With all the serious stuff going on in the political world — like, will we soon have to buy vaccines for our kids on the black market? — you may find it hard to get all that upset when you hear two Democratic state senators have resigned from their jobs just days after being elected.
After all, the resignations won’t matter much in the ever-important business of our huge, and often implacable, political divide. Two Democrats will be picked to replace the two Democrats who are resigning. And in any case, Democrats overwhelmingly control both houses of the legislature, which opens its 2025 session on Jan. 8.
What does matter, though, is that voters weren’t warned that these resignations could be imminent — or even possible.
And even worse, voters will have no choice in naming the replacements.
And there’s also this: If you’re an unaffiliated voter, like, say, most voters, you get completely disenfranchised, no matter which group of party insiders picks a replacement. It doesn’t seem all that long ago that we voted to allow unaffiliated voters to participate in either primary. People seemed to be clearly pro-franchise.
Instead, we have before us the dreaded vacancy committee, — which, in the case of Sen. Chris Hansen, D-Denver, will be composed of 116 Democratic insiders from his district. And those insiders will pick Hansen’s replacement.
To put that in context, more than 90,000 people voted last November in Hansen’s district. To put that in more context, for you math nerds, the party insiders will represent about 776 actual voters apiece, or at least that’s what the online AI-driven calculator tells me.
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And some vacancy committees — which meet all too often these days—have as few as a dozen members to vote in place of, you know, real voters. The math just doesn’t get any better.
For those of you worried about Donald Trump’s threats to national democracy, here’s a bit of homegrown anti-democracy to consider.
Following Hansen’s resignation — he got a big-money offer to be CEO of La Plata Electric Association and said the job was offered too late in the campaign for him to take his name off the ballot — Sen. Janet Buckner, D-Aurora, announced she was resigning, too, for health and family reasons.
Buckner, who got her job as a vacancy-committee appointment when her husband died in 2015, ran unopposed this time.
Hansen — who first made his way into the state Senate in 2020 when he was a state representative, and appointed by, yes, a vacancy committee — won overwhelmingly in his bid for a second term. And he didn’t just announce a Jan. 9 resignation date, shocking a lot of voters, he also (and I know this gets confusing) publicly endorsed a state representative, who was also just elected, to replace him and then endorsed his choice to replace that state representative.
It sounds cynical. It sounds seamy. It sounds like backroom politics, although probably without the cigar smoke these days. And no matter what you may think of Hansen and/or Buckner or their reasons for resigning, this can’t be the way it should go down. It’s a poke in the eye, or maybe a kick to some other body part, to those who voted for them.
A third state senator, Kevin Van Winkle, R-Highlands Ranch, also resigned, two years into his first four-year Senate term, after running and winning to be a Douglas County commissioner last November. Why would he run for another office after serving only half a term? His replacement, like the replacements for Hansen and Buckner, will run again in 2026.
Come on, we can guess why Van Winkle thought it was OK to run for another office. Because that’s the way things happen in the Colorado legislature. Roughly a third of state legislators have been appointed by party insiders at some point in their careers. And given the importance of incumbency, many of them stick around, despite the low pay.
In other words, three out of 35 state senators will resign by the first few days of the legislative session, accounting for nearly 10% of the entire body.
Hardly any politician admits to liking the idea of vacancy committees. Shad Murib, the state Democratic Party chair, says we desperately need to reform the procedure. We do. It’s bad policy. But if you happen to be a Colorado Rockies’ fan, you must know that simply recognizing the problem doesn’t mean you have much say in doing anything about it.
Marshall Zelinger did a recent piece on 9News about how states replace officials who have resigned. Only four states, Zellinger reported, use the same system as Colorado. In some states, county commissioners do the work. In some states, the governor.
But in half the states, they hold special elections, which may be a little expensive, but what price democracy?
For those who say it would take at least 90 days to put a special election in place and note that there are only 120 days in the Colorado legislative session, you could pretty easily find a way to appoint someone — someone who pledges not to run in the special election — to be in place until an election can be completed and the appointed senator gives way.
In the last legislative session, Rep. Bob Marshall, D-Highlands Ranch, proposed an interesting bill that would disqualify anyone picked by a vacancy committee from running in the next election.
Surprisingly, that bill went nowhere.
But what if enough people were angry enough about the whole mess? Is it cynical to suggest nothing will happen?
Sure it is. And yet, I’m just barely hopeful enough to think that the state legislature might be able to talk me out of that cynicism.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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