In the latest profile of courage from the state legislature, House Majority Leader Amy Stephens boldly stood up to House Majority Leader Amy Stephens to apparently gut a bill that she — House Majority Leader Amy Stephens, R-Monument — had spent long hours helping to craft and had co-sponsored. The outcome was sadly predictable.
Stephens had been working with Sen. Betty Boyd, D-Lakewood, and with the governor’s office and with small businesses to set up health care exchanges — Colorado marketplaces where individuals and small businesses can shop for insurance. The business community was on board. The governor was on board. Everyone thought Stephens was on board, until, at the last moment, she introduced an amendment saying that the exchanges would go into effect only if the Gov. John Hickenlooper asked the Obama administration for a waiver to opt out of health care reform. That won’t happen, of course.
What made Stephens change her mind? The Tea Party and others obsessed with “Obamacare” had come to call the common-sense bill “Amycare” and lobbied strongly against it. Stephens folded, but it won’t kill the exchanges. Now the federal government will set them up in 2014.
Without the bill, Colorado loses the chance to set up the exchanges in a way that makes sense to Coloradans. Hopefully, the bill can still be rescued.
Nobody understood the risk better than Stephens herself, who, when she still favored her own bill, wrote this stark message on her Facebook page: “[T]he alternative to this bill is to do nothing and risk everything.” Stephens was right about that. Until she was wrong.
Wrong way on juvenile justice. A juvenile parole bill that would unconstitutionally transfer power from the executive branch to the legislature is now on hold. But House Bill 1287 is so flawed it ought to be killed. At issue is the fate of some 48 Colorado prisoners who were juveniles when they received life sentences without parole. They were adjudicated before 2006, which is when state lawmakers took laws off the books allowing life sentences without parole for juveniles.
These 48, who committed a litany of heinous crimes, remain ineligible for parole. However, they have an avenue of appeal. Colorado’s law and constitution allows them to appeal to the governor for commutation. That process was bolstered by the creation in 2006 of a special board to investigate the cases of the prisoners in question and present recommendations to the governor. We’re told the vast majority of these cases have been looked at once, if not several times. Once someone is sentenced and that punishment is made final, the legislature cannot go back and try to change that sentence. An adequate system for review of the cases already exists, and lawmakers should drop plans to subvert that process.
And in remembrance of . . . Pierre Jimenez, a community activist who died Monday. He often gave voice to the voiceless in Denver, and he left our town better than he found it.
Short Takes is compiled by Denver Post editorial writers and expresses the view of the newspaper’s editorial board.
