At the Capitol, tobacco, even Big Tobacco, seems to have left the building.
Decades ago, it could truly be said that a lot of lawmaking and deal-making were done in smoke-filled rooms. It was not a myth. Once there were smoke- filled rooms at the legislature, even in clean-living Colorado.
Lobbyists, lawmakers, reporters, tourists and visiting members of the public smoked tobacco in its various forms wherever they wished; smoked until their fingers turned yellow and their clothes smelled like saloons; smoked until ashtrays – of which there were many – were gummy with clumps of tarry residue and every desktop was scarred by cigarettes that had burned themselves out as they lay there, forgotten.
And there were the actual smoke-filled rooms where the shapers of law went to escape the glare of floor debate. They would puff on cigars, cigarettes and pipes and mull how to resolve land and water disputes, what new varieties of license plates to offer motorists, how to tax and spend. Many laws in those days were the result of oxygen deprivation.
In the late 20th century, though, the free-range smokers began to lose their habitat. They were confined to individual offices and designated smoking areas with large, noisy exhaust fans.
Then, within the past year or so, the Capitol was wiped clean. Smokers were banished to the outdoors, where they huddle today by the basement doors, commiserating in the comradeship of addiction and popular disdain.
Even the tobacco lobby has joined the exodus. It was little in evidence last year during the campaign to increase the state tax on cigarettes. Amendment 35 passed easily; Big Tobacco spent only a fraction of what it had spent 10 years earlier to defeat another cigarette tax ballot issue.
Tobacco’s profile has been even lower during the recent debate over Senate Bill 207, which would restrict smoking statewide.
It’s dangerous to write about pending legislation this time of year. By the time this is published, the proposal to outlaw smoking in bars and restaurants may have been “snuffed out,” as punning pundits like to say. Or it may be on its way to the governor’s desk. During the last frantic days of a legislative session, bills are born, thrive, are butchered, revived, forgotten, remembered and finally live or die in the span of a few hours.
Whatever the current state of SB 207, it was favored by restaurants and bars, city officials and health advocates, for two reasons.
The eat-and-drink lobby said it would be better than a patchwork of conflicting local laws. The health lobby said it would restore healthy pink to the lungs of the people who have to work in smoky bistros.
The tobacco lobby said very little – at least, it said very little for public consumption. But behind the scenes, one veteran lobbyist said, a couple of tobacco’s paladins were “working the daylights out of it.” How else to explain amendments in the Senate that weakened the bill by narrowing its applicability?
Then again, there’s another explanation, offered by another veteran lobbyist: simple ineptitude, not sinister conspiracy.
Smokescreen or not, the smoking debate has provided more than enough fuel for one of this session’s ongoing disagreements.
Republicans, the minority party for the first time in four decades, saw this as yet another example of the Democratic majority’s fondness for nanny laws and dislike of entrepreneurship.
“Bills like this and so many others we have seen this year are transforming the land of the free and the home of the brave into the land of the over-regulated and the home of the oversensitive,” said Burlington Sen. Mark Hillman, floor leader of the Republican minority.
To which Senate President Pro Tem Peter Groff, D-Denver, responded: “I am sick and tired of the right coming up here and saying what is morally right and morally correct. Don’t come up here and paint us as if we lack morals and values.”
It was ever thus, and it remains the state of the Capitol today. The smoke may be gone, but there is still plenty of fire.
Fred Brown, retired Capitol Bureau chief for The Denver Post, is also a former national president of the Society of Professional Journalists.
