The (Grand Junction) Daily Sentinel, Feb. 3, on President Trump nominating Colorado’s Neil Gorsuch for Supreme Court:
With President Trump’s nomination of Coloradan Neil Gorsuch to fill the vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court, all eyes turn to Senate Democrats.
Will they or won’t they play hardball? They could refuse to allow hearings or a vote on Gorsuch, much the same way Republicans refused to consider then-President Barack Obama’s pick, Merrick Garland.
As satisfying as this might be for the party faithful, Republicans wield a large club. If Democrats refuse to cooperate, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell could change voting procedures. Instead of needing 60 votes to confirm, the Senate could invoke rules that would allow confirmation of a Supreme Court nominee on a simple majority vote. That’s 51 votes. There are 52 Republicans in the Senate.
If exercised, this “nuclear option” kills any incentive to find compromise in the future because whichever party holds the majority in the Senate will win.
Even without this dramatic backdrop, we would hope that Democrats would drop their retaliatory instincts and simply focus on the merits of the nominee. Yes, the manner in which Republicans handled Garland’s nomination was unsavory and reckless. In fact, agreeing to a confirmation hearing would give Democrats the opportunity to ask Gorsuch himself whether “the Senate has a constitutional obligation either to consent or deny consent to a presidential nominee,” the legal scholar Alan Dershowitz noted in an essay for The Boston Globe.
As a constitutional “originalist,” Gorsuch would have to express at least some concerns about the actions of Republican senators following the death of Justice Antonin Scalia a year ago, Dershowitz added.
Knowing there’s little they can do to stop Gorsuch’s confirmation, Democrats would at least get the vindication of an answer and preserve the 60-vote threshold to fight for a moderate the next time a liberal justice retires.
So there’s a practical aspect of giving Gorsuch a fair shake. But he’s also a respected jurist who appears to be eminently qualified for the job, even if his record tilts conservative.
“Like Scalia, Gorsuch is a proponent of originalism - meaning that judges should attempt to interpret the words of the Constitution as they were understood at the time they were written - and a textualist who considers only the words of the law being reviewed, not legislators’ intent or the consequences of the decision,” Robert Barnes wrote for The Washington Post.
While we agree that the Scalia vacancy should have been filled by a qualified candidate nominated by President Barack Obama when he still had nearly a year left in his term, relitigating that now is counterproductive. The Senate can and should be better than that. It should complete the court and end the uncertainty of a deadlock.
Any attempt to punish Republicans would punish all of us by keeping judicial review in a state of suspended animation.
Editorial: https://bit.ly/2kh8OQX
___
The Denver Post, Feb. 4, on oil and gas grants:
We don’t like being the bad guys and singling out for cuts a grant program beloved by local elected officials who get to snip the ribbons on new recreation centers in still-depressed regions of Colorado, but that’s what we’re about to do.
There are more critical needs in the state than those currently being met by the Energy Impact Assistance Fund Grants, and it’s time lawmakers addressed the sacred cash cow and spent the money elsewhere.
How the state will spend roughly $175 million in severance tax revenue next year from oil and gas operators has come under intense scrutiny, after The Denver Post’s Christopher N. Osher illuminated the issue last Sunday in a report about how other states have amassed large reserve funds to benefit future generations with their oil and gas dollars.
In Colorado, severance tax dollars are spent almost immediately and divided four ways (after $1.5 million is taken off the top for the Colorado Energy Office). About 35 percent goes to fund grants that can fix roads pulverized by the industry’s heavy equipment or build new wastewater treatment plants and add missing broadband infrastructure for rural communities. Local jurisdictions also get 15 percent through a funding formula based in part on the level of activity in each area.
Another 25 percent goes to fund the Department of Natural Resources, including inspectors who check for methane leaks and regulate oil spills. Another 25 percent is used to give low-interest loans to water management entities with water infrastructure projects.
The system has worked fairly well historically. For example, the water loan program has amassed a value of about $300 million in expected future loan and interest payments, while filling a gap in financing for critical projects like dams and water storage.
So why question the system now? Colorado’s economy may be strong, but complex interlocking formulas in and around the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights mean that next year’s state budget challenges are severe for K-12 education, higher education and other essential services.
Many of the projects getting funded by the severance tax local grants strike us as less than essential. Amphitheaters, trails, events centers and renovated town halls are nice to have, but not when the state is forgoing billions of dollars in critical statewide infrastructure projects.
Several former lawmakers expressed a similar healthy scrutiny of the grant program to Osher.
North Dakota has squirreled away $4 billion from oil and gas taxes to create a fund that now generates about $300 million in annual interest earnings that lawmakers will begin deciding how to spend. By comparison, Colorado has “frittered away” severance taxes, said Pat Steadman, a former state senator and budget guru extraordinaire.
We get the argument that severance taxes fluctuate so wildly it is unwise to use their revenue as a source for general operating costs. But that doesn’t mean the state can’t use some of the money to bring the reserve fund back up to 6.5 percent, as Gov. John Hickenlooper is suggesting, or to fund critical statewide highway projects. It wouldn’t be the first time lawmakers “raided” severance taxes to pay for other state needs. Osher reports that $360 million has been diverted since 2008.
In a good year, the state can give away between $50 million and $100 million in grants. That amount of money, on an annual basis, could be the start of a fund set aside for infrastructure. It would require lawmakers to change the law, slowly phasing out the grants so communities who have been planning applications for years, have two or three last-minute funding shots.
Such a move need not sound disrespectful of local control, when one considers that Colorado’s oil and gas tax system already is structured to drive more of the economic benefit to local communities. Instead of having a high severance tax rate, as some other big energy producing states have, Colorado relies on an 87.5 percent assessment rate for oil and gas property taxes at the county level. The industry then gets lucrative tax credits for what it pays in property taxes to reduce severance tax bills.
For example, Weld County - the location of about half of the state’s drilling and extraction activity - received more than $403 million in property taxes in 2015. The county also received $1.7 million in direct distribution payments in 2015 and has won $67 million in grants from the severance program since 2008. The state could keep and even increase the direct payments and scrap the grants.
We’re not saying Weld and other counties pock-marked with oil rigs and gas pads shouldn’t get payments to help offset the inherent challenges oil and gas development brings to communities. But the system is skewed too heavily in their favor with too little focus on long-term sustainability.
Colorado’s lawmakers ought to do the hard work of rethinking how the state allocates and spends its oil and gas severance tax money. Given the power that fracking grants the industry, and huge reserves capable of generating wealth for years to come, Colorado needs to make sure it is poised to take advantage of those revenues going forward.
After all, North Dakota lawmakers figured it out.
Editorial: https://dpo.st/2kCksa6
___
The Durango Herald, Feb. 1, on methane emissions rules:
In 2014, NASA discovered a methane cloud the size of Delaware hovering over the San Juan Basin. Although this area includes a vast outcrop that releases methane naturally, there are more than 23,000 gas wells in southwest Colorado and northern New Mexico. These wells are flared, vented and, inevitably, there are leaks - in pipelines too.
Methane waste is not a new problem. In 2014, Colorado adopted legislation to reduce human-produced methane emissions - a greenhouse gas 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide - and wasted gas, improve air quality and recoup lost revenue.
This past November, modeled in part on the success of Colorado’s regulations, the Bureau of Land Management finalized rules, which had not been updated in 30 years, to capture methane emissions from oil and gas operations on BLM-managed public and tribal lands.
These regulations, crafted with broad stakeholder input from industry, environmentalists, tribes and regulators, make good economic and environmental sense, and protect our public health. They mitigate the loss of $330 million annually in taxpayer-owned gas lost to venting and flaring, gas that through royalties could otherwise go to local communities and tribes to pay for schools and infrastructure, and to supply natural gas to up to 740,000 households each year.
The BLM methane rule is currently under threat as Republicans in Congress seek to take a legislative ax to the rule using the little known Congressional Review Act. The CRA has been used only once since it became law in 1996, for a reason. It is extreme and should not be used to repeal the BLM’s new methane rule.
Doing so would immediately void the rule and prohibit the BLM from ever again issuing a similar rule. It would negate years of agency staff time, 300,000 public comments and tribal consultations, and it would harm public health. If there are problems, as industry suggests, the agencies should revisit the rule, not discard it.
We look to our congressional delegation, Rep. Scott Tipton and Sens. Michael Bennet and Cory Gardner, to see that public resources are stewarded responsibly, our public health and environment protected, and the rule retained.
Editorial: https://bit.ly/2jZF1fx
___
The (Longmont) Times-Call, Feb. 5, on a public records laws:
A little more a year ago, the Fort Collins Coloradoan began a project on the salary increases at Colorado State University. So, a reporter requested a digital copy of the information, which the university kept. Rather than turn over the easily searchable version of the database, the university directed the newspaper to a 143-page document kept at the school’s library.
Legal? Yes.
Useful for students and the public in general to know how their tax dollars and fees were being spent at a time of increasing tuition and concern over a tight budget for higher education? Not at all.
That is why a year ago, state Sen. John Kefalas of Fort Collins introduced a bill that would require the custodians of public records to provide them in digital format where possible.
That bill was killed in committee, on a party line vote, due to concerns about cost recovery, the release of confidential information and clarity about what exactly would be required, or not, of records custodians. But even then, its opponents pledged to work with Kefalas on a bill they could accept.
This year, Kefalas is back with a similar bill, SB 17-040, written to make sure clerks and other keepers of public records aren’t legally required to do what technologically they can’t do, and aren’t burdened with extra costs, while opening the door to the information the public should be able to access.
It’s time to move this patch in Colorado’s open records law forward to the governor’s desk.
Information kept in government databases is paid for by taxpayers. And its accessibility allows the public to keep a better eye on how its money is spent. That Coloradoan article, for instance, revealed that the seven administrators who reported directly to the university president were receiving, by percentage and not just total pay, higher raises than average faculty and staff members; and that male faculty members on average were earning more than equally qualified female faculty members.
While many public records custodians are willing, even eager, to share information with those who pay their salaries, others are not. And efforts by the press to access that information often are met with foot-dragging or the placement of onerous barriers to frustrate requests.
Senate Bill 40 removes one of those barriers, a legal barrier that lawmakers have the opportunity to remove. And they should do it this year.
Editorial: https://bit.ly/2lkgAKT
Please read our comment policy before commenting.