August 26, 2025 11:20 AM UTC

Colorado Republicans Use Special Session to Prove Just How Unserious They Are About Everything

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• by: Colorado Pols

TUESDAY UPDATE: The stupid…it burns…

Here’s Rep. Ken “Dildo” DeGraaf (R-Colorado Springs) arguing that the State of Colorado should begin doing genetic identification of post-abortion remains in order to identify the responsible male so that he can repay the state somehow:

Or, if you prefer, here’s Rep. Larry Don Suckla (R-Montezuma County) telling a story about the time he had to force 50 cows to have abortions. Presumably DeGraaf’s proposal would not end up ensnaring Suckla:

These are not serious people. Not even a little bit.

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The special legislative session that kicked off last Thursday is getting close to the finish line on the top-line issues of addressing an $800 million budget hole created by President Trump’s “big beautiful bullshit bill” (OBBB). Democrats in the state legislature are doing most of this work on their own, as expected, because Republicans remain insistent on pretending that the OBBB doesn’t actually force any cuts and makes everything amazing!

As we’ve said again and again in this space, Colorado Republicans are just not serious people when it comes to actually doing the work of governing. But don’t take our word for it; take a look at what Republicans have been saying in their own words.

After saying for weeks that Colorado’s budget hole is NOT because of the OBBB but rather because Democrats have spent too much money, State Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer shifted on Friday to pretending that cuts to Medicaid and SNAP (food stamp) benefits simply aren’t real…or something.

(Don’t think Kirkmeyer doesn’t want to screw over low-income Coloradans anyway! Kirkmeyer wrote an OpEd published in The Denver Post — just a few days earlier —  in which she called for pausing the refund in the family affordability tax credit in order to protect the tax cuts in the OBBB for rich people and corporations).

Among the many problems with Kirkmeyer’s denial of reality is that her own Republican colleagues are saying otherwise. For example, here’s Rep. Jarvis Caldwell (R-Colorado Springs) explaining the special session to “Free State Colorado”:

CALDWELL: So, what you need to know is that we have somewhere between a $1 billion and $1.2 billion budget deficit after HR1 [the OBBB] passed.

D’oh! Jarvis…you’re supposed to be saying that Democrats have a spending problem and this has nothing to do with the OBBB. Did you not get the memo?

State Rep. Ken “Dildo” DeGraaf (R-Colorado Springs) apparently did get that memo, but as he often does, he kept going right on off the rails when talking to “Free State Colorado”:

I was telling one of the aides that Democracy thrives in darkness, and right now they want to keep everything dark, they want to keep everything cloaked. They want to deflect all of the blame for the dismal economic performance.

Thrives in darkness…dies in darkness…what’s the difference, right? Anyway, keep going, Ken!

The fact is, we have a hole in our economy that is based on the Democrats overspending, We had a surplus, and this surplus would be well enough to cover any shortfall this year. But they blew through that surplus and spent right to the edge of their budget. So right now we don’t have any excess, and so now what we’re doing is they bring us in and we’re spending more taxpayer money so that the Democrats can figure out how to TAKE more taxpayer money because they have certainly shown no ideas at reducing spending [sic] – only methods of increasing the load on our businesses.

So, ultimately I don’t know why they don’t want any businesses to remain in Colorado. This seems all part of their rewilding, aka a de-peopling of Colorado. So you get rid of the businesses, you get rid of the people, and then they’ll have their little wolf sanctuary. I don’t know – it’s all insanity. [Pols emphasis]

Wait, what? Democrats want to destroy businesses in Colorado so that fewer people live in the state in order to give wolves more room to roam. Um, sure.

DeGraaf went on to say that he expected there would be a special session in October because of a revenue shortfall that only he knew about, apparently:

I still expect that we’ll see some ballot initiatives come through because we expected this in the October timeframe – that the shortfalls would require a special session in October…Then in October when we’re even more short of money, then they’d be able to just raise the taxes without having to do anything contrived like conjuring up a new enterprise. 

DeGraaf has wasted a lot of time over the past couple of days with his particular brand of gibberish. On Friday, DeGraaf proposed legislation that (we assume) was an attempt at satire but made no goddamn sense. Here he is in his own ridiculous words explaining his legislative idea that never made it to consideration for obvious reasons:

DEGRAAF: The intent of the General Assembly is that all coinage remaining on the ground for more than 30 seconds – this would be a new version of the 30-second rule – will become real property of the state. While most coins are represented by their face value, found pennies have a value of a day’s worth of good luck. While intangible, this day’s worth of good luck is estimated to have a value of $19 dollars and 68 cents. The fee of which, being the rightful property of the State of Colorado, will be $6 dollars and 56 cents, in accordance with tax liberation day being mid-April. It is estimated that each Coloradan finds six pennies each year – over 30 million pennies per year across the state. Resulting revenues are anticipated at $196 million 800 thousand dollars…

…We could seed Colorado with pennies. So, if you would like to participate in the pick-a-penny fee, I would suggest you send one, maybe two pennies, put them in an envelope, and send them to the Governor. And then we can just scatter them all around and people that pick up pennies will be assessed a fee, which of course they will be on their honor to uphold, and then that fee can be fed right into the budget of the General Assembly that will continue to grow unabated. 

DeGraaf’s deep satire was about creating a new tax on found pennies that he inexplicably values at $19.68 (per penny). He talked about this for more than 20 minutes, stopping only so that he could find time to “talk about the cost of unlimited feticide” during discussion about legislation dealing with Qualified Business Income Deductions.

There have been plenty of other Republican bills that are straight gibberish, like this proposal from State Rep. Scott “There is No” Bottoms (R-Colorado Springs) later introduced in the upper chamber by the newly-seated Sen. Lynda Zamora Wilson (R-Colorado Springs):

What’s this? Oh, just a proposal to require abortion providers to reimburse the State of Colorado for proceeds generated from the sale of fetal organs.

Some Republicans talked about more realistic ways to save money…though their math needs a lot of work.

Here’s Rep. Rebecca Keltie (R-Colorado Springs) making her own point accidentally:

KELTIE: I know last session, for the Republicans, we had over $900,000 worth of cuts that we proposed. They were denied. They were turned down. And now we’re back to the drawing board again, and I told them before that if we don’t do something now, we’re going to be back here again. And guess where we are?

Not only that, but we’re costing the taxpayers of Colorado thirty to thirty-five thousand dollars per day, and the minimum is six days. 

Unless we have everyone at the table making good decisions…especially people like the Republicans that are qualified to make these decisions. I firmly believe that you need to be qualified in the realm to be able to make good things happen. Seventy percent of the people here are not qualified.

If only lawmakers had heeded Keltie’s warnings and cut $900,000 from the budget a few months ago…then the legislature would only need to find an additional $799,100,000 in cuts during the special session. Problem solved (ish)!

Here’s Rep. Ty Winter (R-Trinidad) — who has mostly been mad that the special session took place at the same time as the State Fair — trying to do his own budget calculations:

WINTER: I just presented my bill, and my bill was to take $4 million that the legislature put into a slush fund for the Governor – which I found out in committee has $56 million already – to sue the federal government…

…We should have started today with a $4 million savings. That would have been a good faith gesture to the people of Colorado that we’re here to take this serious [sic] and fix things.

Geez, Democrats: If you just listened to Keltie and Winter, you’d only have to cut another $795 million!

State Rep. Ryan Gonzalez (R-Greeley) claims that the state was already facing a $700 million budget deficit even before the OBBB passed, which makes no sense since the legislature is Constitutionally-mandated to balance the budget every summer. But regardless, Gonzalez is going to make everything better by doing this thing:

GONZALEZ: I just ran a bill to have voter approval to lower the vendor fee. So the vendor fee actually helps small business at least get some money back to offset, in part, some of their costs when it comes to payroll taxes, other deductions, sales tax – things to make sure that they stay afloat. 

Unless the vendor fee is responsible for $800 million, this isn’t going to help fix the actual problem facing the state right now.

But at least Gonzalez is proposing legislation that isn’t already in the books. State Sen. Byron Pelton (R-Sterling) presumably thought this one up all by himself!

Right now I’m waiting to hear my bill, which is a resolution that says that any tax increase has to go to the citizens and ask their permissions [sic] to increase taxes….it’s basically saying they have to abide by TABOR, which as everyone out there watching knows, the Democrats hate.

Great work, Pelton. Maybe you could also propose a bill that makes the Colorado State Flag blue, red, and yellow.

Finally, if we’re going to harp on inexplicable proposals, we should give deference to the king of “what in the hell did he just say?” State Rep. Larry Don Suckla (R-Montezuma County). Here’s Suckla attempting to use his words:

SUCKLA: It’s war down here. What they are fixing to do is they are fixing to raise your taxes. They are calling it raising revenue. 

Yes, that’s what everyone calls it, Don. So what is your message to voters?

SUCKLA: And we have got to get back to being physically responsible…we have got to start voting for Republicans and physically conservative people.

Colorado Republicans are not serious people. Just listen to them.