Republican gubernatorial hopeful Bob Beauprez has lent his name to a bitter rear-guard action aimed at flouting the will of Colorado voters who approved Referendum C last November. In so doing, Beauprez renewed an internal split within the GOP – and potentially handed a nice gift to Democrats who want to add the governor’s office to their existing dominion over both chambers of the state legislature in the Nov. 7 election.
Beauprez announced Sunday he had become the “first person” to sign an Independence Institute initiative that essentially would overturn Referendum C. Such a late start augurs ill for a drive that would have to collect some 100,000 signatures by Aug. 7. Skeptics doubt that Beauprez really wants the measure to pass – it would cripple any hopes he might have of rebuilding Colorado’s transportation network and higher education system if he does become governor. His support now for a late-starting initiative likely to be just a dim memory in November may be an effort to upstage his GOP rival, Marc Holtzman, who loudly assailed Referendums C and D long before Beauprez weighed in last year.
The proposed rollback of Referendum C would convert the $3.7 billion estimate of what the fiscal rescue plan would collect in five years into rigid annual revenue ceilings similar to the limits of the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights. Any money above those ceilings would be rebated to taxpayers – an estimated $20 per Coloradan the first year if the economic recovery continues.
House Speaker Andrew Romanoff, D-Denver, compares the idea to the $100 rebate Senate Republican leader Bill Frist proposed to offset rising energy costs. Beauprez’s profile in pandering does bear an eerie resemblance to that discredited idea. But while Frist’s boondoggle would just have added still more debt to the federal budget, Beauprez’s rebates would come directly from capital construction funds now allocated to Colorado highways and higher education needs.
Understanding the state’s conservative budget practices may be asking too much of Beauprez, who has giddily voted to add trillions to the federal debt. But his latest straddle has created a yawning gap between “Both Ways Bob” and Colorado’s business community, which provided most of the money and much of the leadership to pass C. Given business leaders’ clout in Republican politics, it boggles the mind to imagine how Beauprez expects to win the governorship by trashing Colorado’s hard-won economic recovery program.
