After being railroaded through the Senate on nearly party line vote, six House Democrats joined with Republicans to kill a high-priority bill that would have by-passed the Colorado and U.S. Constitutions to elect the President through an illegal interstate voting scheme. Senator Ken Gordon (D-Denver) and Representative Jack Pommer (D-Boulder) sponsored SB07-46, which would have abandoned Colorado’s leverage in Presidential Electoral College.
“The Gordon/Pommer Bill to undercut the Electoral College was even more extreme than Amendment 36 which was rejected by the people of Colorado by almost 2-to-1,” declared Rep. Kent Lambert (R-Colorado Springs), Chairman of the Republican Study Committee of Colorado (RSCC). “SB07-46 was an end-run around the Constitution and the vote of the people of Colorado only two years ago.”
SB07-46 would have required Colorado to pool its Electoral College votes with a coalition of other states and cast all their electoral votes for the popularly-elected candidate.
“The last time I remember an interstate compact to elect a president was by the Confederacy at the start of the Civil War,” Lambert said during the hearing. “The process for a peaceful transition of the president is critical to a unified nation. This bill would have risked legal challenges in every precinct in the country, if not riots in the streets that occur in other countries that elect their presidents by direct vote.”
The measure was killed in the House State Affairs Committee on 10-1 vote after vigorous debate. “I’m gratified that most of the Democrats on State Affairs saw fit to respect the will of the people of Colorado,” stated Representative Kevin Lundberg (R-Berthoud), an RSCC member who also sits on the State Affairs Committee.
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