County GOP no longer holds key roles in state legislature

Time was, the go-to guys in the state Legislature were Republicans from El Paso County.

Just eight years ago, Ray Powers was Senate president and Doug Dean was speaker of the House.

It wasn't a one-time fluke. Reps. Bill Cadman, Keith King, Ron May and Bill Sinclair all held leadership positions even more recently, and Chuck Berry was speaker of the House for most of the 1990s.

Now, the Republicans are in the minority in both houses of the Legislature, and their leaders mostly come from other parts of the state.

Rep. Amy Stephens, R-Monument, was the only legislator from the Pikes Peak region to be selected to a leadership position in the 67th General Assembly, which convenes in January. House Republicans, who dodged the Democratic bullet on Nov. 4 and boosted their number by two, re-elected Stephens as caucus chairwoman, the third-ranking party position.

The other 18 leadership positions were given to legislators from other parts of the state.

Rep. Bob Gardner, R-Colorado Springs, sought a leadership position, but lost. So did Sen. John Morse of Colorado Springs, who ran for a leadership post on the Democratic side - twice.

El Paso County tends to be overlooked when the Democrats select their legislative leaders, perhaps because the county elects so few Democrats. Three of them are headed to Denver, the party's largest delegation from this area since the 1970s.

Area Republicans will be sending a delegation of 10, and they've been accustomed to wielding more clout.

Joshua Dunn, a political science professor at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs, traced El Paso County Republicans' declining prominence to the advent of term limits in 2000. He said local Republicans tend to have safe seats and, before term limits, could get re-elected as often as they wanted to run. Seniority, Dunn noted, is a traditional path to a leadership post. Now that path is blocked.

Dean advanced another theory: that some legislators "are so far to the right from down in Colorado Springs that they are going to be perceived as being too conservative to work into a leadership role."

"If they're very strident in their views, it's not a surprise to me that they wouldn't have much of a chance of being in leadership roles," said Dean, who's now the director of the state Public Utilities Commission. "But then again, the folks that are married very hard to their conservative views, a lot of them don't care if they're in leadership roles or not. They're just up there to do what they think is the right thing."

"It doesn't matter to them if they are - how shall we say? - an effective legislator," Dean said.

Case in point: Sen. Dave Schultheis, R-Colorado Springs, who is unabashed about seeing no need to work with Democrats to build support for his agenda, including his perennial efforts to legislate abortion clinics and illegal immigrants out of existence.

"I'm not criticizing Dave when I say this," Dean said. "But some people just say that, well, if I compromise on one issue, I'm compromising my principles, and I guess I'd just say I disagree with that."

"Today, if you're in the minority party, a Republican, you have to have Democrat votes to pass anything," he said. "And so the Republicans would be foolish to not reach across the aisle if they want to have any real impact on what goes on at the state Capitol."

"It'll handicap El Paso County Republicans if they don't have a strong voice in the Legislature," Dean said. "If they're not in leadership roles, if they're not taken seriously by not only their colleagues but by people across the aisle, yes it can hurt them."

Stephens, who has never been accused of being a closet liberal, disputed the notion that the Pikes Peak Republicans had been marginalized for being too dogmatic.

But she made clear that her vision of effectiveness - and of her party's popularity - did not include using each legislator's five-bill quota on doctrinaire measures having a snowball's chance in a Democratic-controlled General Assembly.

"If you're conservative, knock yourself out. You've got five bills. Be as conservative as you'd like to be," she said. "But what I signed up for in leadership is a solutions-oriented agenda that's neither conservative nor moderate, but Republican."

"We're going to stick good ideas out there and have something on the table," Stephens said. "I think that has contributed to two extra seats in the House."

Berry said working across the aisle can give the minority party some voice in allocations of state funds, but that its influence quickly peters out when it comes to economic development partnerships with the private sector - such as the new wind turbine manufacturing plants cited by Gov. Bill Ritter as early dividends from the "new energy economy" he has been promoting.

Those jobs are going to Pueblo and Brighton, not Colorado Springs. But Berry - who has seen the corporate courtship process in the Legislature and now as president of the Colorado Association of Commerce & Industry, the state chamber of commerce - said that regardless of their ideology, El Paso County Republicans are poorly positioned to influence such outcomes.

"If a company is thinking about expanding or relocating from another state to Colorado, they're interested in talking to the speaker of the House, people of the governor's office, but they're not interested in talking to the Senate assistant minority leader," Berry said.

"They would come to my office," Berry said of the corporate deal-makers, "but the only reason they came to my office is because I was speaker, and if I'd have been the minority leader I don't think they would have given me the time of day."

"I don't fault the Republicans in El Paso County for not being in that game," Berry said, "simply because they're not in the majority positions."

"I'm not saying they ought to just throw in the towel," he added, and Gardner said being in leadership matters even for the minority party.

"The speaker, the Senate president have the authority to make committee appointments, send bills to committees, send bills to committees that they'll get out of, send bills to committees that they'll die in," Gardner said. "So in that sense there's no comparison.

"But is the leadership in one's party caucus important even when you're in the minority? Absolutely," Gardner said. "Because the caucus leadership sets the agenda and the tone for legislation that we are going to support and promote, and the direction of our party."

Contact the writer: 476-1654 or dean.toda@gazette.com