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Keep your guns out of the Capitol
The American legislative process depends on the willingness of elected representatives to engage in debate without recourse to force or coercion. Legislative assemblies are battlefields of ideas, not physical power, and they’re established on principles of reason and free expression. That’s why the presence of armed legislators is antithetical to legislating, and lawmakers should keep […]
Election deniers reveal themselves as charlatans
Colorado’s election deniers are absurd, but you can’t accuse them of sloth. It seems they never tire of attacking democracy. While most of their activity only proves their misguidedness, they represent a danger to constitutional order and, indeed, people’s lives, so when the state’s primary election-denial organization unveils its biggest purported achievement, it warrants review. […]
The GOP is the gallows party
“I’ve said we need to build more gallows.” Those words were spoken last month by a Republican state senator from Arizona, Wendy Rogers, at a white nationist rally. The topic was the execution of political enemies. “If we try some of these high-level criminals, convict them and use a newly built set of gallows, it’ll […]
Get Colorado out of the crosshairs of Putin’s nukes
Colorado is by design a prime target for a Russian nuclear attack. Residents were reminded of this unpleasant circumstance when Russian President Vladimir Putin alluded to the use of nuclear weapons as part of his invasion of Ukraine. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the threat of nuclear attack seemed relatively dormant […]
Fear of a Marshall Fire at Rocky Flats is real
The Marshall Fire could have been worse if it had entered Rocky Flats. On the evening of the fire in December, authorities feared this could happen. Federal officials are at pains to convince local community members that the former nuclear weapons plant and Superfund site is effectively cleansed of radioactive contamination, but their account of […]
What I learned from watching more than 500 Jan. 6 videos
I recently watched hundreds of videos from the Jan. 6 insurrection. Many of the stark moments from the attack on the U.S. Capitol are well-known — the battle at the west terrace tunnel, the shooting of rioter Ashli Babbitt, the desecration of the Senate chamber. But nothing provides the kind of granular and exhaustive understanding […]
Could the 14th Amendment block Lauren Boebert from the ballot?
Is Rep. Lauren Boebert eligible to run for reelection this year? According to the 14th Amendment, the answer might be “no.” And, because Boebert herself is unlikely to acknowledge her own potential disqualification, it would be left to other authorities, such as the Colorado secretary of state or voters in the representative’s district, to seek […]
Colorado leaders must guarantee reproductive justice
In July, former three-term Colorado Gov. Dick Lamm died. Roughly a month later, the Texas abortion ban went into effect. The succession of these two events was symbolic of the perilous state of abortion rights in America and the half-century arc they’ve run from liberalization to elimination. Lamm is largely responsible for establishing Colorado as […]
The Colorado GOP is incompatible with democracy
Stop believing the Colorado Republican Party is compatible with democracy. It is not. Its own members have told us so. Some of the party’s defenders keep saying it is, but they’re invariably discredited by the actions of elected Republicans, and after the events this week at the Colorado Legislature, there can be no more doubt. […]
The Marshall Fire was a force of humans
On the afternoon of the Marshall Fire, after its dreadful scale had started to sink in, Gov. Jared Polis appeared for his first press conference on the disaster. It occurred “with no warning,” he said on Dec. 30. “This fire is frankly a force of nature.” Wrong. The misunderstanding that could permit the Colorado governor […]
Jan. 6 succeeded. Here’s what’s next.
If the point of the Jan. 6 insurrection was to establish that a significant portion of the country is done with democracy, it succeeded. The attack on the U.S. Capitol one year ago by violent supporters of former President Donald Trump — whose lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him was the fuel […]
Stop posing with guns. It makes you look weak.
It’s not hard to find photos of each one of the three Republicans in Colorado’s congressional delegation posing with guns. The images aren’t just out there on the internet — the members want you to see them. They released them as part of campaigns or policy statements. The discouraging implication is that they assume such […]