Freedom Unaffiliated

By: Jon Caldara

Politics is the art of addition, not subtraction.

The job of electing someone is all about getting people who aren’t all that crazy for you to vote for you.

Proving to voters you despise them oddly doesn’t win them over.

Just like government cannot tax a people into prosperity, a political party cannot divide and alienate its way to victory.

So, it is with great curiosity I watch the communications from the Colorado Republican Party. Instead of highlighting what makes them a better choice than Democrats, they condemn Republicans who don’t pass their purity test.

The Colorado Republican Party will be a lost cause for the next six to eight years as it continues to self-deteriorate. We can still move forward with great limited government, freedom-oriented policy reforms. It just won’t be the party carrying them.

For the next several election cycles, the Republican Party will be a “regional party.” That is, Republican state reps and senators will still be elected from strongly conservative, mostly rural districts.

But when running in urban and most suburban areas, a Colorado legislative candidate with an “R” behind their name may as well have a swastika there instead, especially as the party is seen as Trump-crazed and ferociously anti-abortion.

Colorado might become one of the first post-partisan states. That is, we’re going to see business-friendly, anti-tax, but not moralistic, unaffiliated candidates running for office and winning in suburban districts.

By b

uilding a coalition with the minority Republicans in the legislature, these unaffiliateds could help undo some of the economic damage perpetrated by the Capitol’s left-wing occupants.

The Colorado Republican Party is doing its very best to make this scenario a reality by driving voters out of their party and into the unaffiliated camp.

Reading their communications, it’s clear their goal is not to tempt voters in, but to drive voters out with their declared jihad on the ideologically impure or not sufficiently Trump-worshipping.

Even the organization I run, Independence Institute, which for nearly 40 years has served as Colorado’s guiding star for limited government, and personal and economic freedom, was just disdained by the Colorado GOP.

At issue is a lawsuit the GOP is funding under the banner of protecting our Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR), which we didn’t financially support.

In fact, the suit has nothing to do with TABOR. It has everything to do with state Rep. Scott Bottoms demanding a bill in the special session be read out loud. The bill was the hideous, wealth-transferring, earned-income credit.

Bottoms and the GOP have a fair point, and their legal brief is well reasoned. But Independence Institute has no standing in this procedural question. So, when asked to put our donors’ money behind it, I politely declined.

Thus, we earned a spot along with many other libertarian- and conservative-leaning activists, politicians and organizations drawing their ire.

The state GOP advertises a “RINO (Republicans in name only) watch” site devoted to the art of subtraction, listing those (and by default those who support them) no longer worthy to be Republicans. Luminaries include Ken Buck, Dick Wadhams, that rampant liberal Barb Kirkmeyer, Weld County Commissioner Scott James and state Sen. Larry Liston.

Former state party chair Kristi Burton Brown has been targeted in many email blasts for alleged financial impropriety. She sits on their “hall of shame” of “RINOS”.

Yep. She’s quite a RINO. Before becoming GOP chair, this very Christian lady led the fights for abortion limitations, including the failed citizen’s initiative to ban late-term abortions.

On Christmas, the party blasted a Bible-versed email proclaiming salvation can only happen through Jesus, with no regard to other faiths or no faith.

Message: If you’re not Christian, you’re not one of us.

And now the state GOP, whose job is to run impartial primaries, is looking to go against past bylaws, tradition and ethics to endorse Donald Trump before the Colorado presidential primary.

What a middle finger to voters who support other Republican presidential candidates, you know, those voters the GOP will need later in the general election.

In his classic “7 Habits” book, Stephen Covey said to start with the end in mind.

For the state GOP, the end is to purge the impure from the party, French Revolution style.

Why Coloradans hate the plastic shopping bag ban

It’s not the banning of plastic bags that pisses us off. It’s the intolerance and abuse of power behind it.

Soon plastic shopping bags will be forbidden in Colorado. In the grand scheme of things, it’s not the worst inconvenience or even most expensive headache our state government has thrown at us.

I mean, just bring a reusable bag to the supermarket — no biggie.

So why does it anger us so? Because we can feel it in our bones. Instinctively we understand this is a senseless exhibition of raw, unbridled power by an elite who smugly know how others should live.

There are plenty of big, complex issues for us to dissect from different angles — think abortion, monetary policy, Ukraine and the Middle East. Banning plastic bags by contrast is small enough for us to get our hands and minds around.

And we’re not nearly as angry about the bother of not having the bags as we are about that nagging feeling in the back of our heads, that little voice that says if they can force us to do something this stupid and meaningless, what isn’t off limits?

Let’s again get the argument that this is somehow useful policy out of the way.

Banning plastic bags does absolutely nothing to protect Colorado’s environment. In fact, it’s marginally more destructive since people will be forced to buy truly single-use bags to clean up after their dogs and line their trash cans.

I remember the government school, in Soviet re-education camp style, teaching my kid to sing the “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” song. Is there a better example of “reuse” then plastic grocery bags? We use them to carry other stuff, pick up dog poop and line trash bags, among a host of other uses.

The brand-new strictly single-use bags we’ll have to buy now for those functions are not made from natural gas like shopping bags. They’re made from petroleum and will be around a lot longer.

Congratulations, environmentalists. You won a Pyrrhic victory.

And, likewise, it won’t save ocean life. Enviros love to talk about a plastic straw found in the nose of a sea turtle — guaranteed it didn’t come from landlocked Colorado. Even if it got into the water supply, the many water treatment facilities it would have to get through before hitting the ocean would stop it.

Reduce litter? Perhaps on the margin. So ban bottles, beer cans and gum wrappers, too. Wouldn’t it be better to enforce the litter laws? Cleaning the homeless off our streets would do 1,000 times more to get litter out of our communities.

So why are they forcing us to live with this inconvenience that has absolutely, positively, without a doubt no environmental benefit? I see two possible explanations.

The first is the most effective tactic the left employs: boiling the frog slowly. Like compound interest, the power of small incremental despotic change over time is unstoppable.

As people acclimate to a restriction, it becomes the new baseline. The command-and-control crowd uses the “new normal” ratchet to build tolerance of their authoritarianism in the hearts and minds of those they rule.

A government that takes away plastic bags today will take away gas stoves tomorrow, and gasoline powered cars soon after.

But it’s the other explanation that is more distressing. They do this just because they can.

The left is smitten with virtue signaling and just can’t resist forcing you to do their signaling, too. All it takes is a wave of their dictatorial hand.

So, instead of convincing us to join them in their lifestyle choices, they coerce us through the power of law. It takes only 33 representatives, 18 senators and our “libertarian” governor to force their lifestyle on us.

It is pure arrogance. It is an exercise in raw dictatorial power and intolerance. And it’s an addiction our leaders couldn’t shake even if they did recognize it.

It’s not the bad, even comical public policy that quietly terrifies us.

Though we don’t verbalize it, it hits us in our hearts.

Though “small,” we know this is a violation of all the principles we hold dear — our liberty, our pursuit of happiness, our right to be autonomous creatures in a free society.

On some level we know, they are just beating us down.

Greed of Colorado’s elected elite stops local tax relief.

While the world is consumed with the latest bit of activism from the Colorado Supreme Court regarding Donald Trump, the media oxygen has been squeezed away from another important ruling, one that’s going to hit property owners. 

The Colorado State Board of Equalization has decided counties cannot provide property tax relief by lowering property values.

Thanks to the weird way Colorado funds education, the State Board of Equalization has a fundamental conflict of interest, which will always injure taxpayers.

Board of Equalization, you ask? Yep, these five people are the ultimate arbiters of property valuation disputes.

You think the county assessor overvalued your home, your final appeal goes in front of these guys. And maybe they’ll treat you better than they treated the taxpayers of Douglas County.

The Douglas County commissioners voted to lower property values in their domain by a mere 4% to help alleviate the sticker shock that’s coming when their constituents get their next tax bills, saving homeowners about $230.

Property owners statewide are about to see the largest increase in their lives. Any property tax relief, like the symbolic silliness from the last special session, or what Douglas County wants to do here, only lowers the amount of a gargantuan increase.

The Colorado Board of Equalization slammed the door on Douglas County’s modest tax respite. To his credit, Gov. Jared Polis denounced the board’s decision!

What a shame Gov. Polis couldn’t appoint a majority of members to this board.

Oh, wait a second. He did.

Yet another fine example of how Polis plays Pontius Pilate by washing his hands of his own bad decisions. He has the power to influence, if not demand, and replace his appointees to this board.

When will Coloradans learn Polis can never be judged by his words but only by his actions?

So, why would the State Board of Equalization deny a county from lowering assessments? Quite simply, they have a massive conflict of interest between their members and their mission.

The board is comprised of five people, three chosen by the governor and one each chosen by the president of the Senate and the speaker of the House.

Lowering Douglas County assessed property values by 4% results in all of the local districts that rely on property taxes in the county receiving a little less of a massive tax increase. Except, not Douglas School District. Anything they don’t get from local taxpayers gets “backfilled” by the state.

And there’s the rub.

In their meeting denying Douglas County their request to reduce assessed property values, Board of Equalization member state Sen. Chris Hansen was completely honest. If he did his “Board of Equalization” role correctly and approved the change, he’d have a little less money to spend when he’s playing his “state senator” role.

So, here’s the deal:

Property values in Douglas County are up about 50%. That means the Douglas County school district is going to get about $100 million more from local taxpayers. And that means the state of Colorado won’t have to backfill $100 million to the school district.

That’s a $100 million windfall for Gov. Polis, Sen. Hansen and their friends at the Capitol to play with.

By Douglas County commissioners lowering property valuations by a mere 4%, it means instead of $100 million of property tax increases going to the school district, it would be about $92 million.

Sen. Hansen in a moment of embarrassing candor made it clear: Why have a $92 million winning lottery ticket when he could keep all the money and have a $100 million ticket?

What the Douglas County commissioners wanted wouldn’t cost the state anything.

It only lowers the amount of their eye-popping windfall by the state having to backfill the school district $8 million.

People use the word “greed,” mostly to insult people in the private sector. If this isn’t the ugliest type of greed, I don’t know what is.

If county commissioners don’t have the right to adjust assessed property values, the only chance for property tax relief comes from the local districts themselves. Local districts that rely on property tax revenue can, of course, reduce the mill levy themselves as a handful already have. But overwhelmingly most won’t.

If the media and chattering classes weren’t so captivated by the Trump drama, they might be demanding answers from Polis and the Board of Equalization about their mischief.

December 21, 2023 By Jon Caldara

The first mention of vampires in English literature appeared in 1801 in an epic poem, “Tabitha the Destroyer,” written by Robert Southey.

The earliest known plan for a railroad in the USA was drawn up in Pennsylvania, also in the early 1800s.

Coincidence that trains and vampires started at about the same time? Since then, the two phenomena have merged into one cult.

No matter how many times we think we’ve killed the lunacy of rail in Colorado, the central-planning undead still push their 1800s technologies on understandably frustrated commuters as they suck the blood out of naive taxpayers.

The undead just created another government taxing district, the Front Range Passenger Rail District, with a pipe dream of a Choo- Choo from Pueblo to Fort Collins.

The feds just awarded them a tiny $500,000 grant. But that’s enough to get them a little pregnant. Another foolish rail project is being birthed in Colorado.

I’ve seen this too many times to count. This seed money will be used to beg, borrow, and steal more seed money from our state, counties and cities. This district will soon grow big enough to ask for a tax increase for yet another fiasco.

So just how stupid are we?

In the early ‘70s, the Regional Transportation District, RTD, got voter approval for a half penny on a dollar sales tax. The promise was by 1980 they’d fully build 128 miles of fixed guideway rail, and the tax would to be cut in half, used only for 

operations.

You might have noticed that not only was that promise not kept, it wasn’t even started. However, the tax stayed.

In the grand tradition of “why charge once when you can charge taxpayers twice,” RTD conned voters again in 2004 to raise the sales tax to a full penny a dollar for their $4 billion Fastracks scheme.

Funny thing though, the Fastracks price tag nearly doubled to well over $7.5 billion. And while the whole system was promised to be completed by 2017, just like their early 1970s broken promise the longest rail line, from Denver to Longmont, hasn’t even been started. Maybe never will be.

While love is not a zero-sum game, governmental budgets are. Dollars spent on trolley cars squeeze out dollars spent on improving roads.

And thus our roads suck and traffic is horrendous. We have taken our taxing capacity meant to construct modern and smart roadways, used by all of us, to build Choo- Choo trains used by relatively few.

U.S. Census data shows that only 4% of Denver metro commuters use transit, including rail and buses.

I challenge you to stare at the tracks when there is no train going by, for that’s the best way to understand the wasted capacity.

While you’re stuck in your car in an I-25 traffic jam, just feet away is right-of-way used for tracks going unutilized. It’s like being stuck next to a completely empty car lane, but you are forbidden to drive on it.

Governments and central planners love rail because it guarantees a monopoly. Competitors like private bus companies, carpoolers, Ubers, and your car can’t ride on their tracks.

By contrast, bus/high occupancy vehicle lanes give a high-speed advantage not only to government transit, but to anyone who wants to get out of the traffic jam.

The U.S. 36 from Boulder to Denver bus route is arguably the best rapid transit run in the country. RTD buses use the bus/toll lane to rocket around traffic. But there’d still be a ton of unused capacity on those lanes if only RTD buses used them. So, all that excess is open for anyone who wants to get out of the traffic jam.

You can’t do that with rail tracks.

And in a world of smart transportation and driverless cars, why in the world would we build a system that accommodates only a single government conveyance, 1800s style?

The Front Range Passenger Rail District believes their desire named streetcar will cost between $6 and 12 billion. That means closer to $24 billion in real life, just look at California’s rail monstrosity for confirmation.

At the same time CDOT says it needs only $9 billion for its road needs in Colorado, you know, the roads 100% use, but can’t find the cash.

Time to kill the undead so the living can have transportation that works.

Yes, it was an insurrection. Let’s call it what it was — an insurrection designed to prevent duly elected lawmakers from moving forward with the people’s will.

Thousands stormed the Capitol. Doors were ripped from hinges. Law enforcement was overwhelmed. Despite the optics of spontaneousness, the event was planned well in advance.

And though, at the end of all the madness, elected officials completed the job for which they gathered, those who stormed the Capitol were hellbent on stopping them via raw intimidation, and nearly succeeded. It was appalling, frightening and a danger to democracy.

I am of course talking about what happened in late February of 2011 in Madison, Wis., as tens and tens of thousands of organized protesters captured the state Capitol in a prearranged attempt to stop a proposed law that would limit public union dominance.

It happened nine years before the Jan. 6, 2021, events at the U.S. Capitol, yet no one has described it as an insurrection. How is taking over one Capitol for a matter of hours an insurrection, yet taking over another for days somehow isn’t?

This question comes into focus as the Colorado Supreme Court mulls the fate of a lawsuit to prevent former President Donald Trump access to the state ballot by employing the 14th Amendment.

If Trump is disqualified from running for public office for taking part in an insurrection, then what of the thousands who took part in the Wisconsin occupation? Shouldn’t they also be banned from public office?

They created a system of support around the Madison insurrection that was remarkably intertwined and coordinated.

Faculty members from the University of Wisconsin’s School of Medicine put up a “medical” station to provide falsified sick notes for public employees to abandon their jobs without consequence. That unethical and illegal action shut down school districts around the state as teachers got paid to intimidate legislators instead of teaching children.

Live ammunition was found on the grounds outside the Wisconsin State Capitol. Lawmakers fled the state in hopes of stopping the vote due to a lack of a quorum.

Protesters took control of public spaces at the Capitol, put up an “information center,” created a sleeping area, brought in food supplies and erected medical aid stations.

This was a huge operation requiring the vast coordination and support of many people in and out of public office. All of whom still seem able to run for public office today.

But Trump can’t?

The Colorado Supreme Court justices struggled with the definition of “insurrection.”

They pointed questions at Trump’s campaign attorney Scott Gessler. Their questions seemed to flip the notion of innocent-until-proven-guilty on its head as they demanded Gessler tell them why Jan. 6, 2021 was not an insurrection.

His response was on target. He basically said people can’t describe an insurrection but claim to know it after they’ve seen it. That’s many people’s weak definition of pornography.

Is that how our system of law should work?

One justice asked, “Why isn’t it enough that a violent mob breached the Capitol when Congress was performing a core constitutional function? In some ways that seems like a poster child for insurrection.”

By that reasoning the 2011 mob in Wisconsin was a poster-child and absolutely an insurrection.

But the “I don’t know what the definition is, but I know when I see it” logic came through loud and clear when another justice opined, “One of the things we need to figure out is whether what happened on January 6th constituted an insurrection. We don’t need to come up with a definition for all times and all circumstances.”

So, it looks like the rule of law is, well, whatever they want it to be at any time.

There is something terrifying about Supreme Court justices being so blatant about their power to bend laws to fit their views.

Jefferson Davis led armies against the United States government during the civil war. I’m comfortable calling him an insurrectionist.

Trump’s reckless and narcissistic behavior on Jan. 6, 2021 isn’t even close. And I say this as someone who found his actions and inactions reprehensible, sickening and unforgivable.

But if the courts decide it was insurrection, the door opens for them to bar any number of people from running for office, like those in Wisconsin for example.

Isn’t that a threat to democracy?

Kent Thiry has an idea for a new voting option, and he’s halfway right.

Colorado has the possibility to become the nation’s first post-partisan state.

As the number of unaffiliated voters swell and registered Republicans and Democrats shrink to all-time lows, we see a growing movement of people who have just had it with both parties. And why not? The extremes of both parties are becoming more distasteful by the day. 

This doesn’t mean there won’t still be Republicans and Democrats. It means there will be openings for unaffiliated and third-party candidates to win seats usually left only for the two major parties.

Look no further than an unaffiliated mayor of Colorado Springs as an example of what may come.

A growing number of people in the state are looking for a new voting option. Multimillionaire Kent Thiry is offering one. He’s halfway there.

He’s backing a citizen’s initiative that would replace our party-driven primaries completely with what’s known as a “jungle” primary and then completely replace our general elections with ranked-choice voting.

I think Colorado is ready for the first part but should and will reject the second part.

Colorado’s primary system is broken. It often results in the extreme of a party making it to the general election. The current evolution of it has given us a legislature full of members of Democratic Socialists of America and their sympathizers out of step with their constituents. 

A jungle primary allows as many people as wish to petition on from all parties, or no party at all, make it to the primary ballot. Thiry’s proposal calls it an “All- Candidate Primary Election.”

Like Denver’s mayor’s race, it is possible to have two Democrats advancing to the general election in very liberal districts, perhaps one hard leftist and one “just” a progressive for the liberal voters to choose from come November — and the opposite in hardcore conservative districts.

Though the extremes of both parties don’t like jungle primaries, the extreme of the party in charge hates

The political reality is likely Thiry is biting off too much for Coloradans to chew.

it more. So don’t expect Colorado’s progressives to be climbing on board the “All- Candidate” primary train. And since the hardcore GOP leadership doesn’t like the semi-open primaries we have now, they’ll likely hate this too.

The part of Thiry’s proposal that is baffling is after the jungle primary instead of the top two candidates going forward to the general election, the top four candidates go forward for a ranked-choice voting general election. Why? 

Ranked-choice voting is a cumbersome, confusing, klutzy and chaotic voting system that was tried in many large municipalities in the 1920s before being tossed in all of them.

Recently under RCV in Oakland, California, a school board election was found to be improperly counted after the candidate who came in third place was found to actually have won the race.

The New York City mayor’s race took weeks to decipher a winner. And in Alaska, with an overwhelming Republican voter registration, a Democrat became their United States representative in Congress.

Most recently in Colorado, Boulder elected its mayor via ranked-choice voting with many shouting foul.

Also known as “instant-runoff voting,” RCV disenfranchises voters as after every round of counting one candidate is dropped from the race. If you voted for only one of four candidates and the candidate you chose was dropped, well your vote wasn’t counted. 

Furthermore, the dynamics change in an election depending which candidates drop out. Think of how any presidential race changes when a primary candidate drops out. People’s preferences change as the field narrows down.

That is, given these four candidates I would prefer them in this order, but given only these three candidates I might prefer them in a different order. Sadly, I don’t have a chance to go and re-vote after one candidate has been dropped from the race in RCV. 

It also requires a voter to know about all four candidates in detail rather than just two. A general election ballot of four candidates for every office instead of two doubles the research any good citizen must do to inform herself, making RCV a time-gobbler, not -saver, in the general.

The political reality is likely Thiry is biting off too much for Coloradans to chew.

He’d have more luck reforming the primary system first by making that a fully open jungle primary, and then at a later time go for his white whale of ranked-choice voting.

The rumors of complete embarrassment and behind-closed-doors dysfunction in the Colorado Democratic Party are already legendary. But now the dysfunction is spilling out for all to see.

Prop. HH failed, and there doesn’t seem to be any denial of the results.

The deceptive measure to supposedly provide property tax relief, Proposition HH, failed in Colorado, and the governor was forced to call a special session to actually handle the out of control property taxes.

Congressman Ken Buck recently announced he will not be running for re-election in CO-04. Jon Caldara wonders aloud what Buck's next chapter will hold.