May 19, 2025 11:42 AM UTC

Get More Smarter Roundup for Monday (May 19)

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• by: Colorado Pols

It’s been a mighty blustery couple of days. Let’s Get More Smarter! If you think we missed something important, please include the link in the comments below (here’s a good example). If you are more of an audio learner, check out The Get More Smarter Podcast.

Get Smarter Today About: Medicaid cuts move closer; Republicans propose 1,110+ page budget bill; and legislative vetoes by Gov. Jared Polis.

Warm Up Those Brains…

► As Congress moves forward toward making massive cuts to Medicaid, Erik Maulbetsch of the Colorado Times Recorder profiles a family doctor in CO-08 who warns of the disaster that such cuts would create:

Family medicine physician Lauren Hughes has a simple request of U.S. Congressman Gabe Evans: “It doesn’t have to be this way … [You don’t] have to keep supporting Medicaid cuts.”

Dr. Hughes works at a nonprofit health center in Fort Lupton, a small rural town in Weld County that is also home to Evans. At her clinic, which is just down the road from Evans’ home, Hughes’ patients are mostly low-income families, typically with both parents working one or more jobs to provide for their kids…

… “In the district where I work,” said Hughes, “Gabe Evans represents just over 214,000 Coloradans who get their health care through Medicaid. This amounts to nearly one in three people in the 8th Congressional District, including nearly 86,000 women and more than 95,000 children. These include children with a wide range of health conditions who require regular and sustained care, from common ones like asthma to serious conditions such as birth defects or cancer or the impact of trauma. Thanks to Medicaid, they now have a way to see a doctor and to get the treatment and care to manage their conditions.

“Under the bill that Congressman Gabe Evans voted for, now these families will have to do even more paperwork and pay more fees just to keep getting the Medicaid they already qualify for. Making families jump through even more hoops to get the health care they need is likely to lead them to being kicked off of Medicaid. When this happens, more patients like mine will suffer.”

Colorado Public Radio looks at the depressing details of the Congressional Republican Medicaid proposal.

► Republicans needed long hours over the weekend to move forward with a 1,100+ page budget proposal. As POLITICO reports:

House Republicans finally launched their party-line tax and spending package from the Budget Committee late Sunday night, after GOP leaders promised changes to appease fiscal hawks after an embarrassing setback.

The vote to approve the measure for floor action follows a weekend of negotiations between House Republican leaders, the White House and the four GOP lawmakers who tanked the same committee vote Friday. Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters Sunday night that “minor modifications” were promised to those holdouts.

Just before the late-night markup, the speaker huddled privately in a room adjacent to the meeting room with the Budget Committee Republicans who previously blocked the megabill from advancing: Reps. Chip Roy of Texas, Josh Brecheen of Oklahoma, Andrew Clyde of Georgia and Ralph Norman of South Carolina.

Once the markup reconvened, House Budget Chair Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) said that negotiations over changes to the more than 1,100-page bill are ongoing: “Deliberations continue at this very moment, they will continue on into the week and I suspect right up until the time we put this big, beautiful bill on the floor of the House.”

Elsewhere, Brandon Richard of Denver7 digs deep on the big ridiculous spending bill.

► Seth Klamann of The Denver Post talks to Attorney General Phil Weiser about the 20 lawsuits Colorado has joined in opposition to Trump administration cuts and policies:

Limitations on transgender health care. Threats to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds. The tumultuous whipsaw of on-again, off-again tariffs.

Since President Donald Trump returned to office in January and unfurled a flurry of executive orders and directives, Colorado has joined with blue-state allies to file 20 lawsuits challenging those and other actions — a rate of more than one suit per week. It’s a litigious streak outpaced only by Trump’s blistering spree of executive orders and the Republican’s unprecedented attempts to pull the nation’s purse strings to his chest.

Colorado’s top elected lawyer, two-term Democratic Attorney General Phil Weiser, is no stranger to litigation against Trump: Weiser’s office sued the president and his administration at least 11 times during both men’s first terms. Just four months into Trump’s second term, Weiser has already surpassed that total, and he argues that the “level of lawlessness” is unprecedented.

“We’ve had to essentially stretch ourselves as a department to keep doing what I’ll call our normal work, as the people’s lawyer,” he said in an interview last week. Then there’s what he calls the “abnormal” task of the Trump era — “an unprecedented situation of being a constant evaluator of, ‘Is this action harming Colorado and is this action illegal?’ ”

“So we ask those two questions again and again and again,” Weiser said. “And 20 times, I’ve had to say: ‘Yes, it is.’ ”

► As The Associated Press reports, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling today that could allow the Trump administration to deport thousands of Venezuelans who had been under Temporary Protected Status. The New York Times has more on the decision.

Click below to keep learning things…

Get Extra Smarter…

► Colorado Public Radio talks with Denver Mayor Mike Johnston about issues ranging from the housing shortage to how the city is working to renovate the 16h Street Mall. 

► Denver has joined a lawsuit suing the Trump administration over $24 million in grants that FEMA has refused to honor. As Elliott Wenzler writes for The Denver Post:

Denver joined Chicago in a lawsuit Friday against the Trump administration over decisions not to pay the cities millions in promised grant dollars to help cover the cost of sheltering migrants.

The lawsuit comes after the Federal Emergency Management Agency told Denver in April that it would no longer pay the city about $24 million remaining from a larger grant. The city already spent that money during the migrant crisis and was expecting a reimbursement, officials said, but the Trump administration in recent months has threatened to withhold federal money from cities seen as supportive of undocumented immigrants.

Chicago, which received a similar notification, filed the joint lawsuit challenging the grant clawbacks on Friday morning in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. The lawsuit, which is against the Department of Homeland Security, argues the actions are unconstitutional and an overreach of the executive branch, according to a news release from the city of Denver. Denver and Pima County, Arizona, are both joining in the suit.

“It’s a clear violation of the separation of powers,” Denver Mayor Mike Johnston said in an interview Friday. “Congress failed to solve federal immigration reform, but they did allocate dollars to this project for exactly this purpose — and now he’s trying to rescind that. That’s a violation of Congress’ power.”

Johnston said he expects a judge to rule in favor of the city.

► Former President Joe Biden has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer.

► As Eli Stokols writes for POLITICO, Vice President JD Vance is threatening that the U.S. might walk away from Russian/Ukranian peace talks. 

► Via Dennis Webb of the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, concerns continue to mount over the future of national forests in Colorado:

Scott Fitzwilliams had expected to retire as supervisor of the White River National Forest about this time next year, and he used to think about spending his last day on the job flying over the forest he managed, just quietly taking in what he was seeing.

On Friday, he took a flight over the forest, but not as its supervisor. Instead it was an opportunity for a former Forest Service employee to express his concerns about staffing cuts to the agency and what they could mean at a time when Congress is considering selling off some public lands.

After a career that included more than 15 years as the White River forest supervisor and nearly 35 years with the Forest Service, Fitzwilliams opted to accept an early retirement offer as the Trump administration has sought to sharply reduce staff in many federal agencies.

He still sometimes talks about the White River as “my forest,” though, and worries about its future and the future of national forests and other public lands more generally given the cutbacks that are being made.

“What I’m worried about right now is basically (forest) stewardship, management, that I don’t know how will get done without at least a reasonable level of staffing to do it,” he said.

► Colorado might have less to worry about than other states when it comes to flouride restrictions in water supplies being proposed by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 

► State Rep. Shannon Bird (D-Adams County) will reportedly announce her campaign for Congress in CO-08 on Tuesday morning. Fellow Democrats Manny Rutinel and Yadira Caraveo are already running for the nomination in hopes of defeating incumbent Republican Rep. Gabe Evans. 

► You can add Colorado river rafting companies to the list of businesses facing real trouble because of Trump’s Tariff War.

► 9News runs a truth test on an ad praising President Trump that is airing on Colorado TV stations:

► Jesse Paul of The Colorado Sun reports on a veto of a big union bill by Gov. Jared Polis. The Denver Post and 9News have more reporting on the not-unexpected veto.

► Governor Jared Polis also vetoed legislation that would have barred municipal courts from issuing tougher sentences than state courts for convicted criminals.

► CBS Denver reports on an oil spill in Colorado that Chevron officials say could take five years to clean up.

► Officials say a Fort Collins to Denver rail service could be ready to roll by 2029.

Say What, Now?

If you’re going to be an asshole, try to be an informed asshole.

Your Daily Dose Of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

► Pope Leo met with Vice President JD Vance at the Vatican. The Pope is still alive as of this writing. 

► Elizabeth Hernandez of The Denver Post looks at what happens when your next door neighbors are (literally) lions and tigers.

ICYMI

► President Trump’s apparent decision to accept a $400 million luxury jet from Qatar as a replacement for Air Force One is bringing new attention to the shocking degree to which the Middle East nation has been buying access in the Trump Administration. As Mother Jones reports, FBI Director Kash Patel was paid a significant amount of money as a “consultant” for Qatar. For years, Attorney General Pam Bondi was also paid an obscene amount of money — more than six figures per month — to do equally-vague consulting work for Qatar, which is bringing up questions about why she moved so quickly to approve the country’s gift of a new airplane to Trump.

Because as David A. Graham perfectly summarized for The Atlantic, “There’s No Such Thing as a Free Plane.”

As we noted in this space on Wednesday, Congressional Republicans are speaking out against the idea of accepting an airplane from Qatar. Colorado freshman Rep. Jeff “Bread Sandwich” Hurd is among the skeptics.

► Under President Trump, the United States is quickly becoming one of the foremost climate-denying countries on the planet. 

► Don’t miss the latest episode of the Get More Smarter Podcast for an in-depth rundown of the 2025 Colorado legislative session with Denver Post Statehouse Reporter Seth Klamann: