At a time when state legislators should be doing everything possible to encourage job creation, a bill working its way through the Colorado Legislature unfairly paints employers as unreasonable and untrustworthy.

Worse still, Senate Bill 3 gives trial lawyers another opportunity to sink their teeth into Colorado’s job creators – extracting “damages” where none exist and forcing employers to pay dearly just to prove their innocence.

Would it surprise you to learn that the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Morgan Carroll (D-Aurora), just happens to be a trial lawyer with one of the state’s most high-profile firms?  Or that, at the bill’s first hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee which Carroll chairs, not a single witness claimed to have been denied a job or a promotion as a result of a credit history check? [Read more →]

Editor’s Note: My recent Capitol Review contained an old headline, but new text.

Nice guys don’t always finish last.  Sometimes they win three states in a single day.

Rick Santorum’s improbable hat trick — sweeping Republican presidential contests in Missouri, Minnesota and Colorado — provided yet another surprise in a wildly unpredictable nominating process.  It also ensures that the primary season will last longer, that we will learn more about candidates’ strengths and weaknesses, and that voters in more states will have a say in selecting Barack Obama’s opponent.

Pundits gave Santorum a fighting chance to beat Romney in Missouri without Gingrich on the ballot.  But wins in Minnesota and Colorado were particularly noteworthy because Romney had decisively won both states in 2008.  This time, Romney slipped from first to third place in Minnesota, and in Colorado, where he garnered 60% in 2008, finished second with 35%. [Read more →]

Budgeting is about setting priorities.

In most states, K-12 education is the top priority and receives the lion’s share of funding.  Yet across the country, states are grappling with a budget monster that pits education funding against federal health care mandates.

In the last three years, total spending on K-12 education in Colorado has fallen by $389 million.  Spending on health care, however, has increased by $763 million during that same period.

The problem is that states no longer have the ability to set their own priorities. [Read more →]

When Gov. John Hickenlooper announced that the state will appeal a Denver court’s ruling that the state inadequately funds education, he acknowledged what Judge Sheila Rappaport — and previously the Colorado Supreme Court — would not: money is a finite resource, even when it’s spent on worthy causes and when it’s spent by government.

The state legislature allocates $4.3 billion to educate more than 800,000 students — just under $6,500 each — in K-12 public schools.  According to the Colorado Department of Education, other sources bring that total to a statewide average of nearly $13,000, as of 2009-10.

Over two years ago, the supreme court ruled, in a contentious 4-3 decision, that a lower court should entertain claims brought by a group of parents and school districts that the state constitution’s call for a “thorough and uniform” system of free public schools should be interpreted to require a specific funding amount.

That lawsuit, Lobato vs. Colorado, reverted back to Rappaport’s courtroom, albeit with instructions that “the trial court must give substantial deference to the legislature’s fiscal and policy judgments.”

Rappaport’s decision, however, offered no such deference. [Read more →]

Because those doggone Coloradans just won’t vote to increase taxes often
enough, a cadre of folks who just can’t bear to see state government spend
less is asking a federal judge to do something voters won’t – to strike
down voters’ constitutional right to approve tax increases.

Led by Democrat State Rep. Andy Kerr, plaintiffs contend that the
Taxpayers Bill of Rights (TABOR) in the Colorado constitution violates the
U.S. Constitution’s guarantee that all states have a “republican form of
government.”

Don’t think that the plaintiffs have become orthodox disciples of James
Madison.  They’re just sick and tired of state government being forced to
tighten its belt during a recession as ordinary Coloradans must do.
They’d rather raise our taxes and hope we’ll forgive or forget before the
next election. [Read more →]

Say this for President Barack Obama: he doesn’t lack for vision.

As a candidate, Obama spoke of “chang(ing) the trajectory of America” in a way that no president has since Ronald Reagan. Obama’s vision is, of course, antithetical to Reagan’s.

Reagan said, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

Obama believes that government spending can stimulate the economy and that government regulation will fix health care. [Read more →]

Gerrymandering — the conspicuous, irregular manipulating of electoral district boundaries to advantage one political party or candidate — is widely considered a distasteful, if not downright corrupt, practice.

Through gerrymandering, incumbent politicians seek to choose their voters rather than vice versa, packing their legislative or congressional districts with enough like-minded constituents to make re-election almost effortless.

Rather than conform to statutory or geographic boundaries (county lines, city limits, mountain ranges, watersheds), gerrymandering eviscerates those boundaries for the purpose of achieving a specific result on Election Day. [Read more →]

Since 1988, the federal government has spent $8 TRILLION on interest on debt! We are spending our children and grandchildren into a future of poverty. That’s what the 2012 election is about!

Click here to watch video from Government Gone Wild!

Here’s a great little video from Heritage Foundation explaining the national debt.

To hear trial lawyers and their anti-business enablers tell it, the only thing that prevents Colorado employers from literally chaining workers to their desks is the “right to sue” their dastardly bosses.  In this fantasy world, trial lawyers never bring frivolous lawsuits and fired employees never file dubious claims motivated but grudges against their former employers.

In fact, listening to testimony recently on Senate Bill 72 (sponsored by Sen. Morgan Carroll, D-Aurora, and Rep. Claire Levy, D-Boulder), the uninitiated could be forgiven for wondering — given the obvious virtue presumed by the bills’ supporters — why the sponsors don’t propose a new law that simply accepts employees’ claims at face value, dispenses with the inconvenience of a trial, and orders those heartless employers to immediately deposit funds into plaintiffs’ bank accounts.

Maybe that’s on their agenda for next year. [Read more →]