Freedom Unaffiliated

Mayor Mike Johnston proclaimed, “It is past time Big Tobacco cleaned up the big mess it’s created.”

Yep. Denver is suing tobacco companies for the cigarette butts littering the city.

Because Denver’s Big Mess couldn’t possibly be the fault of the mayor, the city council or the people actually dropping garbage on the ground. It must be the fault of — let me check the Progressive Wheel of Blame here — Big Tobacco.

When you drive through Denver, the first thing you notice is obviously the cigarette-butt epidemic. Not the graffiti. Not the passed-out junkies. Not the ridiculous plastic bollards guarding bike lanes emptier than a city council meeting on fiscal restraint. Not even the shirtless guy wandering down the middle of a four-lane street, screaming obscenities at himself.

Nope. Cigarette butts. That’s what has Denverites lying awake at night.

Come on, Michael. You know full well Big Tobacco didn’t create any mess at all. Philip Morris executives are not prowling Capitol Hill after midnight, flicking Marlboro filters onto the sidewalk and cackling.

Inconsiderate smokers littered. That’s right, Denverites, your constituents did it.

Is the progressive mind constitutionally incapable of comprehending personal responsibility?

Drunk driver? Sue the automaker and the distillery. Someone stabbed to death? Clearly Big Knife has been buying off politicians. Hateful letter? Institute a three-day cooling-off period before purchasing a pen. Or the current plan, don’t teach kids how to write.

Your colorblind co-worker shows up dressed like a 1977 game-show host? Blame JCPenney for enabling his fashion decisions.

I deal daily with the litter created by Denverites — particularly Denver’s army of drug-fueled vagrants. Excuse me: “The drug-fueled vagrants currently experiencing un-housed-ness.”

I have only one logical response: “No mayor, it is past time Big Government cleaned up the big mess it has created by refusing to enforce our laws.”

Every day I pick up the debris left by Denver’s finest fentanyl fans around the headquarters of Independence Institute near the State Capitol. Fast-food wrappers. Liquor bottles in every size from “bad decision” to “lost weekend.” Potato chip bags. Syringes. Condoms. And far too often, human feces. (Usually not mine, if you’re wondering.)

Dogs relieve themselves on our grass, but their owners almost always clean it up with plastic bags. Denver’s homeless population also has an endless supply of plastic bags. I know because I pick those up too.

But why use one when the sidewalk is calling your name?

What I rarely —hardly ever — pick up is a cigarette butt.

The other day, beneath our office windows, we cleaned up another pile of abandoned belongings, including a backpack. Inside were a crowbar, a club, pliers, screwdrivers and a tire iron.

It was less a backpack than a burglar’s Swiss Army knife. I now eagerly await Denver’s lawsuits against Black+Decker and REI for causing this particular outbreak of litter.

Suing cigarette companies for their customers’ bad behavior is a sad, pathetic money grab not worthy of the shoddiest ambulance-chasing lawyer.

But it underscores the hypocrisy that is the new leftist evangelical way of virtue signaling — salvation through litigation, endless public displays of anti-capitalist moral purity at taxpayer expense.

Where is the lawsuit against McDonald’s for all the wrappers? Or Starbucks for abandoned cups? Or Fireball for those tiny bottles scattered across the city like alcoholic Easter eggs? Well, those companies are not currently fashionable to hate … yet.

It’s the lack of simple consistency that blows my mind. We ban shopping bags but not the bags we put our produce in, not to mention the plastic that everything inside the supermarket is wrapped in.

Because somehow some plastic is more evil than other plastic. And only our elite can divine.

How do their little brains not implode by the roaring contradictions?

We outlaw plastic straws to protect sea life, even though a straw discarded in Colorado would have to pull off a prison break from multiple water-treatment systems, navigate half the continent and hitchhike to the Pacific before it could menace a sea turtle.

Meanwhile, plastic tampon applicators escape scrutiny, even though cardboard versions exist.

We all know why. Tampon applicators are used by women, a protected political constituency. Cigarette smokers are a small, unfashionable minority.

So raising the cost of cigarettes by shaking down manufacturers isn’t intolerance. It isn’t bigotry. It’s, um, public health.

And now, “public health” means making the law-abiding pay for the behavior of people government won’t hold responsible.

Jon Caldara is president of Independence Institute, a free market think tank in Denver.

Hey, Colorado Democrats! All the fun you’ve had watching Republican dysfunction in Colorado for the last 20 years was just a preview of what is about to happen to you.

The Colorado Republican Party no longer exists as a competitive institution.

Republicans did it to themselves. They built a culture around purity tests, with no curiosity about winning elections. Anyone suggesting an appeal to unaffiliated voters was identified as a Republican in Name Only and bounced from the building.

Deep-pocketed conservatives kept funding candidates while neglecting the boring, unsatisfying work of winning future elections: community organizing, door knocking, recruitment and ballot chasing. They wanted crops without planting seeds.

The result? Colorado’s political press will document every embarrassment of Victor Marx’s doomed campaign, following his clown car while letting the left’s armored truck drive off with the state.

A 29-year-old socialist defeated Rep. Diana DeGette. She defended calls for eliminating Israel and declined to call the Boulder firebombing of pro-Israel demonstrators antisemitic.

That deserves more scrutiny than whatever Marx said to his dog between breakfast and Kyle Clark’s deadline.

So does the growing socialist faction in our legislature. So does Phil Weiser, a progressive law professor and activist. Nobody makes government simpler than law professors.

When Republicans tried putting the Ten Commandments in classrooms, Colorado’s media understood people wielding government power deserved scrutiny.

Now Democrats have elevated misgendering to legal discrimination. School employees must use a student’s chosen name regardless of parental approval, while some policies permit social transition without informing parents.

Moses entering a classroom is a constitutional crisis, but keeping parents in the dark is mandatory compassion.

The coming Democratic Party meltdown? Quite simply, too many factions inside the party are at odds with their own stated goals.

Consider the gay-rights community. It became a juggernaut winning marriage equality. But, like the French Revolution, its victory produced a movement out of control.

The LGB part of the LGBT team is at odds with the T part because they want fundamentally different things.

The LGB part wants to make it easier for gay kids to come out as — now get this — gay.

The T faction has built an apparatus to tell gay kids they’re the wrong gender — eerily similar to what anti-gay bigots once told homosexuals.

So kids need social transition, puberty blockers, hormones and lopping off healthy body parts.

A growing number of gays and lesbians privately fear this system can take children who might become comfortable gay adults and place them on a path of lifelong medicalization. Privately is the operative word. Nothing says “pride” quite like being terrified to say what you believe.

The old Christian-right message was that a gay child should become straight. The new Democrat message is a gay child should change bodies.

Different pitch. Same refusal to let a gay child simply be gay.

Today’s Democrat party is anti-gay.

Hey, Colorado Democrats! All the fun you’ve had watching Republican dysfunction in Colorado for the last 20 years was just a preview of what is about to happen to you.

The Colorado Republican Party no longer exists as a competitive institution.

Republicans did it to themselves. They built a culture around purity tests, with no curiosity about winning elections. Anyone suggesting an appeal to unaffiliated voters was identified as a Republican in Name Only and bounced from the building.

Deep-pocketed conservatives kept funding candidates while neglecting the boring, unsatisfying work of winning future elections: community organizing, door knocking, recruitment and ballot chasing. They wanted crops without planting seeds.

The result? Colorado’s political press will document every embarrassment of Victor Marx’s doomed campaign, following his clown car while letting the left’s armored truck drive off with the state.

A 29-year-old socialist defeated Rep. Diana DeGette. She defended calls for eliminating Israel and declined to call the Boulder firebombing of pro-Israel demonstrators antisemitic.

That deserves more scrutiny than whatever Marx said to his dog between breakfast and Kyle Clark’s deadline.

So does the growing socialist faction in our legislature. So does Phil Weiser, a progressive law professor and activist. Nobody makes government simpler than law professors.

When Republicans tried putting the Ten Commandments in classrooms, Colorado’s media understood people wielding government power deserved scrutiny.

Democratic congressional candidate Melat Kiros speaks after winning the Democratic nomination during a primary election night watch party at The Broadway on Tuesday, June 30, 2026, in Denver. (AP Photo/Rebecca Slezak)

Now Democrats have elevated misgendering to legal discrimination. School employees must use a student’s chosen name regardless of parental approval, while some policies permit social transition without informing parents.

Moses entering a classroom is a constitutional crisis, but keeping parents in the dark is mandatory compassion.

The coming Democratic Party meltdown? Quite simply, too many factions inside the party are at odds with their own stated goals.

Consider the gay-rights community. It became a juggernaut winning marriage equality. But, like the French Revolution, its victory produced a movement out of control.

The LGB part of the LGBT team is at odds with the T part because they want fundamentally different things.

The LGB part wants to make it easier for gay kids to come out as — now get this — gay.

The T faction has built an apparatus to tell gay kids they’re the wrong gender — eerily similar to what anti-gay bigots once told homosexuals.

So kids need social transition, puberty blockers, hormones and lopping off healthy body parts.

A growing number of gays and lesbians privately fear this system can take children who might become comfortable gay adults and place them on a path of lifelong medicalization. Privately is the operative word. Nothing says “pride” quite like being terrified to say what you believe.

The old Christian-right message was that a gay child should become straight. The new Democrat message is a gay child should change bodies.

Different pitch. Same refusal to let a gay child simply be gay.

Today’s Democrat party is anti-gay.

The same contradiction is consuming women’s equality, one of the strongest pillars of the old left. It is why the left fought so hard for Title IX, so girls would have an opportunity to play sports.

Now that same left must welcome boys onto the girls’ court and into their locker room. Again, it is working against its own stated goals.

Today’s Democrat party is anti-female.

Environmentalists face a similar split. Colorado is increasing electrical demand through electric vehicles, data centers and forced building electrification while eliminating reliable fossil-fuel generation.

Colorado’s war on natural gas is equally backward. More than 2.3 billion people still cook with wood, charcoal, crop waste or dung — you know, the stuff that is the most greenhouse-gas emitting.

If Democrats really cared about reducing emissions, they would use American natural gas to help poorer countries replace smoky fires with clean burning stoves.

“Transition Colorado to nuclear! Send our natural gas to Africa!” is a bumper sticker you’ll never see on a Boulder Subaru.

Today’s Democrat party is anti-clean energy.

Fights between Colorado Democrats over these issues along with fights over their anti-business agenda will begin to break out in a way the press cannot ignore.

None of this means Colorado Republicans will return to power anytime soon.

It means Democrats will experience the ravenous and public factionalism Republicans enjoyed for 20 years.

Just watch.

Jon Caldara is president of the Independence Institute in Denver and hosts “The Devil’s Advocate with Jon Caldara” on Colorado Public Television Channel 12. His column appears Sundays in Colorado Politics.

If the goal is reliable, carbon-free electricity, nuclear power is the obvious answer — no emissions and it works when the wind stops and the sun sets.

Ethical historians condemn the practice, known as “presentism,” of judging historical events, people or cultures, through the lens of today’s moral standards, political beliefs or social norms, rather than understanding them within their own time frame. This is an element of the strategy of the radical left to undermine our pride in America by magnifying our faults and downplaying our virtues and achievements. It’s roots are in higher education where leftist academics dominate faculties and indoctrinate students. It seeps down into public schools controlled by leftist teacher unions, is amplified by the dominant liberal media and echoed in entertainment channels and social media.

America is singled out and damned for practicing slavery in our early years, although it was common worldwide for millennia long before the USA was born (and still disgracefully exists in other places). In 1787, after the Revolutionary War when our nation’s founders were crafting the Constitution, the southern colonies would not have joined the union if slavery were abolished. It took 78 years and a Civil War to right that wrong in 1865. The Brits like to brag they outlawed slavery in 1833 before we did. True, but England, founded in 925, took 900 years to get around to that.

Long before White Europeans came to these shores, American Indians enslaved other Indians they captured in battle. Blacks in Africa enslaved other Blacks and sold them to slave traders who brought them to America. Ironically, centuries later the descendants of those slaves have the good fortune to live in America rather than in so many suffering countries of Africa today.

When America expanded westward, the Indian Wars were predictably won by the more populous and technologically advanced civilization, overwhelming the more primitive one. I’m not celebrating that, just observing the inevitable outcome. War is a constant of human history, with worldwide borders repeatedly changing by right of conquest. No one living today bears any responsibility nor guilt for what has happened in the distant past. The expiration date for “reparations” has long since passed. To borrow a biblical phrase, “let that nation who is without sin cast the first stone.” I’m not suggesting we throw anything down the memory hole to rewrite history and conceal past transgressions. I’m saying we shouldn’t forever obsess on the bad stuff, and that we balance the scales by acknowledging the good stuff. In other words, that was then, this is now; let’s move on.

In its criticism of Western civilization in general, the radical left is also obsessed with the sin of “colonization.” This goes back thousands of years practiced by ancient civilizations like the Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Persians and Chinese. More recently in the 1500s, modern European colonization surged applying its advanced seagoing technology to intercontinental colonization and ushering in the era of worldwide trade. Some colonial powers were exploitative and brutal; others were better behaved. British rule over India, for example, was initially harsh but later softened to allow the “passive resistance” of Mahatma Ghandi and eventually granting independence. The political roots the Brits left behind led to India ultimately becoming the world’s most populous democracy.

Ethical historians condemn the practice, known as “presentism,” of judging historical events, people or cultures, through the lens of today’s moral standards, political beliefs or social norms, rather than understanding them within their own time frame. This is an element of the strategy of the radical left to undermine our pride in America by magnifying our faults and downplaying our virtues and achievements. It’s roots are in higher education where leftist academics dominate faculties and indoctrinate students. It seeps down into public schools controlled by leftist teacher unions, is amplified by the dominant liberal media and echoed in entertainment channels and social media.

America is singled out and damned for practicing slavery in our early years, although it was common worldwide for millennia long before the USA was born (and still disgracefully exists in other places). In 1787, after the Revolutionary War when our nation’s founders were crafting the Constitution, the southern colonies would not have joined the union if slavery were abolished. It took 78 years and a Civil War to right that wrong in 1865. The Brits like to brag they outlawed slavery in 1833 before we did. True, but England, founded in 925, took 900 years to get around to that.

GETTY IMAGES The Old Slave Mart Museum, building originally used as slave market in South Carolina, Charleston.

Long before White Europeans came to these shores, American Indians enslaved other Indians they captured in battle. Blacks in Africa enslaved other Blacks and sold them to slave traders who brought them to America. Ironically, centuries later the descendants of those slaves have the good fortune to live in America rather than in so many suffering countries of Africa today.

When America expanded westward, the Indian Wars were predictably won by the more populous and technologically advanced civilization, overwhelming the more primitive one. I’m not celebrating that, just observing the inevitable outcome. War is a constant of human history, with worldwide borders repeatedly changing by right of conquest. No one living today bears any responsibility nor guilt for what has happened in the distant past. The expiration date for “reparations” has long since passed. To borrow a biblical phrase, “let that nation who is without sin cast the first stone.” I’m not suggesting we throw anything down the memory hole to rewrite history and conceal past transgressions. I’m saying we shouldn’t forever obsess on the bad stuff, and that we balance the scales by acknowledging the good stuff. In other words, that was then, this is now; let’s move on.

In its criticism of Western civilization in general, the radical left is also obsessed with the sin of “colonization.” This goes back thousands of years practiced by ancient civilizations like the Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Persians and Chinese. More recently in the 1500s, modern European colonization surged applying its advanced seagoing technology to intercontinental colonization and ushering in the era of worldwide trade. Some colonial powers were exploitative and brutal; others were better behaved. British rule over India, for example, was initially harsh but later softened to allow the “passive resistance” of Mahatma Ghandi and eventually granting independence. The political roots the Brits left behind led to India ultimately becoming the world’s most populous democracy.

America was actually a victim of colonization imposed by the British Empire. But after an admittedly rocky start and a few wars, we ultimately became best friends and allies. This is another case of “that was then, this is now.” Outside of eleven uninhabited small islands sprinkled around the world, America’s colonization is principally our five foreign “territories,” the U.S. Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands, whose people generally like the relationship and aren’t asking for independence. So, what’s the problem?

Like any nation America has had its faults. But any fair assessment that weighs our faults against our virtues far favors the virtues. One in particular immediately comes to mind. The overwhelming contribution of American military might and industrial war-fighting capacity that turned the tide in World War II, leading our allies to victory and saving the free world from Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. That, alone, neutralizes any and all of our sins.

As the victor, not only didn’t America colonize German and Japan, it helped rebuild both of those countries, reform its governments and stationed 300,000 American NATO troops (including me) in Germany during the Cold War to protect that nation and the rest of Europe from the Soviet Union. Isn’t it ironic that Germany and Japan are, today, among our most steadfast friends and allies. Yet another example of that was then, this is now.

Mike Rosen is a Denver-based American radio personality and political commentator.

We are finally getting a clearer picture of what happened during COVID. Not because the people who locked us up, masked our faces and forced unproven chemicals into our bodies have suddenly become transparent, but because Anthony Fauci’s COVID-era diary is coming into public view.

This long document makes one thing painfully clear: the people who forced us to surrender our lives to their expertise did not have the expertise they claimed.

At best, they were guessing.

And when their guesses failed, they did not retreat. They didn’t come clean. They doubled down.

Our health, our freedoms, our bodies, our economy, our children’s education were all less important than their unchallenged status as the infallible elite.

Yes, Fauci’s diary shows his arrogance. Yes, he seems incapable of admitting error. Yes, he was willing to make “majestic leaps” ahead of the evidence while insisting the rest of us follow his orders.

But Fauci is merely a symptom of something more dangerous.

Government is at its most powerful and dictatorial precisely when it knows the least.

An unknown crisis arrives — and crisis always involves the unknown — and politicians panic. Bureaucrats come up with “answers.” They tell us foundational rules — individual liberty, open debate, fiscal restraint, bodily autonomy and just plain sense — must be suspended.

Then they spend money they do not have to keep the whole madness alive.

And with the media as cheerleader, they scare the hell out of people to make sure nobody asks uncomfortable questions.

Colorado did not merely watch this happen from the sidelines. We did it to ourselves.

Gov. Jared Polis and our local governments put you under house arrest. They closed businesses. They restricted worship. They suspended your right to peaceably assemble. They turned neighbors into hall monitors. They treated people trying to earn a living as dangers to society.

With the press as their enforcers, they canceled people who refused to mask or take their jab as “murderers,” costing many their livelihoods and personal relationships.

Workers were told their jobs were nonessential. You are nonessential!

Families were separated as they had to view their loved ones behind glass windows outside nursing homes.

Kids were told their smiles, their speech and their ability to see other people were somehow less important than obeying unseen adults in centers of governmental power who did not know what they were doing.

And in the cruelest act of all, they robbed children of school.

As the Fauci diaries prove, they knew young people were the least at risk of COVID, yet they injured our young the most.

“Remote learning” was no learning. It was cruel isolation.

For special-needs children like my son who has Down syndrome, it was punishment for a crime they didn’t commit. This crime wasn’t done by Fauci, but by feckless Colorado leaders.

These kids who learn through personal contact, social interaction, speech therapy, occupational therapy and the daily structure of being around other human beings were abandoned.

That lost time cannot be made back in a government program. This theft compounds over a lifetime.

The people who shut down our schools, our world, will say they were following the science. Fauci’s diary ought to make us ask: What science? Whose science?

Why isn’t the press doing with COVID what they did to Nixon after Watergate, ruthlessly asking what did you know and when did you know it?

Because this wasn’t just a mass injustice of government. It was a mass failure of the Fourth Estate.

If the nation’s top COVID bureaucrat was privately acknowledging uncertainty, failure and a lack of meaningful evidence, why did Colorado officials act as if disagreement itself was immoral?

They also used money we did not have.

The Colorado COVID response exploded government spending and pushed more people into government dependence. Medicaid enrollment in Colorado skyrocketed, and now the state faces the bill.

The inflation that followed the federal printing of money was not an act of God. The budget crisis coming to Colorado is not a mystery.

The next unknown crisis will come. And when it does, politicians will again tell us fear requires obedience.

They will again promise safety in exchange for freedom.

They will again insist there is no time for debate, evidence or restraint.

Colorado must remember what happened when we believed them.

Jon Caldara is president of Independence Institute, a free market think tank in Denver.

Colorado wants taxpayers to spend another $4.73 billion on passenger rail.

Don’t worry. They have a plan.

Which is a little like your brother-in-law announcing he’s launching another exciting restaurant venture after his last three restaurants ended in bankruptcy.

Please. Tell me where to send the check.

This week the Front Range Passenger Rail District released its “plan” for their choo-choo, laughingly branded “CoCo,” a desire named streetcar stretching from Fort Collins to Pueblo.

According to Independence Institute transportation analyst Randall O’Toole, the project will cost at least $4.73 billion. At least.

If that number sounds familiar, it should. It’s nearly a billion dollars more than Denver’s Regional Transportation District promised FasTracks would cost.

As the former chairman of RTD, I’ve seen firsthand how these numbers are invented for political marketing. Keep the estimate low enough to win the tax increase. Worry about reality later.

We were promised FasTracks would relieve congestion, transform transportation, and be completed by 2017 for $3.8 billion.

Instead, taxpayers have already spent about $5.5 billion. RTD says it still needs another $1.6 billion to finish what it promised. Congestion is worse. Ridership is down. And Longmont is still waiting for its train.

Passenger rail is Colorado’s abusive boyfriend. It lies. It takes your money. It promises it’ll change this time. And somehow, we keep taking it back.

So here we are again.

The choo-choo undead never stay dead. Like any good horror movie, they just keep coming back. Every failed rail proposal depends on one thing: taxpayer Alzheimer’s.

Forget the promises. Forget the cost overruns, the delays, the unfinished projects. Then buy the next glossy brochure.

RTD’s original sales tax increase proposal in the 1970s promised 118 miles of rail by 1980, after which the tax would be reduced.

Voters approved the tax. Not one inch of rail was built. The tax was never lowered.

Then came FasTracks in 2004, complete with another sales tax increase and another set of promises. The ending wasn’t much different.

And now it’s time for a train named after a cross-dressing stripper. On stage number one: Give it up for CoCo!

O’Toole points out something that should embarrass every elected official promoting this proposal. The document isn’t really a plan at all, even though it proudly calls itself A Plan That Works.

A real plan asks uncomfortable questions. What if ridership falls short? What if construction costs explode, if changing technology makes the project obsolete, if another transportation investment produces greater benefits?

This document asks none of them. Instead, it simply says we’ll spend $332 million in Phase One. Then another $1.7 billion. Then another $2.7 billion.

Apparently, recessions never happen. Construction costs never rise. Ridership never disappoints. Politicians never overpromise. Reality simply isn’t modeled.

Private businesses don’t operate this way. You open a restaurant and nobody comes, your response isn’t, “Excellent. Let’s immediately open three more locations.”

Otherwise, you’d be RTD.

One of my favorite CoCo selling points is that people can ride the train to Broncos games. Adorable.

CoCo carries roughly 500 passengers. Empower Field holds around 76,000 fans. Congratulations. You’ve solved approximately one bathroom line.

Then there are the economic claims. The report insists every taxpayer dollar invested somehow creates five dollars in economic benefit.

Awesome! Government planners have discovered a machine that turns one taxpayer dollar into five dollars. They should stop building trains and take over Wall Street.

But here’s the question missing from every glossy brochure: What else could Colorado do with $4.7 billion? Economists call it opportunity cost.

According to CDOT’s own 10-year transportation plan, that same amount of money would fund the state’s 23 most expensive transportation projects: Floyd Hill. Vail Pass. Eisenhower Tunnel repairs. Major reconstruction on I-25 north of Denver. Bridge replacements. Colorado Springs improvements. Grand Junction improvements. Twenty-three major transportation projects.

Or — one train.

If the goal is reducing traffic congestion with nearly $5 billion, it’s difficult to imagine a less effective investment than passenger rail.

This isn’t rail versus nothing. It’s rail versus everything else.

Colorado isn’t suffering from a shortage of transportation needs. It’s suffering from a shortage of priorities.

FasTracks already taught us that rail mega-projects routinely cost more than promised, take longer than promised, and deliver less than promised.

Before Colorado asks taxpayers to finance another multibillion-dollar railroad, perhaps government should finish paying for the last one.

Jon Caldara is president of Independence Institute, a free market think tank in Denver.

On TABOR Talk we discuss how Colorado Legislators are trying to get you to give up your TABOR refunds forever. Will you let them have it?

It was no surprise that the Supreme Court struck down President Trump’s executive order denying citizenship to children born in the U.S. to parents who were here illegally or were birthright tourists visiting the country on a temporary visa. The latter group is made up of foreigners who game the system by coming here for the sole purpose of birthing a child (or twins) to get the kid(s) U.S. citizenship, then returning home with their anchor baby for future use.

While I agree with Trump’s intent, doing this with an executive order clearly overstepped his bounds and was easily nixed by the Supremes. An act of Congress is required which Democrats would certainly have blocked.

Nonetheless, by taking the case, it gave SCOTUS, with a 6-3 majority of conservative justices, an opportunity to also make a judgment on the matter of birthright citizenship. This has been a debatable issue with laws and court precedents going back and forth for two centuries. There’s precedent in taking either side. Unfortunately, perhaps with misguided honorable intentions, Chief Justice John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett couldn’t bring themselves to take the decisive option and join their conservative colleagues to resolve the issue and voted with the three leftist, “living-Constitution” justices who favor open borders and have little allegiance to original intent.

Roberts and Coney ignored other valid arguments and centered their case on a controversial interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment and a claim that the nation’s founders adopted British common law basing citizenship on the “soil,” jus soli, the place where a child was born. Some founders agreed, some didn’t, but virtually all rejected the British form of government which led to the Revolutionary War. The majority ruling leaned on the 1898 case of Wong Kim Ark in which the court asserted U.S. citizenship for a man born to Chinese resident aliens in the U.S. who were lawfully here but not U.S citizens and were subjects of the Emperor of China.

So, the Wong ruling shouldn’t pertain to the issue of citizenship for children of illegal aliens.

Four of the six conservative justices, Alito, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch and Thomas, dissented. They believe citizenship is based on the “blood,” jus sanguinis, the nationality, roots and creed of a child’s parent, which is the dominant global rule for determining nationality at birth. Clarence Thomas’s 91-page dissent argued that some jurists have historically misapplied the Fourteenth Amendment which was specifically designed to secure equal rights for freed blacks after the Civil War.

Thomas declared, “The Court has repurposed the Fourteenth Amendment to protect its own set of preferred rights that the Reconstruction Congress never contemplated and that cannot find support in its text. Today, the Court does so again by recognizing a constitutional right to citizenship for the children of all foreign birth tourists and illegal aliens.”

Its “Citizenship Clause” reads: “All persons naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and the state wherein they reside.” As it applies to foreigners that key phrase, “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” doesn’t just mean subject to our laws. The framers of the amendment intended that allegiance to the U.S. be exclusive and to no other country. Foreign tourists legally or illegally in the U.S. are subject to our laws but not our political jurisdiction. They owe no allegiance to the U.S. and their children born here should have no automatic right to American citizenship.

The same Congress that crafted the Fourteenth Amendment in 1866 also passed a civil rights law in 1868 restricting American citizenship to those born here and “not subject to any foreign power.” In that law, Rep. John Bingham of Ohio (who also authored the Fourteenth Amendment) confirmed that “Every human being born within the jurisdiction of the United States of parents not owing allegiance to any foreign sovereignty is, in the language of your Constitution itself, a natural born citizen.” That right was not granted to foreign visitors legally or illegally present in our country.

Unlike the millions of foreigners who have entered our country illegally in recent years, unlawfully overstayed their visas, or failed to show up for their mandated asylum hearing, the flood of immigrants who came to these shores during our nation’s founding weren’t here illegally. For today’s foreigners, U.S. citizenship is a privilege that may be earned but is not a right. This latest SCOTUS ruling was wrong again but may not be the last word.

In his dissent, Justice Kavanaugh wrote that Congress has the latitude to add new exceptions that respond to modern problems like illegal immigration. We’ll see.

Longtime KOA radio talk host and columnist for the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News Mike Rosen now writes for Complete Colorado.

Why is it that Victor Marx is going to become a superb governor? Because he’s the self-proclaimed world’s fastest at disarming someone holding a gun to his head. Seriously, watch the videos. It’s pretty impressive.

How could I not vote for him?

Think that’s ridiculous? During negotiations over the Colorado River Compact, things will get heated. A governor who can snatch a pistol away with his bare hands might just save Colorado’s water supply.

If Attorney General Phil Weiser could disarm an armed attacker just a little faster, he’d probably get my vote instead. I’m a single-issue voter.

You may value other qualifications. You might be looking for a governor who “may” have killed people, or launched missile attacks, or led some 150 successful paramilitary rescues of women and children.

Agreed, these are all needed skills to be a successful governor, but snatching guns with your hands is definitely the most important.

Sadly, I have to admit there is the slightest possibility Victor Marx won’t become Colorado’s next governor, because of, um, voter fraud.

So, after the stolen election what will Colorado look like a year from now?

Pretty ugly.

The national media is focused on the anti-Semitic socialist who won the Democratic primary to replace Diana DeGette. More important to Colorado’s future, though, is what happened in the legislative primaries.

Several Democratic lawmakers lost to candidates even further to the left. Even if Democrats don’t gain a single legislative seat this fall, the legislature itself is going to become more progressive.

Given the anti-president environment that usually accompanies a midterm election, and the hefty anti-Trump hate in Colorado, don’t be surprised if Democrats expand their legislative seats to a veto-proof majority.

We’ll likely have a progressive academic as governor paired with the most left-leaning legislature in Colorado history.

And you’ll find yourself casually browsing real estate listings in Texas.

The first target will almost certainly be the Labor Peace Act.

For nearly 80 years, it has been Colorado’s uneasy compromise between organized labor and employers. It has prevented Colorado from becoming either a Right-to-Work state, as business groups prefer, or a forced-union-dues state, as many unions would like.

Twice in the past two years Gov. Jared Polis vetoed legislation that would have dismantled that compromise. Phil Weiser almost certainly signs it.

Then comes technology.

Several of Polis’ most controversial vetoes involved legislation that many in Colorado’s growing tech sector warned would make the state a hostile place to innovate.

One bill restricted companies from using pricing algorithms to recommend prices for products and services. Another prohibited software and data companies from recommending rental rates to landlords.

Whether you agree with those policies isn’t really the point. Companies deciding where to invest will increasingly view Colorado as a state eager to regulate first and compete later.

Expect more regulation elsewhere as well.

Rideshare companies will likely face additional reporting and operational mandates, which usually means higher costs that eventually find their way into your Uber receipt.

Social media companies could be required to provide more information to government regulators while facing new restrictions on content moderation.

Along with high energy prices and intermittent power, the dream of Colorado being a tech hub will dwindle.

Government itself may become even less transparent. Polis vetoed legislation that would have made Colorado’s open-records process slower, more expensive and more opaque. Under a new administration, that bill could easily become law.

Gun owners should also brace themselves.

During his eight years in office, Polis repeatedly insisted he opposed an outright ban on so-called assault weapons. He signed enough gun-control legislation to make Colorado the most gun-regulated state in the nation, but he drew the line there. No ban on “assault weapons” (guns that function the same as every other gun, but look meaner).

Gov. Weiser will gleefully sign the ban.

No one has ever confused Jared Polis with Barry Goldwater.

But after a year of a Weiser administration working alongside an even more progressive legislature, Colorado working families, business owners and gun owners may discover something they never imagined possible. We’ll miss the days when Polis was governor.

By this time next year those of us who have been watching the regulatory elite turn Colorado into the lethargic, unaffordable, overpriced state it is might regret Victor Marx isn’t performing exorcisms in the governor’s mansion.

Jon Caldara is president of Independence Institute, a free market think tank in Denver.

Happy 250th Birthday, America! You look fabulous. As all the cool countries are saying, “250 is the new 230.”

The Declaration of Independence wasn’t merely an announcement of war against a tyrant. It was the most revolutionary political document ever written.

The Declaration was a landmark in human development, perhaps the landmark of all human history.

For the first time government was no longer affirmed sovereign. The individual was.

That simple idea changed the world.

You rule yourself. Your life belongs to you. Your liberty belongs to you. Your happiness is yours to pursue as you define it. Your property belongs to you.

Government exists not to rule over you, but to secure your rights, to protect you from, well, government.

The part of the Declaration rarely quoted during patriotic speeches isn’t the soaring language about liberty. It’s Jefferson’s long list of grievances against King George, the “causes which impel them to the separation.”

Those grievances are worth study. Because they’re back.

Reading them today, I can’t help wondering what our Founders would think of our government today, Colorado’s in particular.

Would they find today’s overlords less oppressive? I doubt it.

Jefferson wrote of the king, “He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.”

Colorado lawmakers and governor just dissolved two-thirds of the elected RTD Board of Directors, replacing them with hand-picked lackeys.

They dissolved a Representative House. The representatives of the people can be troublesome, might be an obstacle to their plans of statewide trolleys. Best to install yes-men.

Jefferson complained the king had “erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.”

New offices since Polis became guv alone include the Energy and Carbon Management Commission — created just after voters shot down restriction on oil and gas and on a mission to end drilling (as you might notice in your energy bills). There’s also the Behavioral Health Administration, the Department of Early Childhood, the Prescription Drug Affordability Board, the Office of Gun Violence Prevention and the Just Transition Office.

I could fill the page with new offices.

In the last decade alone, the state has added more than 11,500 more employees, growing 21%.

Swarms of Officers? Indeed.

To “eat out our substance” in the same period the state needed to hire 28% more tax collectors at the Department of Revenue and 25% more form-checkers at the Department of Regulations. You will comply.

Jefferson also listed the top grievance: “For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent.”

Really? Do I need to spell this one out?

In Colorado, consent is spelled T-A-B-O-R.

Today, lawmakers simply rename taxes as “fees” so they can avoid consent.

To collect those “fees,” they’ve created bureaucracies with names that sound like they were generated by George Orwell’s artificial intelligence:

Clean Screen Authority. Capitol Parking Authority. Statewide Tolling Authority. Statewide Transportation Enterprise, Statewide Bridge and Tunnel Enterprise.

Then there’s the Healthcare Affordability and Sustainability Enterprise to collect hospital bed taxes “fees.” How about the Clean Transit Enterprise? Or the Community Access Enterprise? Lest we forget the Nonattainment Area Pollution Mitigation Enterprise, to tax every delivery you get and raise your gas tax.

If it sounds confusing enough, maybe you won’t notice it’s taking your money without permission.

By 2023, these fees extract $23 billion a year from Coloradans without voter approval.

Since TABOR became law, state government has collected well more than a quarter-trillion dollars outside its voter-approved tax structure.

Think about that.

Without your consent, government has taken nearly $42,000 for every man, woman and child in Colorado.

For a family of four, that’s almost $170,000. Two-hundred-fifty years ago, taxation without consent like this prompted Americans to dump tea into Boston Harbor and take to arms.

Jefferson wrote of the king, “He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.”

Colorado has well more than 5,000 governments and special districts.

There is physically no way a citizen could keep up with the legislature, school boards, city councils, county commissions, water districts, transit districts, and the like. Each have their own taxing and regulatory powers to which you must comply.

Hell, the wait at the DMV has fatigued us enough.

What would Jefferson write for a modern Colorado Declaration of Independence?

Jon Caldara is president of Independence Institute, a free market think tank in Denver.

On June 23, 2026, the federal U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas sentenced eight violent protestors convicted of assaulting the Prairieland Detention Center, an ICE facility in Alvarado, Texas, in an anti-Independence Day attack on July 4, 2025. Their stiff punishments rangedfrom 30 to 70 years in prison for rioting and providing material support to terrorists, among other charges. An exception was made for Benjamin Song, the group’s leader, who got a total of 100 years with an additional conviction piled on for attempted murder.

Texas is a Republican red state that isn’t soft on these kinds of criminals. A court in Minnesota, California, Seattle, Oregon, Illinois, New York or other Democrat-controlled blue states might have let them off with community service or even found them not guilty. Don’t be surprised if some left-wing legal organization pays for legal fees to appeal the verdict and the sentencing all the way to SCOTUS. Several other protestors were scheduled to be sentenced on July 1.

Prosecutors said the protestors vandalized vehicles, launched fireworks at the ICE facility, wounded an Alvarado police officer with a firearm and shot at unarmed corrections officers. The thugs were identified as a cell of radical ANTIFA left-wing anarchists who claim to be anti-fascist although they resort to standard fascist tactics in their violent protests.

The defense presented by lawyers who represented this bunch was preposterous. As was expected, none of the defendants took to the stand to testify at the trial. Meagan Morris’s attorney, D. Miles Brisette, claimed Meagan went to Alvarado that night expecting a peaceful demonstration and “felt deceived by what unfolded.” Likewise, Zachary Evetts was portrayed by his attorney, Patrick McLain, as a pacifist who also expected a peaceful protest claiming the fireworks were only intended to gain the attention of the (illegal alien) detainees so that they could hear the protestors’ (screamed) words of support. Apparently, this was the collective script of the group’s defense who should be treated like misguided juvies deserving nothing harsher than being grounded for a week or, at worst, sent to a reform school. This innocent-lambs defense is especially incredulous when the perps are ANTIFA thugs who proudly love to bust heads. A department of Homeland Security spokeswoman applauded the stiff sentences as “a win for the rule of law.”

Given its customary liberal bias, the spin in an Associated Press story was sympathetic to the protestors, including quotes from Phillip Hayes, the attorney representing the aforementioned Benjamin Song who was found guilty of attempted murder. Hayes described the protestors as just “a bunch of kids and young adults who really have a big heart and really wanted their voice to be heard. It was never intended that anybody get hurt. It was never intended that any shots would be fired.”

Really? So, why did they bring guns? Their real intent was clearly to obstruct the DHS and ICE from doing their jobs which is also the intent of violent mobs that interfere with ICE officers all over the country, especially in Minnesota, under the pretense of social justice and compassion for their wonderful neighbors who just happen to be illegally present in the United States. Baloney! The leaders of this movement and its paid-provocateurs by financiers like George Soros is to “resist” the governance of the Trump administration and advance the open borders and progressive Democrat socialist agenda.

Civil violence is right out of the Marxist handbook of permanent revolution.

The DFW (for Dallas-Fort Worth) Support Committee, providing financial support for the legal defense of the protestors, said the defendants were wrongly being “thrown away for the rest of their lives.” It added, “The egregious sentencing is to send a message to anyone with the same beliefs.” No. These sentences weren’t punishment for the “beliefs” of these criminals. It was for their unlawful “behavior.” And I certainly hope this sends a message discouraging violent criminal action by radical activists and the useful idiots who are duped into following them. The message: “If you commit a crime, you’ll do the time.”

I greatly doubt that any of these criminals will spend the rest of their lives in prison. It’s more than likely that their stiff sentences will be reduced during the appeals process, especially if they come in front of liberal judges. Failing that, the next Democrat in the White House, maybe President AOC, will commute their terms or, even worse, pardon them and throw in the Presidential Medal of Freedom as a bonus.

Longtime KOA radio talk host and columnist for the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News Mike Rosen now writes for Complete Colorado.