As you sit for hours road-raging all over the Front Range and I-70 corridor this week, think of the three total-tea-party-poopers in the Colorado Senate who voted Tuesday to keep the traffic jammed.
Say it with me: Thanks, state senators Jack Tate, Tim Neville and Owen Hill for prohibiting all Colorado voters from having a say in fixing Colorado’s abysmal roads and traffic gridlock.
Thank you very much.
These three lawmakers stood in the way of a bipartisan plan to allow voters to decide if they want to raise the state sales tax by about a half-a-penny on each dollar’s purchase to leverage enough money to make a good dent in Colorado’s mushrooming transportation needs.
Top Republicans and Democrats in the Legislature compromised last month and crafted House Bill 1242, which would reduce license plate fees in exchange for asking voters for the small sales-tax hike. That could be parlayed into about $3.5 billion for desperately needed road dollars.
Colorado voters could weigh the pros and cons, see where the money would be spent and then decide in November whether to approve the request.
But a handful of tea-party Republicans had a melt-down over the idea, saying that Colorado is awash with money, and there’s already plenty of it to pay for road expansion and repairs without a tax hike.
Alternate facts.
If you don’t know what these tea-party parasites are, let me remind you. These are the Obama birthers in the Republican Party. These are the anti-abortion and religious extremists of the Republican Party. These are the carpet-bagging tax-protesters who come to Colorado to worship the so-called Taxpayer Bill of Rights. TABOR is a manifesto inflicted on unsuspecting Coloradans by another carpet-bagging, tin-foil-hat-clad tax-a-saurus, the infamous Douglas Bruce. He’s the Southern California transplant who thunk up the 1992 tax-protesting scheme. It’s so awesome that after about 25 attempts to make it spread into other states, not one has taken the bait. Zilch. Zip. Goose egg. Zero other states have wanted to inflict TABOR on themselves. Nada. Not even Texas.
So this triad of taxaphobia on the state Senate Finance Committee sacrificed your chance to vote this November on better roads — as homage to Bruce. He’s the guy who got himself appointed as a state legislator in 2008 and kicked a newspaper photographer on his first day at the Capitol. He remains the first and only legislator censured by his peers, one time for calling Mexican guest workers “illiterate peasants.” He went on to live in even greater infamy by spending time in jail, just last year, for money laundering, tax fraud and bribery of a public official.
What a guy to envy and emulate, senators Neville, Tate and Hill. Your constituents must be so very proud of your moment in the sun on Tuesday.
Rather than kill HB 1242, they could easily have said they would later vote “no” on the floor and passed it to the full Senate, allowing each state senator a voice and a vote. By many accounts, it would likely have passed. And as voters found out how little the sales-tax hike was and how big the transportation rewards would be, it probably would have been approved.
So why hold the entire entire gridlocked state hostage?
Medicaid. It’s all about Medicaid. These three state lawmakers, who come from well-heeled districts, are tired of using taxpayer money to pay for health care for Colorado’s damned poor people.
You see, every reasonable Republican and Democrat will tell you that every dime of state money is already spoken for. Ask them. And while Colorado has indeed continued to collect and spend more money, it’s because it comes chiefly from increased revenues from an increase in population and parallels an increase in expenditures needed to serve them.
We certainly could pave more roads by shifting money from schools or colleges or state patrol or testing for West Nile virus or other things state lawmakers agree are critical.
But the one thing that this small, bullying arm of the GOP agree they can do without is Medicaid, state spending for health care for poor people, which don’t much live in their districts.
So lets say the Cruella Fairy appeared suddenly and granted their wish, cutting Medicaid by 75 percent and we direct that money to state roads.
Poof!
That money is actually tied to bigger federal dollars. When we quit spending, we lose it all. Guess who really uses a lot of Medicaid money in Colorado? Rural Republican counties. And guess what happens when that Medicaid money diminishes? Those rural Republican county hospitals close their doors, three of them almost immediately.
So these three alternate fictitioners say that an initiative being cooked up by a Golden libertarian lobbying group is a better idea. That measure, as reported, would ask voters if they want to dedicate more existing tax money to roads.
But we already know the cuts must come from Medicaid, which closes rural hospitals, which is not the problem of these three state senators and their constituents in Parker, Castle Rock, Littleton, Lakewood and Colorado Springs. There are plenty of hospitals there with plenty of paying customers who didn’t make bad life choices that made them not only poor, but sick and poor. Farmers, ranchers and the people who work for them — who needs ‘em? Here’s the truth. Urban consumers will then pay even higher health-care prices when their hospitals dish it out to booted Medicaid recipients for “free.” That’s how we got here.
Sound a lot like Trump’s America? It is.
Will Colorado fall to ruins tomorrow without HB 1242? No. Things will just keep getting increasingly worse until we finally fix it.
It could be that a coalition of courageous state leaders and businesses outside the Capitol gather the signatures needed and spend all that money to get this on the ballot. Too bad, because these three state lawmakers could have made it possible without all the cost and trouble to the Colorado businesses and volunteers that now must step up to the plate.
So send these three senators a note of thanks for opening our eyes to the terror that TABOR continues to inflict on Colorado. Thank them for making us realize that our rural neighbors are Colorado residents, too, and we need to take care of each other. And thank them for making it clear that during the next election, we need to send these taxing tea-party types packing. Let them go ruin someone else’s state.
Follow @EditorDavePerry on Facebook and Twitter or reach him at 303-750-7555 or dperry@aurorasentinel.com