If you’ve been envious of the political spectacle that Republican Congressperson Lauren Boebert has inflicted on Colorado’s Western Slope and the U.S. House of Representatives, you’re gonna love the new show at A-Town’s City Hall.
The new Grand Old Party has grabbed the reins of Aurora’s City Council and by all early accounts, they’re going to show Boebert how the new right gets stuff done Aurora Style.
Gone — long, long, long gone — are the Aurora Republicans of the past. Not on the political stage anymore are the likes of forever-council-person-and-mayor Steve Hogan. He prided himself on leaving the Democratic Party decades ago to pursue a way to guide smaller, less-restrictive, reasonable and effective government. Hogan wouldn’t last 15 minutes among new Republicans in the region, who treat science, math and the law as mere whimsy, something akin to following horoscopes.
Gone are the likes of Barb Clelland, a Republican who was famous for aligning herself with causes, not partisan promises. Gone from the council dais are Republicans like Ingrid Lindemann, an East German immigrant who brought her experience as a public school teacher and her passion for pragmatism to each meeting, leaving her party affiliation at the door.
Even before these new GOP city leaders were sworn into their seats on the dais this week, they began acting as a Republican block, not unlike the hot mess that has become Douglas County.
If you forgot or didn’t know, Douglas County commissioners and other officials there are confident that the pandemic is a political problem, not a medical one, best solved with powerful politics, not medicine.
Team DougCo was infuriated that Tri-County Health Department would have the temerity to follow the scientific consensus — from Colorado, the nation and the planet — and require people to wear masks when indoors as a proven way to slow people from discharging the deadly COVID-19 virus through their blow holes and into yours.
If you think study after study hasn’t proven that mask mandates slow the spread of the coronavirus, turn off your Fox News feed and waltz right into reality.
A few months ago, even more incensed that Tri-County would have the further audacity — and really, folks, you have say that word “awe-DASS-it-ee” with pearls firmly clutched and in your best, throaty, “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” growl — to make children in schools wear masks in an effort to keep children and their families from getting sick and dying.
The nerve.
So they showed us. Douglas County packed up its clown act embedded into the Tri-County Board of Health, and announced they would invent their own health department that follows the GOP, rather than a bunch of pesky, credible doctors and researchers.
Apparently impressed by the wisdom of Douglas County Republicans, new and new-old Aurora City Council Republicans followed their leaders.
Recently, as Tri-County Health joined health departments from Denver, Jefferson County and Boulder in bringing back the indoor mask mandate to keep from destroying regional hospital systems, overwhelmed with sick and dying COVID-19 patients, they hatched a plan.
Republican council members Curtis Gardner, Francoise Bergan, Mike Coffman and now-former member Dave Gruber, joined soon-to-be council members Dustin Zvonek, Steve Sundberg and Danielle Jurinsky to try and strong-arm City Manager Jim Twombly into pulling a Douglas County.
In a letter posted to social media, the GOP caucus said Aurora should abandon the mask mandate because it would not fairly be enforced across the city. A sliver of Aurora lies within the boundaries and grasp of Douglas County, but no businesses that are open to the public. Suddenly, they became the first and only Republicans talking “equity” in the state.
Advised that, ahem, the mask mandate applies only to businesses and not to residents, they switched their words.
Then it became a matter of protecting Aurora businesses from the mad dash by shoppers to get to Douglas County Walmarts, where everyone can shop and infect each other freely as they watch each other scowl.
If you were out and about in Aurora over the Black Friday shopping-palooza, it was pretty clear maskless markdowns were not on the minds of anyone but the A-town R-Team.
If you’re thinking this might have been a fluke and not a testing of the waters of Front Range Boebertism, you missed Monday night.
The council band is back together live and in person at City Hall again, after months of Zoom-meeting isolation, just in time for swearing in the newly elected and re-elected members of council.
Defying the mask mandate they were unable to thwart the week before, the GOP Caucus brought their raised right hands but no masks to the public meeting.
It’s unclear who among these Republicans are vaccinated or boosted, but just a few weeks before, when pressed by reporters during a campaign debate, candidates Sundberg and Jurinsky, both restaurant owners, said that at that point, they were not vaccinated.
The official line from City Hall is that they had no power to impose the mask mandate on these elected officials. That’s a job for Tri-County Health, which issued the mandate.
Officials there say, ummm, yeah, they take complaints and send stern letters about the mask mandate.
Tri-County Health Department “seeks voluntary compliance through education, technical assistance and warning notices,” health department spokesperson Becky O’Guin said in response to a query. “However, the Order may be enforced by any appropriate legal means.”
If you’d like to file a complaint, the form is here.
I can imagine that if I were a city staffer or lawmaker forced into a room with people who think Douglas County is going in the right direction when it comes to this pandemic thing, and they refused to wear a mask, I’d be pretty pissed that my job depended on my pretending to smile at them behind my own mask.
If this is an indication of the same kind of science and politics the A-Town GOP caucus wants to use to solve other serious problems like gun violence, homelessness, mental health, struggling schools, serviceless elder people, immigration and police reform, you can expect plenty of time watching the Lauren Boebert spinoff A-town: Code Red.
Perhaps this was all a lapse of good judgment, or masks and the world of science and rule of law were simply left in the glovebox. Or something.
Given that no one seems to be listening to successful Republican leaders of the past, rest assured everyone else will be listening to the voices of Boebert and those whispering in local ears so we can be prepared.
City council meets in earnest next week, folks. Enjoy the show.
Follow @EditorDavePerry on Twitter and Facebook or reach him at 303-750-7555 or
dperry@SentinelColorado.com
Well, no one can say that you didn’t give them a chance, that you didn’t jump to conclusions based on preconceptions. Clearly you gathered a sufficiency of evidence from performance over a significant amount of time and came to a reasoned conclusion.
They can only be judged by their actions. So far, not so good.
Now more than ever, we need to show support for council members who care about our city and our kids, more than arguing against wearing masks. At-large members represent ALL of us. And if we support Tri-County Board of Health, racial equity, supporting science, getting guns out of the hands of children, finding shelter for our unhoused, etc. etc. etc. then it’s up to us to hold our council members accountable to ALL Aurora residents
Lost in this hysterical diatribe is Perry’s own support for hyper-partisan Democrats on the city council, which led directly to the situation that he’s lamenting. Don’t count on him having the humility or self-awareness to acknowledge it, however.
Would love to know how Dave Perry contributed to any of the problems faced by Council.
Read the OP.
The Republican Party has become a death cult. It is the first political organization I know of that is encouraging people to needlessly risk their lives for political points.
Don’t believe me? Compare the COVID death rates in Trump counties to the counties that went for Biden across the country. These nimrods are literally dying to own the libs.
They have literally lost their minds. And soon, they may literally die for their juvenile obstinacy and selfishness.
“The first political organization… to needlessly risk their lives for political points” …Maybe it is time for you to study the history of freedom and the first continental congress again.
I am quite aware of history. I am aware, for example, of the Supreme Court decision in Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905) where the Court upheld the authority of the state to impose mandatory vaccination.
I am aware of the Continental Congresses, which led to the Articles of Confederation. The Articles were such a disaster that we had to have a Constitutional Convention to give us the Constitution itself, a document that has ruled for over 200 years.
The Constitution is not, despite current Republican doctrine, a suicide pact. It established a strong federal government, which I’m sure you don’t like.
“These nimrods are literally dying to own the libs.”
No Jeffy, they’re doing a personal calculus and deciding what risks to take. That your side is power-mad and hysterical to force people to do what you want them to do is simply one of the factors they’re considering.
Resisting anything you and people like you demand is merely a civic service.
Then you really don’t like the Constitution and the Supreme Court. The Court found no constitutional right to infect one’s neighbors with a potentially fatal disease in Jacobson v. Massachusetts.
That was in 1905, when people actually cared about the health and well-being of their fellows. Now we have a Republican Party whose members tried to overthrow the government last January 6.
And now, fatalities from COVID are on the rise in Trump-voting counties. That’s science. But you do you. Like the ad says, “What would you like on your tombstone?”
Now that Trump is gone, the new progressive playbook is to attempt to somehow tie every Republican to Lauren Boebert. It reeks of desperation.
I don’t recall Perry drawing a similar dotted line from socialists Marcano, Coombs, and Murillo to radicals Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Arianna Pressley, AOC, and Castro-lover Bernie Sanders (though Marcano was the local chair for his presidential run.)
Anyone you disagree with is automatically a “socialist” now, per the republican playbook, even though you have no idea what socialism is and that we cannot have a socialist form of government per our Constitution. That document is just a pesky annoyance in the way of republican politics. You ought to try reading it sometime, just for fun, especially the ENTIRE Second Amendment. And guess what else! Legislative bodies at every level are entitled to have members with whom you disagree. It’s called “democracy,” a concept with which you also disagree, as you people move towards totalitarianism.
It’s easy to identify a socialist when one self-describes as Coombs, Marcano, AOC, Talib all do — all dues-paying members of DSA, “the largest socialist organization in the US” according to their own website.
Murillo’s 100% voting alignment with these far-leftist council and congress members reveals a socialist without the courage to announce it.
If it looks like a duck.
I don’t call them socialists because I disagree with them. I call them that because they are. How hard is that to comprehend?
As to your final thought, of course, legislative bodies are entitled to disagree. That’s an apt description of what this entire article is about.
I am unsure whether you are willfully ignorant or just ignorant. The socialist agenda is not hidden by those who believe it the way.
Washington Socialists mince no words: “It will take future candidates like Sanders – perhaps members of the Squad, perhaps others not yet on the national radar – to lift the Democratic Party into the role of a truly progressive party, and perhaps someday a genuinely socialist one. It also will take hard work by DSA and other organizations on the left to back them up.”
Same as it ever was.
Same as it ever was.
Until we hold our elected officials accountable, nothing will change.
“In a letter posted to social media, the GOP caucus said Aurora should abandon the mask mandate because it would not fairly be enforced across the city”
https://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/360/weld-county-residents-respond-to-mask-mandate-after-sheriffs-office-refuses-to-enforce-order
The number of elected sheriffs throughout the state know exactly what these Tri-county health unelected officials are demanding. Be that as it may, these sheriffs are willing to face the voters come election time, unlike Tri-County appointed bureaucrats.
Please note, in Perry’s criticism of the New Aurora Republican council he wants to drag into his hysteria a Congress Woman from the western slope.Talk about a reach. There is someone that is in the bulls-eye that if this is such high priority for Dave to drag politicians into, why DAVE not include Governor Polis? Talk about a politically convenient free pass, Dave! The Gov. and you feel so in tune with each other, where is he on this anyway? I thought so?
Horrific.
Almost as if you could have covered the city council races better before the election happened.
He made a valiant effort to promote his leftist fantasy by endorsing only candidates from his side of the aisle, including the socialist Bryan Lindstrom and the convicted felon Candice Bailey.