It is unrealistic to expect great things from a special session of the Colorado General Assembly.
Among the bad examples are special sessions to land a new United Airlines maintenance center (Indianapolis won that battle, and the facility never lived up to expectations), to lure a massive accelerator for advanced nuclear research (Waxahachie, Texas, got the Superconducting Super Collider, but it never was built), and to address the “Summer of Violence” in 1993 (as it turned out, the rate of violent crime that year was lower than average).
Colorado has just witnessed another special session, and local politicians are basking in the afterglow, talking tough about their five-day slog through the swamps of immigration reform.
Colorado now has the toughest immigration laws of any state in the country, they say. But that’s not saying much.
Immigration is primarily a federal responsibility. The federal government determines citizenship and provides border security. The problem is that the national government has not been doing a very good job of it, and that’s one thing all sides agree on.
The first twitch of buyer’s remorse is now surfacing, with some asking whether the increased requirements for producing and checking citizenship papers will create more bureaucracy and delay.
This special session had great potential for mischief. It could have ended in an angry, abrupt adjournment, with no bills passed. It might have attempted to do more than a state can do legally, or should do morally.
As it was, charges of bigotry and racism flowed too readily. There was irony, too, in that some of the legislature’s most conservative members argued for expanded, big-government enforcement of strict new regulations.
In terms of policy, it was unnecessary. But it wasn’t driven by policy so much as by politics. And in those terms, the outcome was as good as might reasonably have been expected.
“It could have been a lot worse,” said Polly Baca, a former Democratic state legislator who heads the Latin American Research and Service Agency (LARASA). “I still am of the feeling there was absolutely no need for a special session. But given that it did happen … we did the least amount of harm that could be done.”
One of the consequences of round-the-clock meetings is that legislators get tired and cranky. They make last-minute deals, often without fully considering all the consequences, and they say things they may regret later.
Gov. Bill Owens has been vilified by some of his fellow Republicans – “unrelenting crap” is the way former Gov. Dick Lamm indelicately put it – for not insisting on tougher laws, and for not demanding that the major bill of the package be sent to voters.
That would have helped stir the Republican base to get to the polls in November, and they’ve made no secret of the tactic.
The session had no hard numbers on how much tax money has been spent on services to illegal immigrants that aren’t required by federal law. No one could say how many non-citizens might be voting in Colorado elections, although it’s improbable that any would register and risk being found out and deported.
But Lamm is beaming about the outcome, calling it “the best possible scenario for Colorado and for those seeking tough legislation against illegal immigration.”
Lamm has reason to feel relieved. He was one of the principals in the effort to pass the court-rejected constitutional amendment denying state services to illegal immigrants, but he concedes it wasn’t the best solution.
“A constitutional amendment is a blunt instrument; legislation is a scalpel,” he said. With the special session, “We got in July better legislation than we would have likely gotten next year.”
Was the special session worth it? That, as we say in the opinion game, remains to be seen. Former state Sen. Norma Anderson, a Republican, thinks it was a waste of $75,000. As long as the legislature was in session to take on a fundamentally federal policy, she asked wryly, “Why didn’t they address the missile problem in South Korea?”
Fred Brown (punditfwb@aol.com), retired Capitol Bureau chief for The Denver Post, is also a political analyst for 9News.
