Penry wants to punt on fixing Amendment 23/TABOR conflicts

Speaker Of the House Andrew Romanoff and a bi-partisan group of leaders, including Republican Attorney General John Suthers, have offered a fix to Colorado's conflicted constitution. The Taxpayers Bill of Rights caps state spending and requires all moneys left over to be refunded to the taxpayers. Amendment 23 requires the state to spend more money on education every year based on a formula of inflation plus population. What ends up happening is that the required increases in education spending eat away at the state spending cap, forcing cuts in other areas of the budget like health care and transportation. Romanoff's plan would ask voters to approve a new constitutional Amendment which would keep the spending caps in place but would forever return monies collected over that limit to the state education fund. TABOR's requirement that all tax increases be voter approved would remain. It's a sensible solution and one that will permanently fix the constitution in the only way that that is possible, through a constitutional amendment.

Now though we have Republican state Senator Josh Penry offering up his own plan. Not surprisingly it's an inadequate fix and will just paper over the real issues facing the state, pushing them off onto another legislature to fix at some other time.

Republicans unveiled their own budget fix Wednesday, saying it's an easier and more conservative solution than an effort already underway.

Part of what the state now dedicates to K-12 education — about $2.5 billion over a decade — would instead fund both roads and a state savings account under the GOP plan.

And with no constitutional changes required, it would not take a lengthy ballot initiative to pass, Sen. Josh Penry, R-Grand Junction, said...

Penry wants to take the easy way out. He wants to paper over a serious constitutional flaw with a milquetoast statutory "fix". He doesn't want to address the problem now, he wants to punt it to a future state legislature.

This is a very simple concept to understand - when you have an issue within a constitution you cannot solve them by offering statutory changes. Penry clearly recognizes that there is an issue, if he didn't why offer a competing "fix"? He'd just prefer if someone else did the heavy lifting in finding a constitutional fix to our constitutional problems.

That pretty sums up the Colorado GOP doesn't it? Always looking for the easy way out.

Cross-posted at Colorado Pols