So Andy McElhany, the Senate minority leader, is in the hospital having a skin cancer removed from his leg. It’s just a local anesthetic, so he decides to take a look. Bad choice.
“I can’t watch that,” he tells the surgeon.
“That’s all right, senator,” the doctor replies, “we can’t bear to watch while you work, either.”
McElhany, a Colorado Springs Republican, told that story as part of his opening day speech at the Colorado legislature on Wednesday. Opening day usually brings out the legislature’s better nature.
House Speaker Andrew Romanoff told another one. Before the start of the 2004 session, he said, a reporter asked him if the politics of an election year and lingering ill will from last-minute redistricting in 2003 wouldn’t make it impossible to get anything done.
No, said Romanoff; there were important issues facing the state and he was sure they would do their best. After a long pause, the reporter finally said, “Do you think there’s someone else I could talk to?”
At least they can laugh at themselves. That’s good, since everyone else does. Jokes, or groans, or shows some other sign of disdain for the lawmaking process.
We citizens have lost interest in, and respect for, this yearly business. We think it has become predictable, partisan and diminished by restrictions and mistrust.
And yet, there are still impressive rituals and even the occasional flash of eloquence. Opening day attempts to set this higher tone. Legislative leaders talk about the benefits of bipartisanship. They say it’s important to show a turned-off citizenry why it’s a good idea, and not a mistake, to have a working legislature.
There are exceptions, of course. Wednesday’s exception was House Minority Leader Joe Stengel, the right’s point man. He warned that unions and other special interests are itching to grab the extra revenue voters approved with Referendum C. He used “Democrat” as an adjective as well as a noun, which is what Republicans do when they’re feeling partisan.
And, of course, he got most of the attention. The news media that translate the legislature for the public thrive on conflict. Compromise doesn’t get much ink or air time.
It’s hard to find good people willing to work in this environment. One of the legislature’s most serious problems is that it does not retain people of the caliber of Norma Anderson.
The Jefferson County Republican surprised everyone at the start of the year when she announced she would resign her seat before beginning her 20th year in the legislature.
She has been called a moderate Republican, but she prefers to be called a “reasonable” Republican. “I can be pretty conservative,” she says. And “moderate” implies an accommodating style that doesn’t fit her fierce advocacy of the things she believes in.
She has the usual plans for retirement – travel, grandkids, great-grandkids – but she also would like to work on “a campaign to explain just what government does.”
In fact, she and Rep. Bernie Buescher, a Democrat from Grand Junction, have been asked to work on a project to restore civility and credibility in government.
Buescher compares it to what former U.S. Rep. David Skaggs of Boulder tried to do in Congress some years ago. They’re not discouraged by the apparent futility of that effort. They’re focusing on first-term legislators. Their first meeting, a week ago Saturday, lasted almost twice as long as they had intended.
Anderson says some of her fellow Republicans are anti-government ideologues, and she won’t miss them as she leaves the legislature. They would limit government “so far you actually destroy it,” she said.
But the legislature will miss Norma Anderson. Senate President Joan Fitz-Gerald, D-Golden, made a particular point of that in her opening-day speech. “Your predecessor set the bar very high,” she told Anderson’s successor, Kathleen “Kiki” Traylor.
Anderson herself didn’t show up for the opening rituals. “When you close a door, that’s closed,” she said. “And you go on down the road.”
Fred Brown, retired Capitol Bureau chief for The Denver Post, is also a former national president of the Society of Professional Journalists.
