showdown between good and evil. The trouble comes from ideologically strident lawmakers for whom every issue is exactly that, driven to new levels of emotion by a social media culture that conjures up the most horrendous possible motives of their opponents, and proceeded from there in this case to threaten the lives of Colorado lawmakers.

With, to quote Rep. Bradley once again just idly repeating what she saw online so don’t take it personally, “a wood chipper or a noose.”

Rep. Bradley knows how to start a snowball of misinformed outrage rolling, but she doesn’t know how to stop it–assuming she even cares to. We haven’t seen any instance of Bradley stating unequivocally that death threats against fellow lawmakers are wrong, instead blaming the lawmakers being threatened for “opening Pandora’s box” by voting against her bill. In previous years, condoning death threats against fellow lawmakers like that would have made headlines. In 2024, House Minority Leader Rose Pugliese just shrugs the madness off:

[Pugliese] was firm that she will not try to regulate what Republican lawmakers say in the chamber, or write online.

“All of our elected officials on both sides have a First Amendment constitutional right to free speech, and we support that. We don’t control our members.”

Apparently no one does, and that’s going to make for a long, ugly session of the Colorado General Assembly.