Amid all the good bills coming out of the state legislature this year, there is the usual crop of bad bills, silly bills and hare-brained ones. Many, thankfully, are already consigned to the legislative scrap heap.
The most puzzling bill of the session was House Bill 1082 by Mary Hodge, D-Brighton, which made forced microchipping a crime.
Say what?
“A person may not require an individual to be implanted with a microchip,” the bill said. While this might become a problem in the future, Colorado does not now have a problem. Hodge killed her own bill after lawmakers couldn’t stop laughing.
Senate Bill 138 by Sen. David Schultheis, R-Colorado Springs, met a timely demise in committee. The bill proposed a religious bill of rights for public school students, parents, teachers and employees. Students would have been allowed to wear “religious garb” and teachers would have been allowed to “use a religious greeting as a recognition of a religious holiday.” We need to work on making our schools better, not rules for non-existent problems.
House Bill 1080 by Rep. Judy Solano, D-Brighton, to regulate “art therapists” has passed the House and is headed to the Senate. Why, we don’t know. If art therapists need regulating, it should be done by the profession, not the state.
Should state government be weighing in on minors trying to get tans? We don’t think so. The FDA already discourages their use for people of all ages. Senate Bill 23 by Sen. Bob Hagedorn, D-Aurora, prohibits anyone under 18 from using a tanning salon unless they have a doctor’s prescription, a notarized affidavit of consent from a parent or guardian or an affidavit signed in person by a parent.
Rep. Kevin Lundberg, R-Berthoud, proposed House Bill 1241 to temporarily reduce the income tax rate from 4.63 to 4.33 percent to reduce the revenue that the state is receiving from Referendum C. The decrease would continue through 2010. The bill, killed in committee, would have undermined voter wishes to put a five-year moratorium on revenue limits of the 1992 TABOR law to help the state recover from the last recession.
There are plenty of other bills we would just as soon forget, among them SB 142, an effort by hardliners to impose their will on the judicial branch; SB 143, proposing to throw doctors in prison for performing abortions; and SB 69, prohibiting law enforcement from maintaining a statewide concealed handgun database. These three have been shelved.
