New Democrat Bulletin - September 2004
ALWAYS TELL THE TRUTH - IT'S EASIER TO REMEMBER
For months, State House Democratic Leader Andrew Romanoff has been working across party lines to solve Colorado’s fiscal crisis. Unfortunately, House Republican leaders ran out the clock on budget negotiations. The following commentary by Rep. Romanoff, a member of the DLC’s New Democrat Caucus, appeared in the Colorado Springs Gazette on September 2.
Always tell the truth,” Sam Rayburn once said. “Then you’ll never have to remember what you said the last time.”
Sadly, a recent column by Rep. Keith King (“Blame college tuition hikes on statehouse Democrats,” The Gazette, August 26, 2004) is so riddled with half-truths, quarter-truths, and downright untruths that it’s difficult to remember them all.
Let’s start with Rep. King’s main assertion: that Democrats are somehow responsible for the collapse of the legislature’s budget negotiations. If Democrats had only been willing to accept his proposal, Rep. King suggests, we could have reached a solution.
As uncomfortable as it must be for him to admit, Rep. King’s proposal died at the hands not of the Democratic minority but of his own Republican majority. The Appropriations Committee killed his bill by a vote of eight to three. (Two Republicans voted for it; five Republicans voted against it.)
Losing hurts. While other legislative leaders agreed to poll their members on a constitutional compromise, Rep. King’s team reneged on a pledge to do the same.
I see everyone trying to work for a compromise except the House leadership,” said the Senate’s co-majority leader, Republican Norma Anderson (“GOP leaders kill latest fiscal fix,” The Denver Post, July 16, 2004). “The House Republican leaders have refused to compromise unless it’s their plan.”
Rep. King, in turn, accuses Democrats of refusing to compromise on Amendment 23. That’s the constitutional measure requiring automatic increases in K-12 funding.
To anyone familiar with the legislature’s deliberations over the last eight months, Rep. King’s charge will ring false. Democratic lawmakers offered more than half a dozen proposals to reform Amendment 23. One of the most ambitious would have repealed the amendment altogether.
Democrats did insist that any change to Amendment 23 be accompanied by a change to TABOR. But that was one of the principles the House Republicans espoused as well.
Or, at least, that’s what Rep. King and his cohorts announced in July. Any solution, they said, must treat TABOR and Amendment 23 equally, take only enough revenue to cover the state’s structural deficit, and preserve the TABOR formula.
Democrats agreed. In August, a group of college leaders submitted – and Democrats endorsed – a proposal that met all of Rep. King’s demands. It would have enabled us to balance the budget without changing a word of TABOR or Amendment 23. And best of all, it might actually have passed; in the House, a bipartisan majority swiftly signed on.
Confronted with the sudden prospect of consensus, Rep. King altered the terms of the deal. Whether or not we reformed TABOR, he declared, an immediate cut in school funding was essential.
Rep. King thereby succeeded not only in rewriting his own list of principles – barely five weeks old – but also in dooming any hope of compromise. He and Gov. Bill Owens (who refused even to meet with Democratic leaders) ran out the clock on legislative negotiations.
Rep. King is now desperate to shift responsibility for Colorado’s fiscal crisis. His attempt to pin the blame on the donkeys is shameless, self-serving, and singularly unpersuasive. But don’t take my word for it. Ask a Republican.
It’s “baloney,” said Sen. Anderson (“Springs lawmakers jump into state budget fray,” The Gazette, August 24, 2004). “When the House leadership called and told the Republicans not to agree to go into a special session, how can they blame the Democrats?”
Baloney aside, our state faces a serious budget shortfall. The legislature could be forced to slash more than $300 million in services next year. It will soon be time to begin that task, by setting priorities and identifying potential cuts.
Coloradans face other real challenges – a sluggish economy, a crumbling infrastructure, soaring health care costs. Now, more than ever, we need Democrats and Republicans to work together.
Pointing fingers and twisting the truth won’t solve our state’s problems. But straight talk and honest answers will.
SECOND VERSE, SAME AS THE FIRST
The following commentary is from the September 3rd New Dem Daily.
The president's acceptance speech in New York was much like the Bush presidency itself: nice backdrops, abundant determination, and unwavering confidence in a philosophy and policies that never seem to work.
The policy content of the speech can be briskly summarized as offering a handful of old proposals and a smattering of micro-initiatives. The only promise that really mattered was the pledge to make his tax cuts permanent, which makes his other proposals unaffordable and irrelevant. He could not bring himself to acknowledge the fiscal crisis that his party has deliberately engineered. He remained unable to think of a single policy mistake he's made, or to recognize any development since 9/11 that might give him pause. He offered nothing tangible to suggest he's learned a thing from the mess in Iraq or the plunge in U.S. influence and prestige that has accompanied his presidency.
This is a president who wants Americans to judge him by his intentions, not his ideas; to trust his heart, not his mind; to weigh his resolve, not his record.
Like this entire Republican convention, the president's speech urged Americans to return to the emotional landscape of September 12, 2001, when all of us longed for a national expression of simple outrage, calm determination, and swift justice. He avoided the excesses of belligerent bluster, intolerance for dissent, and weepy sentimentality that characterized so many of the speeches that preceded his, but the spirit was the same: this is no time for the distractions of debate; no time for careful policymaking; no time to risk change. America's enemies can be physically destroyed by our military might, and morally destroyed by the sheer clarity of our values, all under the direction of the iron will of a leader who perfectly represents the sturdy folk virtues of our people.
The political calculation that Americans are willing to re-enter the world of 9/12 and forget years of accumulated unhappiness with the domestic and foreign policies of this administration is breathtaking in its audacity. As the president said, in Texas, they call that walking.
It's anybody's guess whether the Bush-Cheney campaign can sustain this mood over the next two months. John Kerry's task is to get Americans focused on the real challenges facing us in the future -- challenges that require clear ideas, not just clear values; skillful diplomacy and compromise, not just determination; a willingness to understand the world as it is, not as we wish it to be; the humility to admit and adjust to mistakes, not mulishly persist when things go wrong; and the intelligence to solve problems in pragmatic ways, not bludgeon them with the blunt instrument of ideology.
Time and again, the president said, "Nothing will hold us back." For millions of Americans with doubts about the direction the country is headed on Bush's watch, that may sound more like a threat than a promise.