Colorado House Democrats gathered Friday to speak in praise of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision. (Photo by Joey Bunch/The Denver Post)
Friday morning had the makings of election-year dynamite: House Democrats gathered in the speaker’s well to memorialize the 43rd anniversary of Roe. v. Wade, which could have prompted a backlash of hot words from Republican abortion opponents.
Republicans, however, wouldn’t take the bait on an issue Democrats hope to use against them in this year’s state and national elections. An showed support for abortion rights a two-year high at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood clinic.
Most of the House Republicans meandered out of the chamber for a few minutes, then returned when a proclamation honoring the Denver Broncos was read. Those who left said it was not an organized walkout and downplayed their emotions over the Democrat display, even as most of them gathered in the same area just outside the chamber.
Even Rep. Gordon Klingenschmitt, the pastor turned politician from Colorado Springs , didn’t go to the lectern to offer a rebuttal to the Democrats’ praise for the landmark Supreme Court decision in 1973.
“I’m tempted,” he said with a coy smile.
Klingenschmitt had reason to call foul, too. The first time he went to the speaker’s well in his first session last year, he spoke in opposition to Roe v. Wade, then asked for a moment of silence. House Speaker Dickey Lee Hullinghorst, a Democrat from Boulder County, called him out of order.
The reason, though, was not his position on Roe v. Wade, but his asking the full House, including his opponents, to join in a moment of silence, which was out-of-line, in Hullinghorst’s view.
State Rep. Jon Keyser, a Republican from Morrison, was painted in a corner. Friday was his last day in the legislature. He is resigning to run for U.S. Senate, and Democratic campaign operatives would have loved to have seen him in an uproar about reproductive rights. But it was not to be.
Keyser was cool, and he said didn’t care to comment on Democrats’ display of unity. He said he did not think it was aimed at getting a reaction from him to affect his candidacy.
I told him I admired his lack of cynicism; I’ve been cynical about politics a very long time.
