Donald Trump

In wake of GOP Obamacare repeal’s failure, calls for bipartisan fixes get louder in Colorado

DENVER – In the wake of the failure of Senate Republicans’ efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act early Friday, Colorado’s lawmakers and governor said they weren’t ready to give up on fixing issues with the nation’s health care system that both parties have acknowledged need to be addressed.

While Democrats were pleased that the “skinny repeal” bill Republicans threw together Friday in an effort to get to conference committee discussions with the House failed in a narrow 49-51 vote, they said there was still work to be done going forward. Continue reading

Colorado to send voter info. to Trump commission Monday; no evidence any withdrawals were ineligible

DENVER – Colorado will send the voter roll information requested by President Donald Trump’s election integrity commission over by the end of Monday, after the secretary of state’s office received a new request for the information on Wednesday.

The vice chair of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, said in his latest letter to Colorado Secretary of State Wayne Williams that the commission had addressed issues Williams and others brought up by implementing a new file transfer system for the voter roll information that will send it straight to the White House securely. Continue reading

In evening vote, Cory Gardner shows health care hand by supporting failed BCRA procedural amendment

DENVER – In two procedural votes Tuesday, Colorado finally got a look at what cards U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner is holding as Republicans push to repeal and possibly replace the Affordable Care Act.

Gardner voted for the motion to proceed to debate on the bills—something that in and of itself was a victory for Senate Republicans when it passed on a tiebreaking vote by the vice president. Previous Senate versions of the bill had failed to get enough votes to make it to the floor for discussion. Continue reading

Sen. Cory Gardner votes for repeal of Obamacare in failed effort, staying true to his past

DENVER – U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner voted Wednesday to repeal much of the Affordable Care Act in another failed effort by Senate Republicans—keeping in line with how he voted in his first days as a senator in 2015 and holding true to his years-long promise that he’d repeal the health care law.

Gardner and his staff have avoided answering any questions in recent weeks about how he might vote in the latest efforts by the GOP to reach a party-wide compromise to repeal the ACA, also known as Obamacare, and possibly replace it later. But he’d spoken out in recent months against a straight-repeal bill, as well as against any bills that wouldn’t adequately cover the Medicaid population or people with pre-exisiting conditions. Continue reading

Sen. Cory Gardner votes ‘yes’ on motion to proceed to GOP health care bill; what comes next?

DENVER – U.S. Senator Cory Gardner voted Tuesday in favor of the motion to proceed to a Senate floor debate on Republicans’ efforts to repeal, and possibly replace, the Affordable Care Act—despite not knowing what bill the Senate might take up to debate first.

The final vote came down to Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who came back to the Senate just days after being diagnosed with brain cancer to cast a vote. Continue reading

Western Conservative Summit 2017 kicks off in Denver with Gardner, Buck, Sekulow among speakers

DENVER – The Western Conservative Summit kicks off Friday in Denver, and though President Donald Trump won’t be there this year as he was in 2016, the event is packed with high-profile Republicans and comes in the midst of a trying time for the GOP in Washington.

The yearly summit comes as Senate Republicans are expected to try for a last-ditch effort to get one of three possible health care bills to the floor early next week, though some of the senators who have opted to oppose bringing the Senate’s bills to the floor remain on the fence.

It also comes after a week of discord in the White House, as President Trump seemed to throw Attorney General Jeff Sessions under the bus over his recusal from the Justice Department probe into the 2016 in an interview with the New York Times on Wednesday, and White House press secretary Sean Spicer resigned Friday after Anthony Scaramucci was appointed as new White House communications director.

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke will be at the summit, and announced Friday that Colorado’s Canyons of the Ancients National Monument would remain a national monument after a review of designations made under presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama that was ordered by President Trump in April.

U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner, R-Colo., is scheduled to speak at the summit on Friday evening, though it’s unclear exactly what time or what he’ll talk about.

He’s been among the most under-pressure Senate Republicans regarding the GOP’s attempts to repeal and/or replace the Affordable Care Act, as he’s yet to definitively take a public stand one way or another on any of the three proposals laid out by the Senate GOP over the past two weeks.

Earlier this week, he seemed to tip his hand on how he felt when he said he wasn’t happy with people who he said were “spiking the football” after efforts to get a repeal-now, replace-later bill to a floor vote.

But in an interview with the Denver Post Thursday, he said he “would prefer a solution that would be a replacement” for the Affordable Care Act, perhaps a hint he wasn’t pushing for the repeal-only bill that some of his Senate colleagues have sought to vote on.

But Gardner said he wouldn’t speculate on if he’d support that bill.

“I don’t know that’s what would come up and I don’t want to say that I’m going to vote for this, that or the other before I see it and before I know what’s in it,” Gardner’s told The Post. “I don’t see why anybody should be concerned about fighting for legislation that they believe will do better than what we have.”

But Gardner also told The Post he wouldn’t focus only on health care in his speech to the Western Conservative Summit on Friday.

A group of advocates is expected to gather outside the convention center at 4 p.m. Friday to protest.

Many Colorado’s Republican governor candidates for 2018 will also be at the summit. Victor Mitchell will speak Friday night, and George Brauchler and Doug Robinson are scheduled to talk Saturday.

State Sen. Owen Hill, who is running for Colorado’s 5th Congressional District seat in the Republican primary for 2018, will also speak Saturday afternoon, and Rep. Ken Buck will speak Saturday night.

Also scheduled to speak Saturday night is Jay Sekulow, who President Trump has hired to represent him in the Russia scandal and who on Friday denied reports that Trump and the White House were discussing the possibility of pardons in the future.

The conference kicks off at 1:30 p.m. Friday, and the final session will start Sunday at 9:30 a.m. at the Colorado Convention Center.

More information can be found here. 

See the angry emails Americans sent to President Trump’s election integrity commission

DENVER – President Donald Trump’s election integrity commission has received plenty of criticism about its motives for requesting voter roll information from every state in the U.S., and emails the White House released last week show just how angry some Americans are.

Though some people answered the commission’s request for input from citizens with constructive input on what they hoped the commission would accomplish, the overwhelming majority of responses the White House released were negative.

For more on how Colorado is handling the commission’s request, click here.

Some trolled the commission over the security of its transfer system, while others blatantly told the commission and its vice chair, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, to shove it (though often in much more flowery language).

Kobach and the commission were again widely mocked Wednesday after the commission’s first meeting, when Kobach said on MSNBC that “we may never know” if Hillary Clinton won the popular vote last year (she did by several million votes), and when he said “absolutely” when asked if votes cast for Trump were also in doubt.

The commission was only formed by the president after his yet-unfounded claims that “millions of people” voted illegally in last year’s election.

We’ve collected some of the responses and put them in one place for easy reading. Tap the image below or click here to see them. (Editor's note: The White House didn't redact email addresses or names, but we have.)

Denver Sheriff Department disputes ICE claim it didn’t notify of inmate’s release

DENVER – The Denver Sheriff Department is disputing allegations it never notified U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents it was releasing an inmate with an immigration detainer from custody.

Late on Tuesday, ICE said it had picked up Ricardo Daniel Lopez-Vera, 19, and was holding him pending a hearing in front of a federal immigration judge.

ICE said it had placed an immigration detainer on Lopez-Vera on July 11—a day after he was involved in a fight that left another inmate dead. Continue reading

Colorado Dems call for Trump election integrity commission to be disbanded, citing voter withdrawals

DENVER – Three of Colorado’s members of Congress are calling for President Donald Trump’s controversial election integrity commission to be disbanded or handcuffed in the wake of nearly 4,000 voter registration withdrawals in their home state over the past three weeks.

Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., sent a letter to the commission, its vice chair, Kris Kobach, and Vice President Mike Pence asking they “immediately terminate” the commission, which he said was “wasteful and harmful” and formed only “as the result of delusion, conspiracy theories, and truly ‘fake news.’”

He said the “entire premise for its origination has zero basis in any peer-reviewed study or analysis” in the letter before going on to call the commission’s quest to get voter roll information from each state a “taxpayer-funded fishing expedition” that he said was “eroding trust and confidence in our democratic institutions and perpetuating fear in communities throughout the country.”

Bennet pointed to the nearly-4,000 Coloradans, most of whom are Democrats or unaffiliated voters, who had withdrawn their voter registrations since the commission’s request was sent to Colorado Secretary of State Wayne Williams as reasons why the commission should be dissolved.

“Given the spike in these registration withdrawals, I request that you immediately end the commission and describe how you intend to reverse the damage that it has already caused in my state,” Bennet wrote.

Most of the registration withdrawals since June 28 have been chalked up to the commission’s vice chair’s request, and Colorado Secretary of State Wayne Williams’ saying that he’d hand over the voter roll information that he’s required to under state law.

In Colorado, that means he’s required to send a voter’s full name, address, party affiliation and date the person registered, phone number, gender identity, birth year, and information about if a person has voted in prior elections.

The commission had also requested two things that Colorado won’t hand over: a voter’s Social Security number and a voter’s birth date—things that aren’t public record in Colorado.

But Williams still hasn’t sent over any of the information, as the commission asked last week that no states send the voter roll information over until a federal lawsuit in Washington D.C. is decided.

But Bennet was joined by fellow Colorado Democratic members of Congress in expressing their displeasure with the commission this week, when Reps. Diana DeGette and Jared Polis joined more than 70 other members of the U.S. House of Representatives in also calling for the commission to end its quest for voter roll information.

“The federal government has an obligation to protect the personally identifiable information of the American people. We believe your June 28th request to the states would do the opposite by ignoring the critical need for robust security protocols when transmitting and storing sensitive personally identifiable information and by centralizing it in one place,” the members of Congress wrote.

The commission has gone back-and-forth about how it wanted the states to transmit the information, eventually opting for a secure network on the same day the commission asked states not to send any information over until the lawsuits were resolved.

Calling the commission “bogus,” DeGette said its request was deterring people from participating in democracy.

“It’s clear that many Coloradans simply don’t trust this ill-conceived effort, and for good reason,” DeGette said. “Maintaining the integrity of our elections is a critical priority, but this ‘investigation’ is the wrong solution.”

Williams, as have many others, has repeatedly said that voter fraud in the U.S. is extremely rare.

He noted in a letter to Kobach on Friday in which he outlined Colorado’s voter system that there were only 18 election-related crime cases prosecuted or under investigation in Colorado since November 2000. He also said that the information the commission requested wouldn’t be able to be used to verify the accuracy of voter rolls in the U.S., as most states are withholding some of the information the commission requested–including Kobach’s own Kansas.

There are more than 3.3 million active registered voters in Colorado, meaning that the number of withdrawals amounts to about 0.1 percent of the state’s total voting population.

Cory Gardner laments people ‘spiking the football’ after latest GOP health care failure

DENVER – U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner said Tuesday that people were “spiking the football” after learning that Senate Republicans were again unable to bring a bill to the floor that would repeal Obamacare without an immediate replacement—a move leadership had pivoted to after their second version of a new health care bill failed Monday night.

The Republican from Colorado was notably displeased at the failure of the latest attempt to fulfill the party’s promise to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act during a news conference he held with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and other top Republicans in Congress’ upper chamber. Continue reading