When the Colorado legislature adjourns, voters will lose the services of 15 of their most effective lawmakers.
The departed solons won’t step down because the voters decided to throw them out. They will leave because a 1990 law limits service to four consecutive two-year terms in the House and no more than two, four-year terms in the Senate.
Seven senators and eight representatives will leave, taking with them a total of 162 years of legislative experience.
The term-limit law was designed to limit the power of elected officials, and it has clearly done that. But power at the Capitol is a zero-sum game and the expertise surrendered by the people’s elected representatives has been offset by an ominous aggregation of power by the permanent state bureaucracy and the ever-growing corps of professional lobbyists.
As former state Rep. Don Friedman, R-Denver, once observed, the specialized state employees upon whom the elected lawmakers rely for advice on issues as bafflingly complex as water law and environmental issues are mostly protected by civil service rules. That gives them many years to build their expertise, but it also enables them to dazzle inexperienced lawmakers and sometimes load the dice in terms of selective presentations that predispose the legislature to favor policies crafted by the bureaucracy.
Now that legislators are precluded from gathering the expertise that legendary lawmakers like Friedman did, there has also been a massive shift of power to the unelected but ever- more powerful corps of professional lobbyists. Lobbyists are often former legislators themselves, turning their hard-earned expertise into profitable advocacy.
Simply put, since term limits took hold, the people’s elected representatives have increasingly lacked the independent experience and expertise to evaluate the information from bureaucrats and lobbyists that they need to pass laws.
The problem is worst in the House, because senators often serve a stint in the lower chamber before restarting the term-limit clock in the Senate.
Here is the list of legislators forced out by term limits in this election. Some may run for other offices; most will simply set down. They leave with the public’s gratitude for a job well done. But the people will be poorer for their absence.
House of Representatives
Speaker Andrew Romanoff, D-Denver
Majority Leader Alice Madden, D-Boulder
Rosemary Marshall, D-Denver
Alice Borodkin, D-Denver
Cheri Jahn, D-Jefferson County
Mary Hodge, D-Brighton
Debbie Stafford, D-Aurora
Al White, R-Winter Park
Senate
Majority Leader Ken Gordon, D-Denver
Minority Leader Andy McElhany, R-Colorado Springs
Bob Hagedorn, D-Aurora
Stephanie Takis, D-Adams County
Jack Taylor, R-Steamboat Springs
Ron Tupa, D-Boulder
Sue Windels, D-Arvada
