September 22, 2025 12:21 PM UTC

House Republicans Select Noob Jarvis Caldwell as New Minority Leader

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• by: Colorado Pols

Colorado House Republicans on Saturday selected Rep. Jarvis Caldwell (R-Monument) to be their new Minority Leader following last week’s surprise resignation of Rep. Rose Pugliese (R-Colorado Springs).

The House Republican caucus met over Zoom on Saturday morning to choose their new Minority Leader. Caldwell received 12 votes, with fellow Reps. Larry Don Suckla (R-Montezuma County) and Ken “Dildo” DeGraaf (R-Colorado Springs) receiving 4 votes each.

As CBS News reports:

Caldwell takes the helm amid heightened tension in the House after a Republican took a picture of a Democratic colleague and shared it with other GOP members, some of whom made degrading remarks.

Caldwell, among those who voted to condemn the behavior, said, “I’m not coming in here to look backwards. I’m focusing on moving forward.”

He says he will fight to lower crime and the cost of living, but he says he will do so respectfully and hold his caucus to the same standard: “We have to bring that temperature down.”

Caldwell’s pledge to “bring that temperature down” may be tough to accomplish, particularly given his history as a former rhetorical bomb-thrower for the House Republican caucus. In his pre-election speech to the caucus on Saturday, Rep. Suckla defiantly said that it was a mistake for House Republicans to vote in favor of last month’s censure of former Rep. Ryan Armagost for taking a photo of a Democratic Representative that Republicans then mocked on an internal text thread.

Suckla’s comments were likely shared by at least a few of his fellow Republicans. Following the vote on Saturday, Rep. “Boxwine” Brandi Bradley voiced her displeasure with her caucus for apparently not electing a more, um, controversial candidate as Minority Leader:

We don’t know how Bradley voted on Saturday, but we’re guessing she preferred her partner-in-slime Ken DeGraaf — who undoubtedly would have been a walking migraine for House Republicans. It’s not clear what sort of “another caucus” Bradley could form; the key point, however, is that House Republicans will most certainly not be moving forward together.

Instead, the GOP will turn control over to the 36-year-old Caldwell, who was just elected to the House of Representatives in 2024. You would think Republicans would have learned their lesson about appointing a Minority Leader with little actual legislative experience; Pugliese was an utter disaster as Minority Leader, which wasn’t a huge surprise given that she was handed the reins after serving just one session in the legislature. Yet House Republicans decided to run it back with another leader who has only one actual legislative session under his belt.

Of course, the bar for the House Republican micro-minority is impossibly low. Things could have turned out worse, but not by much.