April 15, 2026 01:37 PM UTC

Budgetpocalypse 2026: It's Barb Kirkmeyer's Turd Sandwich Now

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• by: Colorado Pols

As Marianne Goodland reports for the Colorado Springs Gazette’s political blog formerly known as the Colorado Statesman, what’s known as the “Long Bill” specifying line-item appropriations for the General Fund budget–this year requiring over a billion dollars in cuts to almost every public program and service Coloradans rely on–has passed the Colorado House, after a marathon session that saw the bill read at length in a protest forced by Rep. Brandi Bradley over the slap on the wrist delivered to Rep. Ron Weinberg after her ethics complaint. After receiving only a single Republican “yes” vote from Joint Budget Committee member Rep. Rick Taggart, now it’s up to the Senate’s JBC Republican, Sen. Barb Kirkmeyer, also a candidate for governor, to sell a budget her House colleagues just got done enthusiastically trashing.

The first indication that this wasn’t going to be an easy sell came before the meeting even began, as we reported yesterday, when Senate Republicans fled the building for a closed-door and potentially illegal meeting blocks away:

While Democrats talked strategy opening at the Capitol, Republicans held a closed-door caucus at the Independence Institute on Tuesday, with no public access or recording provided, raising concerns that the meeting may have violated the state’s open‑meetings law. [Pols emphasis]

Assuming we’re to take her word for it, Sen. Kirkmeyer described the backroom session with her fellow Senate Republicans this way:

“We didn’t resolve the structural deficit, but we did address overspending,” said Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer, R‑Brighton, who represents the caucus on the Joint Budget Committee.

She said she isn’t happy with the budget but that she co-sponsored the bill because it was the only way to balance it…

The JBC worked to protect K-12 funding, [Kirkmeyer] explained, but that meant the budget is being “balanced on the backs of the poorest among us and the medically fragile,” rather than on students’ backs, as was the case during the Great Recession of 2008.

The hard choices that lawmakers had to sort through this year in order to balance the budget as revenues decline and the federal budget chokes off hundreds of millions of dollars are politically toxic, and no one wants to be the person–or the party–to take ownership of them. Even though the cuts required to this year’s budget are in large part the result of Republican policy decisions in Washington, state-level Republicans in Colorado are politically incentivized to shift that blame onto the Democratic majority forced to carry out cuts they never supported. That’s how Republicans in the House suddenly became ardent defenders of Medicaid funds that the JBC had no choice but to cut.

But this doesn’t work for Sen. Kirkmeyer, who is dutybound to support this budget full of pain for voters as a member of the JBC. It’s Kirkmeyer’s job to explain how this was the best possible outcome in a terrible budget environment, made over a billion dollars worse by the actions of Kirkmeyer’s fellow Republicans in Washington. To make her job even harder, Kirkmeyer can’t acknowledge the role of federal cuts in the pain she proposes to inflict on Coloradans without opening herself to blowback in the governor’s race.

If Kirkmeyer was serious about winning the nomination that appears to be slipping away from her to Lauren Boebert-backed upstart challenger Victor Marx, she wouldn’t be the one trying to sell this budget no one wants to see passed. It’s far too easy with this liability in hand for Kirkmeyer’s primary opponents to paint her as sold out to the same “Uniparty” the MAGA base has been taught to despise. Kirkmeyer’s opponent Rep. Scott Bottoms, who voted against the budget with the rest of his House colleagues, is primed to make this case if he can ever get out from under Marx’s beefcake shadow.

Kirkmeyer is no “moderate,” in fact attempting to brand Kirkmeyer as such is just another example of how far to the right the party has slid. But today’s Republicans simply have no use for anyone who breaks MAGA character, even to keep the lights on. Kirkmeyer’s determination to keep one foot planted in MAGA world and the other in reality is headed for an inauspicious end.