The third day of the Colorado legislature’s special session moved along at a stutter-start pace Saturday, as leadership leaned on procedural rules to relieve partisan acrimony in the state House.
After moving to shut down Republicans’ lengthy opposition, House leadership shepherded through Democrats’ priority package of revenue-raising tax changes, sending them to the state Senate by Saturday afternoon. The tax bills, which targeted the wealthiest taxpayers and various corporate-friendly incentives, would raise $250 million as part of Democrats’ three-pronged plan to fill a $783 million budget hole ripped open by the tax bill signed by President Donald Trump last month.
Simultaneously, a smaller group of lawmakers and lobbyists worked to find a path forward on amending Colorado’s first-in-the-nation — and much-maligned — artificial intelligence regulations. A bill backed by progressive lawmakers and the Senate’s second-ranking Democrat was awaiting an Appropriations Committee vote in the Senate on Saturday. But Democratic support on the committee was shaky, and the bill’s supporters were working to finish amendments to ease concerns from opponents.
The slow progression of House votes left the Senate largely adrift for most of the day: With the exception of the AI bill, Senators had little to do but twiddle their thumbs and wait for the House to send them the tax reform bills.
By the afternoon, House leadership pulled procedural levers to end debate, hurry along their languishing legislation and end growing tension in the chamber. Senate leaders then made their own moves to fix their backlog: They struck one Democrat from the Appropriations Committee who opposed the AI bill, and swapped in two others, apparently to ease the bill’s journey deeper into the legislature.
Sen. Robert Rodriguez, the Democratic majority leader and the sponsor of the AI bill, said his proposal was only part of the reason he rearranged the committee.
“AI was one thing,” he said. Several other bills — including all of the revenue-raisers — were routed to Senate Appropriations. “It’s such a narrow committee that it needed to be a bigger size.”
Saturday was the third day of the special session, which is now set to stretch into next week. The dual purpose of the session — responding to the federal tax bill and fixing the state’s AI regulations — has led to parallel policy debates.
Democrats are largely aligned on raising revenues by limiting or nixing corporate-friendly tax rules. But the legislature’s minority of Republicans is opposed — hence Saturday’s slow start.
The AI debate, meanwhile, has prompted dueling bills from different coalitions of the Democratic caucus, and that debate largely has unfolded behind the scenes. One, backed by more-moderate lawmakers, now seeks a delay of the existing regulations, which seek to prevent discrimination by AI systems that influence hiring or lending decisions.
The other, supported by progressive legislators and allied groups, seeks more disclosure from AI companies and tighter rules to prevent discrimination.
A path forward remained elusive: After extensive meetings and negotiations, both bills remained in limbo by Saturday night.
Revenue shortfall
The first half of Saturday revolved around the tax bill debate. By early afternoon, only one of the Democrats’ revenue-raisers had moved to the Senate, the first of a package of bills Democrats said was vital to avoid cuts to core state services.
“Eighty percent of the tax breaks from Trump’s bill went to corporations, totaled almost $1 billion in lost revenue to Colorado,” Rep. Emily Sirota, a Denver Democrat, said. “So it’s only fair that we are closing tax loopholes and benefits that really go to corporations because we have got to preserve critical services that our constituents depend on.”
The debate was lengthy: Republicans, who have sought to shift blame for the budget hole away from Trump and onto state Democrats, all opposed the tax changes and talked at length against them Saturday.
“What we are trying to do on the minority side is mitigate the harm to the taxpayers caused by these policies put into place by the majority,” Minority Leader Rose Pugliese, the House’s top Republican, said. (Republicans are the minority; Democrats are the majority.)
The slow pace eventually led to some Democratic needling. Rep. Sean Camacho, a Denver Democrat, noted the daily cost of running a special session and accused Republicans of wasting money by taking up as much time as possible. That prompted Republicans to protest that they were voicing legitimate opposition.
Democratic leadership then moved to end the debate entirely, quickly forcing votes on all the bills and, finally, sending all of them to the Senate.
The tension had been building: Democrats have been frustrated by Republican messaging on the revenue shortfall, while Republicans have called for spending cuts that Democrats are trying to limit. GOP legislators also have sought to blame Democratic spending and pointed to largely unrelated budget forecasts from June as evidence that Trump and congressional Republicans aren’t to blame for the fiscal situation.
State economists and nonpartisan staffers have said the shortfall is a direct consequence of the tax bill and Colorado’s rare mirroring of federal tax policy. Although the state was likely to face a budget shortfall next year, that was the result of pre-existing budgetary constraints. That separate shortfall was also a year away, unlike the hole caused by the tax bill, which was immediate and needed a special session to fix.
AI debate
Meanwhile, the Senate’s thumb-twiddling ended as the wheels in the House finally began to spin. By mid-afternoon, the package of revenue-raisers was marched down the hall to the Senate, where leadership then restructured the Appropriations Committee. The committee then advanced part of the tax package.
But the path forward for the AI bill remained unclear. Rodriguez, the bill’s sponsor, said late Saturday afternoon that negotiations were continuing with the coalition of business, tech and government groups who were skeptical of his proposal. He declined to detail those discussions but said that some progress had been made.
“They’ve been offering proposals, and everyone has been like, ‘That’s a nonstarter,’ ” he said of the bill’s opponents. “Last night, they sent us a proposal like — OK, this at least recognizes what we’re looking for.”
Both sides have redlines they’ve been unwilling to cross: Rodriguez’s bill requires AI developers and the companies that use them to disclose what information AI uses to make decisions on tasks such as job or banking applications. It also places liability on developers and the companies that use the technology to screen people.
By early Saturday evening, both Rodriguez’s bill and the competing proposal — which was due for a first House vote — were pulled back from planned debates. Negotiations — and accompanying frustrations — were set to continue Sunday.
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