In 1992 — the same year that Democrat Bill Clinton defeated
Bush One — Colorado voters made two huge mistakes: they passed the anti-gay Amendment Two (later overturned by SCOTUS) and TABOR, the misnamed Taxpayers Bill of Rights, which has been strangling Colorado government ever since, though many localities have voted to overturn it.
Yesterday, Proposition CC, a statutory change that would have cut into TABOR’s numerous excesses, was defeated, with the Naysayers voting it down, 55% to 45%.
If it had passed, Colorado would have been able to spend badly needed money on roads and public education.
Douglas Bruce, perhaps the most arrogant of all Colorado Republicans, was the author of TABOR. Bruce evidently thinks that everything government does is wrong, in part because he’s been incarcerated for being a notorious slumlord.
Former Centenial State governor Bill Owens celebrated the defeat of CC, which your solitary reporter and his many friends supported. The Colorado Democratic Party enthusiastically supported CC; the GOP, of course, opposed it.
Associate solitary reporter and Denver GOP Chairman Eddie Cook was ecstatic about the defeat of CC.
“With CC going down,” Cook told us, “Coloradans can waste even more of their money in the gambling palaces of Blackhawk and Cripple Creek."
Elsewhere, in Kentucky, a protege of "Moscow Mitch" McConnell, a black man named Daniel Cameron, 33, was elected Attorney General. Cameron’s well-funded TV ads attacked his Democratic opponent, accusing him of wanting to help “illegals…pour over the border” and sell “Mexica meth” on the streets of Kentucky (https://www.kentucky.com/news/politics-government/election/article237032524.html).
We’re scratching our heads over how a black man and a Republican could do that to his own people.
Associate solitary reporter Melissa Smith, who knows McConnell all too well, attributes it to Kentucky voters wanting to fatten Mitch up ahead of his certain defeat in his re-election bid a year from now.
Cameron’s ill-gotten victory was, however, offset by Denver voters overwhelmingly electing African American Tay Anderson, 21 and a proud graduate of Manual High School (where your solitary reporter first saw Barack Obama at a rally in 2004). Anderson is a rising star in the Democratic Party. He won his At-Large seat by a wide margin, beating his better funded opponent.