A group of gun-rights activists seeking to oust a top Democratic state lawmaker in Colorado over the passage of strict gun control legislation on Monday turned in double the signatures needed to force a recall election. KDVR reports the group turned in over 16,000 signatures, more than double the 7,178 valid signatures needed, to the Colorado Secretary of State's office in the effort to recall Colorado Senate President John Morse.Let's recap.
“This sends a strong message,” Rob Harris, who delivered three boxes full of petitions to the office, told KDVR. “We’ve obtained enough signatures to recall a state legislator for the first time in the history of Colorado.”
The Secretary of State’s office now has 15 days to determine whether enough of the signatures are valid, and then Morse's office has another 15 days to contest the validity of the signatures. Morse tells KDVR he is going to fight the recall effort.
Colorado .. which is, after all, a "Western" state, has recently enacted strict gun-control laws against the wishes of a significant percentage of its citizens (leaving out Boulder and Denver which one understands to be bastions of liberal think-speak).
Denver being the capital, and Boulder being .. well, Boulder. These are two of the biggest three cities in Colorado.
And in Colorado, when you've got two of the three major cities watching your back, you've got most of the liberal population on your side. Which is to say ... Democrats and Welfare Recipients.
State Senate President Morse is confident, if not complacent. According to KDVR TV in Denver, Morse intends to challenge the recall proposal:
“We’ll go through these signatures with a fine-toothed comb,” Morse told FOX31 Denver Monday afternoon. “And we’ll file some protests with the Secretary of State’s office because we know a lot of these signatures were gathered based on misinformation and lies.”Yes .. well ....
...
“This is a hill worth dying on,” Morse said. “This is a fight worth having; it’s a fight we’ve already had on the floor of the Senate; it’s a fight worth winning.”
Apparently the Democratic State Senate Leader intends to fight the recall on the basis of the legitimacy of the petition signers, rather than on the merits of the measure which lead to this unique citizen's rebellion. It's important to recognize the unique character of Colorado voters, who have never before become so outraged at a state law that they have made the effort to remove from the senatorial throne the man who is the leader of the state senate, if not the author of the bill.
To this writer, Morse's determination to examine the petition signatures rather than his own obligation to his constituency is typical of the hubris which characterizes politicians who know best what is right for the citizens of his state. That is to say ... they know what's right, even if the hoi-polloi are too stupid to know what's good for them.
They forget that they are essentially a rural state. T
The United States House of representatives is based on geographic and population demographics, which makes a farmer easily as important as a welfare recipient; unlike the U.S. Senate, which accords two senators to each state (making them more attuned to population centers ... major cities .. where the votes are).
State senates tend to be a product of gerrymandering, which allows the senator from a population center to be MORE powerful than a U.S. Representative from a rural counties, in terms of real power on purely state legislation. And Morse is a product of that political background: Think ... Tammany Hall, and the Pendergast influence on Western Missouri in the early 1950's.
So, a State Senator in a Rural State may tend to reflect the interests of population centers ... which is not necessarily the interests of the majority of the "wealth-producing" population of the state. This is especially true of the 'more powerful' State Senators, such as the President of the Senate.
We can extrapolate (with a bit of finger-puppet magic) the politics of the rural population of Colorado by looking at the web blog of Michael Bane, who has been (a) an influential citizen of Colorado, living in a rural region, for the past then years, and (b) an outspoken opponent to these gun laws for the past few months.
Even though the country mice (to mix metaphors) have a political bent much different from the city mice .. they have not the power to influence events in the State Senate.
As this writer lives in a similarly Democratic state (with conservative rural population) for several decades, this dichotomy is not difficult to understand. The Grasshoppers (even more mixed metaphors) in The City elect the leading politicians while living on the welfare bread-and-circuses, and the Ants in the rest of the state support them financially. If not politically.
Getting back to the Colorado Political scene, my guess is that Morse will retain his position after slandering the majority of the Colorado Ants (The Country Mice) in petition challenges.
And the Grasshoppers (who have no concept of citizenship) will cheer in support of The Golden Rule:
"He who has the Gold, gets to make the Rules".
And that's just the way it is.
1 comment:
The rural and lessor populated counties in Colorado have grievances that go beyond gun control. Urban liberals don't seem to understand the needs of hicks in the sticks.
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