October 20, 2012 01:14 AM UTC

Kerr's TABOR Vulnerability Comes to Bear

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• by: Colorado Pols

As the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit challenging TABOR’s constitutionality, State Representative Andy Kerr has always been vulnerable on tax policy in his SD-22 bid against Rep. Ken Summers. TABOR is a complex issue, as is the lawsuit bearing Kerr’s name, but both can easily be distilled by conservatives with one deceptively simple platitude: Andy Kerr wants to raise taxes.

Little surprise, then, that’s exactly the messaging that right-leaning Colorado Citizens for Accountable Government 527 is deploying against the Lakewood Democrat on basic cable.

Inherent in this commercial, of course, are certain perplexing inaccuracies. Andy Kerr is apparently so devious that not only was he able to “raise taxes,” he’s also filing a lawsuit against the amendment that makes it impossible for legislators to raise taxes. It’s an odd contradiction under scrutiny. Either Kerr already has the power to raise taxes, making the lawsuit moot, or he’s suing the people of Colorado so that he’s able to raise taxes, which apparently he can already do without the lawsuit? It just doesn’t make sense.

Most voters seeing this on television, however, won’t know the intricacies of TABOR or of the legislature at-large. They’ll simply hear that Andy Kerr is a liberal politician who has raised taxes in the past and, if elected this year, will raise taxes in the future.

That talking point is overplayed. Voters have heard the “Democrats want to raise taxes” canard thousands of times this cycle alone. It’s lost its teeth. Sure, Kerr is involved in a lawsuit loosely connected to “raising taxes,” but so many different candidates for so many different offices in Colorado have recently been attacked on the tax issue that ads like these get lost in the noise and are easy to shrug off as hyperbole.

The “doesn’t trust us” line doesn’t have legs either. Conservatives tend to believe that the entire state worships TABOR and considers its provisions sacrosanct. The truth of the matter is that most Coloradans, even Republicans, blame the amendment for Colorado’s slide into fiscal dysfunction.

Repeated attacks against Kerr over TABOR might have been able to shape the race early on, but at this juncture, the issue is too wonky and too hackneyed to really move the needle in Summers’ favor.