Nearly one-third of Colorado’s state senators laid claim to their job without receiving a single vote in an open election.
And nearly one in six House members also were selected for their posts by a small group of party stalwarts, not the people, according to an analysis done by The Post’s Jessica Fender. Just this year, five people won appointments to the legislature.
That’s hardly representative democracy.
Given Colorado’s term-limits law, some legislators choose to resign their seats toward the end of their terms, giving their appointed successor a leg up in the next election. It’s then harder for an opposing party to win the seat if they’re facing an incumbent.
Early retirements also mean seats can go for decades without having an open election — hardly the type of democracy any of us envision.
Colorado is one of only six states where a political party or committee fills vacancies, rather than a special election of that district.
It’s time to consider changing that law, and require an election. Yes, it can be costly, but it gives voters a needed and important voice in the process. It also might force more lawmakers to stay through the end of their terms.
The high number of appointments also is just another one of the unfortunate side effects of Colorado’s fruitless foray into term limits.
The term-limit law was designed to limit the power of elected officials, and it has clearly done that.
But, as we’ve opined before, power at the Capitol is a zero-sum game and the expertise surrendered by the people’s elected representatives has been offset by the power of the permanent state bureaucracy and the ever-growing corps of professional lobbyists.
Lobbyists — paid representatives of interest groups, who obviously are not term limited — now have more institutional knowledge than many lawmakers. They often know the governing process and politics better than those elected to govern.
“It’s a musical-chairs operation more than it’s been in the past,” statehouse observer and Colorado State University professor John Straayer told The Post. “People start looking for jobs before their terms are up.”
Between 1990 and 1996, about two-thirds of lawmakers who left the legislature retired from politics. From the advent of term limits in 1998 and until 2004, nearly two- thirds of lawmakers who resigned early left to seek some other elective office, Straayer told The Post.
Term limits have acted as disincentive for lawmakers to make friends across the aisle and build the kind of trust necessary to bridge partisan tensions. A 2006 study by three non-partisan organizations also suggested statehouses with term limits are less diverse, less powerful and less civil.
Let’s let voters limit the terms of lawmakers.
