These are heady times for Colorado’s hard left. Pumped up by their party’s back-to-back election victories, members of the ruling Democrats’ radical fringe are trying to make the most of it by fast-tracking their agenda for action.
Never mind that they are attempting to claim a mandate for extremist policies in a state where nearly half the electorate is registered unaffiliated. The rallying point for that pivotal voting bloc, according to pundits and polls, isn’t equity, gender, socialism or other buzzwords of the left; it’s simply unaffiliated voters’ dislike for Donald Trump. That’ll only go so far.
Perhaps even the radicals themselves realize it’s a matter of time before the general public has second thoughts about Colorado’s lurch to the left — and before their own party’s mainstream pushes back. So, radicals in the state legislature, on some city councils and elsewhere in Colorado’s political firmament are doing their level best to move fast.
When they aren’t trying, essentially, to decriminalize crime, they are attempting to wreck the rental market; unionize even local government; and strangle small businesses in litigation and red tape. Some of those efforts haves been rebuffed by stakeholder groups that are already sounding the alarm, as well as by elected Democrats like Gov. Jared Polis who sometimes serve as the adults in the room. So far, though, the far left is undeterred.
On Monday, the left was back at it with another outlandish foray from the fringe. And this one targeted even Polis, the lifelong Boulder Democrat and bane of Republicans.
As reported by Colorado Politics, a group calling itself “Here 4 The Kids” rallied at the Capitol to stage a sit-in that promises to last a week — in the name of scrapping the Second Amendment right to bear arms.
The group’s gambit isn’t about more gun-control laws, of which the legislature already has adopted several this year alone; those were signed into law the other day by the governor. No, this crusade is about getting rid of guns altogether.
As noted in the Colorado Politics report, Monday’s sit-in included a demand for Polis to issue an executive order declaring a state of emergency due to gun violence in Colorado. The executive order also must declare a, ”total ban on all guns and a comprehensive, mandatory buy-back program,” Here 4 The Kids insisted.
Polis’ office explained in a public statement to the press that the governor doesn’t have that kind of power, whether or not he would care to exercise it. The press statement said Polis does not have unlimited authority under a disaster declaration and cannot suspend either the U.S. or Colorado constitutions, both of which recognize a right to arms.
A rally organizer wasn’t having any of it.
“(Polis) is afraid and trying to save face with as many people as possible so that one day he can run for president,” she told Colorado Politics.
As also noted by Colorado Politics, even some of the more activist lawmakers in the legislature expressed dismay at the rally’s unrealistic aims.
Indeed, it’s all so over the top, it seems almost frantic. As if to fret, “So much monkey-wrenching to do — so little time before the public gets wise.”
Is the radical fringe overplaying its hand? Will the public, in fact, get wise? And will Colorado’s Democratic establishment step up to the podium and call out the radicals — before the entire party is tainted in the eyes of the electorate?
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