May 09, 2025 10:09 AM UTC

Losers from the 2025 Legislative Session

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• by: Colorado Pols

The 2025 legislative session officially came to a close on Wednesday night, which means it’s time for our annual “Winners and Losers” assessment.

We wrote about our “Winners” on Thursday, so now it’s time for the “Losers”:

Losers

House Republican Communications

The press and media operation for House Republicans made a lot of silly proclamations throughout the 2025 legislative session, but particularly when it came to complaints about fees passed by lawmakers in recent years. Colorado Republicans began the session with a “plan” to attempt to roll back various fees in a pitiful effort to save Coloradans a few dollars (literally). To nobody’s surprise, this plan went nowhere. The House GOP Communications office compounded the failure by complaining about a bunch of fees for special license plates that are a luxury item and not a requirement for any Coloradan. The press office aggressively attacked fees that many of its former members – now in the State Senate – actually supported in prior sessions.

Rebecca Keltie

The freshman Republican from Colorado Springs was elected in 2024 by a three vote margin over Democrat Stephanie Vigil; once the legislative session began, Keltie went out of her way to show voters just what a mistake they had made. Keltie took a lot of bad votes – including opposing a resolution condemning President Trump’s pardon of people convicted in the Jan 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol – but it was an interview with a local radio station earlier this month that is going to be a YUGE problem for her in 2026. 

As Erik Maulbetsch reports for the Colorado Times Recorder, Keltie inserted both feet into her mouth in an appearance on a Libertarian podcast called “Free State Colorado,” starting by calling her colleagues evil and soulless:

KELTIE: “I’ve never seen a group of people that are so … for lack of a better term, evil. I feel it when I come in there. I pray as soon as I enter the building. As soon as I enter that room, I pray. While I’m in there, I’m praying. I’ve never prayed so much in my life. … I went in there with an open mind of respect. I have lost — for almost all of them, except for maybe a few — all respect. Like, I can’t even look at them in the face. It’s very difficult for me to think that, you know, they even have a soul. I’m not even sure they even have a soul, and their eyes are just … I don’t know.”

Keltie then accused lawmakers who didn’t just accept her suggestions of $70 million in cuts as being corrupt:

KELTIE: “I know it sounds weird, but I’m telling you, these people are corrupt. And the amount of money that they’re going through, it’s like you get ‘Oh, it’s a fiscal note of zero — no, it’s going to cost millions of dollars!’ But they cheat and they scheme and they scam and your money — your money in Colorado, every penny you give the state — is not safe in the hands of these people; it’s just not. We’re paying for hippie camps. We’re paying for hundreds of brand-new vehicles that they don’t need. I gave them $70 million of cuts they could make. That’s what I kind of do in the civilian world. I go through contracts, I look at every word. That’s what I do, and I’m like, ‘Here you go, silver platter, $70 million with the cuts just from me,’ and they just [said], ‘No thanks’ and just threw it to the side. It’s a shame.”

Keltie then outdid herself by declaring that Colorado should probably just be burned into ash: 

KELTIE: “I hate to say this, but it’s almost like the State of Colorado needs to be burned to the ground and built from the top up. I hate to say that, but from the ashes of the fire will rise a Phoenix. And that Phoenix is gonna be us. We are gonna be that Phoenix, but until we take it all the way down and we get these sons of guns out of there — I almost said a bad word. Anyways, get them out of there. I’m not sure what else we can do.”

Good luck with this 2026 slogan: Re-Elect Rebecca Keltie and Burn Colorado to the Ground!

Rocky Mountain Gun Owners 

This is turning into an annual award for RMGO, the “no compromise” gun rights group that can’t seem to understand that Coloradans would actually like to reduce gun violence. In their efforts to defeat Senate Bill 3 (see our “Winners” list), RMGO rolled out the same dumb lobbying campaign that they tried in 2024: Delivering boxes of “petitions” from “Coloradans” who “opposed” gun violence prevention efforts. The group even attempted to deliver several batches of “petitions” to lawmakers who are no longer in office. 

Republicans Interested in Higher Office

We’ve said again and again that the Republican “bench” in Colorado could fit inside a phone booth, and that was evident again during the legislative session. Two official candidates for Governor in 2026 – State Rep. Scott “There is No” Bottoms and State Sen. Mark Baisley – failed to make a positive impression for future voters. Bottoms continued his now-familiar parade of wackadoo nonsense, which included disgusting attacks on transgender people. As for Baisley, roll call votes are the only evidence that he was even a participant in the 2025 session; he was a co-sponsor with Democrats on two minor pieces of legislation, and the five bills he put forward himself all died in their first committee hearing.

Senator Barbara Kirkmeyer, a potential gubernatorial candidate herself, managed to generate plenty of headlines. But “Both Ways Barb” was all over the place on a number of important issues that will be a problem for her in a future Republican Primary Election.

The 10th Amendment and State Sovereignity

The overarching problem for legislative Republicans looking to advance their political careers is the asinine position they decided to take in the final weeks of the session. Only 43% of Coloradans voted for Donald Trump, yet Republicans insisted that Democrats should listen to their demands or else they would Tweet at Trump and encourage him to cut federal funding to the state. As we’ve written before in this space: Republicans in Colorado really don’t understand…Colorado.

Gabe Evans and Lauren Boebert

The two Republican Members of Congress from Colorado spent an inordinate amount of time complaining about Democrats in the state legislature. Needless to say, this is not their job.

Participation Trophy

Congratulations, or whatever, to Colorado Springs Republican Rep. Ken “Dildo” DeGraaf!

It would be redundant to call DeGraaf a “loser,” so instead we’ll award him a participation trophy for wasting an inordinate amount of time yammering on the House floor but not really doing much in the way of actual lawmaking, DeGraaf managed to pass one bill out of the House this year before watching it die in the Senate (HB25-1260, Electrical Generation and Distribution Resiliency). Still, DeGraaf has now passed one more bill out of one chamber — in three legislative sessions — than his other half of the “Unambiguously Lame Duo,” Republican Rep. Scott “There is No” Bottoms.