July 15, 2025 10:18 AM UTC

Barb Kirkmeyer On Cutting Funds For Kids: "Ground The Kids"

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• by: Colorado Pols

As Colorado Newsline reports, local officials are currently analyzing the impact of the recently-passed Republican federal budget bill on Colorado’s already strained state budget, looking to determine whether a special session of the legislature will be necessary to reallocate reduced resources to minimize the pain to Medicaid patients, food assistance beneficiairies, and so many others about to experience the dark side of tax cuts for the richest Americans:

Colorado state leaders and Democratic lawmakers warned of the budgetary impacts from the federal tax break and spending cut bill in the months leading up to its passage, saying it will devastate the state’s Medicaid program, drastically reduce nutritional assistance for families and blow a hole in the budget that the state can not absorb…

One state lawmaker who helps write the budget says state leaders have no more room to trim around the margins and predicts they will be forced to make cuts in core areas of spending.

“We will have to see to what extent we need changes in our law to be responsive to what we’re seeing coming in that bill. And each of the different agencies (are) going through that bill now trying to figure out exactly the answer to that question,” Rep. Shannon Bird, a Westminster Democrat who sits on the Joint Budget Committee, said.

The goal is to figure out what needs to be addressed now — potentially through a special legislative session or when the Legislature reconvenes next January — and what can wait.

While Democratic majority leadership in the legislature and Gov. Jared Polis work out whether the legislature will need to be called back into session, local Republicans are politically obligated to have a very different reaction to the massive hole in Colorado’s budget blown by their colleagues in Washington. With the hard questions of what gets cut and by how much left to the states to figure out, congressional Republicans had the easy part. For Republicans in the states trying to reconcile the harm done by fellow Republicans in Washington with local priorities they too claim to care about, the result is typified in another angry, dodgy non-answer from Joint Budget Committee member and all-but-announced gubernatorial candidate Sen. “Both Ways Barb” Kirkmeyer:

“The problem is that Democrat lawmakers and the Governor have been on a spending spree for years with hardworking Coloradans required to pay the bill,” she said. “My strategy remains the same: to protect and fund critical priorities such as health care, public safety and education. In the short term, it’s time to ground the kids and take away the credit cards. In the long term, we need to get a clear understanding of what (the bill) does, instead of just attempting to scare people to death.” [Pols emphasis]

So first of all, it’s every expert analysis of the bill that universally predicts widespread harm to millions of Americans “scaring people to death,” not the lack of a “clear understanding of what the bill does.” This is an implicit acknowledgement that Americans are indeed scared, but Kirkmeyer can’t admit that the reason for that fear is legitimate. As for the supposed “spending spree” by Democrats, Kirkmeyer already knows that Colorado runs one of the tightest fiscal ships in the nation due to the revenue constraints imposed by TABOR and other constitutional provisions. Just like Rep. Gabe Evans, Kirkmeyer wants to justify cuts in the billions with “spending sprees” that amount to millions, and the math just doesn’t add up.

And it must be noted for the record: saying it’s time to “ground the kids” in response to a bill that literally hurts kids is the height of political masochism.

At least she didn’t say the kids are all going to die.