State and Local Issues

Last month’s A Line of Sight profiled Mark Hillman’s excellent article describing the Colorado Supreme Court’s latest “power grab”.

In an audacious power grab, the Colorado Supreme Court recently embraced, by a 4-3 decision, a judicial doctrine that would relegate the other two branches of government — and the voters — to a perfunctory role. The high court’s activist majority used Lobato vs.

Given that Stephanie Villafuerte has been nominated to be the next United States Attorney for Colorado, her handling of the Cory Voohis situation is unquestionably fair game for the confirmation process.  If she broke the same law she and the Ritter campaign accused Voorhis of breaking (accessing a federal criminal database to confirm the identity of a person Ritter had let plea bargain) for essentially the same political purpose, and was not candid with federal investigators, that raises a serious question about her fitness for an office that is responsible for enforcing federal law i

It's natural to sympathize with the parents of Brandon Patch, the 18-year-old baseball pitcher who died after he was hit by a batted ball in 2003.

Sooner or later, sympathy must yield to logic and reason, so when Brandon's parents sued the bat's manufacturer, Louisville Slugger, and a jury awarded them $850,000, they contributed to the terribly misguided notion that behind every tragedy lies a lawsuit.

Given that Stephanie Villafuerte has been nominated to be the next United States Attorney for Colorado, her handling of the Cory Voohis situation is unquestionably fair game for the confirmation process.

As the health care debate rages on this summer, many of our nation’s political leaders and major media outlets expressed their disbelief that wide-spread citizen outrage and dissent is truly a grassroots movement. In Colorado, expressions of dissatisfaction are hardly orchestrated. Many Coloradans simply feel forgotten and are making their presence known at tea parties, health care rallies and town halls meetings.

The Colorado General Assembly added considerable teeth to the regulation of the initiative process last session, and I predict that someone or some organization caught in the cross hairs of the new regulations will challenge them.

Impending mortality tends to focus the mind, and looming elections tend to focus politicians' ears on vox populi. But just as theologians debate the sincerity of "deathbed conversions," voters should be skeptical of lawmakers who find religion as elections near.

Although 15 months remain until the 2010 elections, Democrats are learning — just as Republicans discovered after their 2004 victory tour — how quickly the political winds can shift for the party in power.

Herb Fenster, a lawyer who I know and respect, stirred the pot at a recent meeting of the Long-Term Fiscal Stability Commission when he availed himself of the public comment section and announced that he intended to file a lawsuit in federal court claiming that TABOR violates Article IV, Section 4 of the United States Constitution. That section, referred to as the “Guarantee Clause,” “guarantee[s] to every state in this Union a republican form of government.”

Clean air, clean water and good stewardship are hallmarks of life in Colorado. But we must not lose sight of where and how our food, water, electricity and energy are produced. Excessive regulation, in the name of environmental preservation at all costs, can hinder production of these basic necessities of modern life.

The cost of regulation isn’t limited to companies, utilities or local governments — it’s passed on to each one of us. Newton’s third law of physics states that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The same can be said about regulation.

The Regional Transportation District’s (RTD) FasTracks project was originally billed as a $4.7 billion savior to our region’s transportation needs. In 2004, voters who approved the measure were told that with FasTracks voters would know exactly what they are going to get, which was supposed to be a distinctive gem for the 8-county Denver metropolitan area.

Today, the project is now at a critical crossroads. Critics are rightfully wondering aloud whether the project is going to end up being nothing more than a lump of coal paid for with billions in taxpayer dollars.