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As a pawn on the Colorado political chessboard, I suppose I should be pleased by our legislature's last-minute revision of our congressional districts, so that Chaffee and Lake counties are back in the Third District.
In the 1990s, we were in the Third, which was essentially Pueblo, central Colorado, the San Luis Valley and the Western Slope. It was a good fit, since public-lands and natural-resource issues are a major concern throughout that district.
Then came the census of 2000, which meant new boundaries to reflect population changes, We got put in the Fifth District, a Republican fiefdom which has always consisted of Colorado Springs and some pieces of the boondocks added to make the population balance.
Colorado's decade of growth also meant another House seat as a result of the 2000 census. The two houses of our legislature couldn't agree on boundaries, so the issue went to court.
The new district, the Seventh, was so competitive that the winner, Republican Bob Beauprez, won by only 121 votes over Democrat Mike Feeley, giving Republicans a 5-2 edge in Colorado's congressional delegation.
That wasn't enough to suit certain Republican operatives, both in Washington, D.C., and in Denver. Among the latter was powerful state Sen. John Andrews of Centennial, who announced that the legislature had a constitutional duty to draw congressional districts.
His argument might have passed the laugh test if he had presented it at the beginning of the session in January, when there was time for deliberation. Instead he presented it at the last possible minute, three days before the General Assembly was required to adjourn.
Perhaps Andrews, along with various Bushite
puppetmasters, misunderstands the original intent of
Article IV, Section 4 of the federal constitution: The
United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union
a Republican Form of Government....
In school, they taught us that this meant that states had to elect their legislatures and governors, not that Republicans were constitutionally mandated to run state governments. But then again, we might have missed chanting the Pledge of Allegiance one morning, thereby allowing pernicious ideas to seep into the classroom and poison our young minds.
At any rate, our statehouse Republicans are pushing this redistricting with an eye to the future. Scott McInnis, the Republican congressman from the Third District, is an ambitious fellow. He once had his eye on Ben Campbell's U.S. Senate seat, which comes up in 2004. But Campbell shows every indication of planning to run again, and McInnis isn't about to challenge Campbell in a primary.
On account of term limits, the governorship will be open in 2006, so McInnis might run for that. But what Republican would run for his seat in the Third? State Sen. Ken Chlouber is the logical choice, except for a residency problem. He's from Leadville in Lake County, but before the 2002 election, he switched his mailing address to Denver so that he could run for Congress from the First District.
He lost, so he could just move
back to Leadville
and run from the Third when the time comes, except that
Lake County is in the Fifth, and two carpetbagger runs for
Congress might be too many, even for Chlouber.
The solution? Persuade the legislature to put Lake County (and its southern neighbor Chaffee, where I live) back into the Fifth, and the Republicans have Chlouber to run for Congress when incumbent McInnis decides to advance his political career by running for something else.
At least from here, that appears to be how the chess game is being played, with the other shuffling designed to put more Republicans into Beauprez's Seventh District. Otherwise, the Seventh would still be competitive in 2004, and thus an impediment to occupying France, bankrupting the federal treasury with corporate subsidies, repealing the Bill of Rights and implementing other vital principles of the national Republican platform.
But if the Republicans use gerrymandering to solidify their hold on the Seventh, it could reduce their hold on the Third. Putting Lake County back into the Third would put Chlouber in the district and give the Republicans a personable candidate who knows how to campaign hard.
However, Lake County is no GOP stronghold. Leadville, the county seat, has been a labor town since it was founded 125 years ago. In the 2002 congressional election, Lake was the only county in the Fifth District that was carried by the Democratic candidate, Curtis Imrie. Here in Chaffee County, Democrats won every county office except sheriff in 2002.
So the Republican backroom operators and their puppets in the legislature could end up losing the Third in their effort to keep the Seventh. It would serve them right.
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