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Just about every guy I know with a pony tail who rides a hog is a Republican, so our Sen. Campbell ought to feel right at home under that big tent.
There was a conclave of Colorado Democrats in Denver
last weekend -- why they had to hold it in Denver is beyond
me; these days, Punkin Center could hold all the Democrats
in Colorado, maybe the country -- and a local Democrat told
me that in the wake of the announcement from Benedict
Nightmare Campbell,
the session was kind of like
going to a morgue.
That came from Curtis Imrie, who ran for state
representative last fall. But Roy Romer was pretty
good,
Curtis hastened to add.
He's going to change parties, too?
I asked,
wondering whether we could handle that much honesty in
government.
No, of course not,
Curtis said. In fact, he
gave a rather moving speech, and said that if anybody
wanted to leave the party, there was the door. Nobody
left.
Curtis had some other adventures with the assembled
Democrats. I grew up in the South, where Stonewall
Jackson is a major hero. So when I saw there was a meeting
of 'Stonewall Democrats,' I figured it was some other
transplanted good ol' boys, and I signed right up.
However, I've been living up in the mountains too
long. They weren't named in honor of Stonewall Jackson, but
in honor of the Stonewall riot in New York, where in 1969
gays and lesbians started fighting back.
Some culture shock? Well, yes, but we all managed.
The real culture shock would have hit if I'd been elected
to the legislature. Have you ever been there? It looks like
a convention of insurance claims adjusters.
That's more or less what my younger daughter, Abby, said last week after returning from Colorado Close-up, a program which exposes innocent high-school students to the inner workings of state government.
She saw the legislature, and it looked like a flock
of penguins. How can they say they're
representative?
I didn't have an answer, and returned to contemplation of Sen. Campbell's party change. The final straw, I read, was the Balanced Budget Amendment. He supported it, though his old party was working against it.
Why do we need a constitutional amendment to balance the budget? Ronald Reagan wanted balanced budgets, but it was just campaign blather. It was within his power, as president, to submit a balanced budget to Congress, and he never came close. Instead, the federal debt tripled.
Now that balanced-budget Republicans control the House of Representatives, where the constitution requires all appropriations bills to originate, they too could craft a balanced budget. It's within their power at this moment -- and yet, they'd rather pass the buck by passing a constitutional amendment.
So this whole balanced-budget controversy is hardly the
material for profiles in courage. Washington is full of
gutless wonders who are incapable of saying No, you
can't have school lunches because that money is going to
Lockheed to keep people working in the Speaker's
district.
Instead, they want to say No, you can't
have passenger trains because our hands are tied by the
Balanced Budget Amendment, and the airline industry got
into the trough first.
Perhaps a chronically unbalanced federal budget is not the disease, but merely a symptom of an unbalanced national economy. Curing the symptom wouldn't cure the disease. For that, we'd need the Balanced Economy Amendment.
Its principle is the same -- you can't consume more than you produce. Under the Balanced Economy Amendment, we might:
A) Ban fossil fuels. Burn some wood or trash if you've got to burn something, but otherwise, American energy will come from sunshine or hydropower. No more consuming, in a few minutes, resources that took millions of years to produce.
B) Prohibit water mining. Out on the plains, they're busy drawing down the Oglalla Aquifer by a foot a year, when it replenishes, at best, at an inch a year. Ditto for the wells that nourish Phoenix and Albuquerque, as well as various developments in Colorado.
C) Require recycling and redevelopment. No more building distant suburbs while urban neighborhoods get abandoned. Once they're full and thriving, only then we can look at expansion. No more new mines until we're making full use of all the metal we've already recovered.
Granted, the Balanced Economy Amendment would cause a few hardships until we adjusted, but the same could be said of the Balanced Budget Amendment, and if we're going to go through the pain, why not attack the root, rather than one of its sprouts?
On a sad note, farewell to Blair Macy, who died a week
ago today. Before their retirement, he and Gen published
weekly newspapers in Windsor and Keenesburg. Blair was one
of those rare publishers who believed that money exists
to make newspapers
rather than newspapers exist to
make money.
We corresponded frequently, and, well, Ben
Campbell's party change was one of those things, but Blair
Macy is one Democrat I'm going to miss.
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