As Colorado House lawmakers churned through final votes during the last night of this year’s session, Republicans stood up and marched out of the chamber before the Democratic speaker could gavel it to a close - a defiant act meant to show how sidelined and silenced they felt.
The political theater this week was the culmination of a 120-day session that proved to be the latest illustration of the leftward shift in what was long a battleground state, leaving Republicans scrambling to adjust to their unfamiliarly weak position and surfacing internal rifts among Democrats over just how progressive Colorado should be.
To help pass those bills, House Speaker Julie McCluskie invoked a rarely used rule curtailing filibusters, arguing that the debates had become unproductive and merely stall tactics. Republicans decried it as a gag measure.“What we saw through this session is … an overwhelming amount of power,” Minority Leader Rep. Mike Lynch said, calling Republicans’ position a “superminority.”
Democratic Senate Majority Leader Dominick Moreno, who has been in the Legislature since 2013, said Colorado is on a blue trajectory but he still considers its political tint to be “a shade of purple, indigo maybe.” But Colorado doesn’t figure to flip back to red anytime soon, said Seth Masket, director of the Center on American Politics at the University of Denver, especially with the biggest population growth coming in the blue-leaning urban corridor along the east side of the Rocky Mountains including Denver and its sprawling suburbs.
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