TABOR Refunds: News Miner 13
Notes on refund politics, the delivery tax, Peck's free-speech victory, Pete Lee, abortion law, and more.
TABOR Refund Politics
Complete Colorado published my column, “Jared Polis thinks you’re stupid,” about the politics of the refunds under the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights. Here is part of the text:
Now Polis is taking credit for the TABOR refunds he previously tried to eliminate and that his party actively seeks to end. . . . Was there any reason, other than political showmanship, for Polis’s name to appear anywhere in the refund envelope, three months before Polis just happens to be up for reelection? . . . The bill Polis mentions, SB22-233 did affect when and how the state sent out TABOR refunds. . . . It’s understandable that Democrats would crow about making TABOR refunds more “progressive” given they can’t eliminate them completely.
Related: On August 9, Jon Caldara, subbing for Mandy Connell on 850 KOA, had me on to discuss the piece (also on iTunes) starting around the 13:30 minute mark.
Colorado’s New Delivery Tax
Complete Colorado published my column, “Delivery tax disguised as a ‘fee’ adds insult to injury,” part of which reads:
I ordered the CD of The Best of A Flock of Seagulls, on sale at Amazon for $4.99. But then government forced Amazon to tack on not only 42 cents in sales taxes but 27 cents in new “regulatory fees” (meaning, delivery taxes), raising the total to $5.68. Combined, that’s a 14% tax on my purchase. . . .
The delivery fee is straightforward special-interest-group politics that harms delivery services relative to physical stores. The fee discourages energy-efficient deliveries and encourages more energy-inefficient driving. And, unlike the traditional gasoline tax, the fee has little to do with actual road use.
Jessica Peck Chalks Up a Free-Speech Victory
Michael Roberts begins a recent Westword story:
On August 9, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a significant part of a March 2021 ruling that found subsections of the Colorado statute collectively known as the Children's Code to be unconstitutional, based largely on First Amendment grounds — a decision that flowed from a lawsuit filed by Denver-based attorney Jessica Peck after she was threatened with jail for talking with Westword regarding a 2019 story.
Peck was represented by renowned Colorado attorney David Lane.
Jeffrey A. Roberts of the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition also wrote about the case:
A Colorado statute that criminalizes the public disclosure of all child abuse and neglect records violates the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals held Tuesday. The federal appeals court ruled in a case brought by Denver lawyer Jessica Peck, who says the law prevents her and others from speaking out about government misfeasance and malfeasance without fear of prosecution.
What Was Pete Lee Thinking?
“State Sen. Pete Lee, a Colorado Springs Democrat and the chair of the influential Senate Judiciary Committee, has been indicted on a felony charge alleging that he lied about where he lives for the purpose of voting,” reports the Colorado Sun. Apparently Lee didn’t care where he voted; he cared where he “lived” because of the legislative map.
There are a lot of details here that I have not run down. Peak Politics, Kyle Clark (and again), and the Colorado Springs Indy also share aspects of the story. The GOP’s Kristi Burton Brown lost no opportunity to politicize the indictment. Neither did the Gazette.
Colorado’s Abortion Law
Sara Swann of PolitFact says it is false that “Colorado Governor Jared Polis has just signed into law a bill legalizing abortions through all nine months, up until the moment of birth.” (See CPR for the broader story.) Swann reports that a post with a message quoted “was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed.”
But Swann denies that the bill protects abortion until birth while also implicitly saying it does. She writes, “Colorado’s law protects the right to have an abortion and does not make distinctions or regulations around a time or stage during pregnancy.” If it doesn’t make any distinctions, then that means it doesn’t have any exceptions, prior to birth.
Swann notes that “Roe v. Wade banned states from prohibiting women from terminating pregnancy before viability,” but that doesn’t mean the court decision automatically restricts abortions after “viability” within states. There would have to be a Colorado law on the books to accomplish that. Something is not illegal unless the law explicitly says it is (or at least that’s the way things are supposed to work).
Swann also writes, “Abortions that occur later in a pregnancy—at 21 weeks gestation or later—are rare.” That means they happen.
So, even though Swann claims the statement is false, she offers good reason to think it’s true. But maybe there’s some detail in the bill in question, or in preexisting law, that I have not adequately considered.
In my view, although many late-term abortions are morally fine and should be legal, there are some situations in which the state probably properly may restrict them, specifically when the woman could about as easily give birth to a healthy child. I discuss this issue in more detail in my July 2 article at Self in Society.
Quick Takes
Abortion: “Abortion ban fails to make Colorado's November ballot.” Republican candidates very quietly breathed a huge sigh of relief!
Abortion: “Anti-abortion activist Seth Gruber gave a presentation rife with racism, transphobia, misinformation about abortion, and references to Moloch and Gnosticism during Saturday’s ‘Voice for the Unborn’ event at Colorado Christian University in Lakewood, organized by Colorado Right to Life,” reports Heidi Beedle. Gruber said, “One of the most dangerous threats that has ever existed to the Christian worldview and the survival of the republic is Darwinism.” Good grief.
Child Welfare: Here’s a maddening story out of Arizona: After a woman let her five- and seven-year-old children play at a park with friends as she shopped, police hassled her about it. “County prosecutors later dropped the charges. Yet officials with the state’s Department of Child Safety (DCS) weren’t satisfied. They began accusing [the woman] of child neglect,” write attorneys Adi Dynar and Timothy Sandefur. “DCS insisted on adding [the woman’s] name to its Central Registry—a confidential statewide list of people accused of harming kids,” they continue. Hopefully Colorado’s new “free range” parenting bill will help prevent such nonsense here.
Water: “Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts in April signed legislation that, within the terms of the compact, would allow Nebraska to build a canal in Colorado to siphon water off the South Platte River,” CNN reports.
Journalist Pay: The hedgefund-owned Denver Post is not offering its reporters pay increases, and boy are they pissed. See Tweets by Elizabeth Hernandez, Elise Schmelzer, and former Post reporter Alex Burness. But they’re not quite pissed enough to all quit. Burness, by the way, went to D.C. to write for Bolts, where he’ll “cover criminal justice and voting rights, with a particular eye on local and state politics.”