The next week will be crazy under the Gold Dome. The legislative session will formally be done at midnight on May 11. Late bills are allowed with the permission of Senate and House leadership, and many legislators are pursuing this avenue, some with the intent to sneak a bill through the process. The Senate has dozens of bills that have not yet been seen by House Committees, much less gone through second and third readings and votes.
The House, on the other hand, laid over several bills that might be controversial last week because Rep. Larry Liston was forced to have emergency eye surgery and was absent last week, leaving the Republicans one vote short of a majority. Larry is scheduled to be back this week and Ive been told that our days will probably go from early morning until midnight or beyond. Lobbyists tell me it will be as hurried as they have seen. I fear that the rush will mean that bills will not be scrutinized to the extent that they should and next session will be spent amending half done law. If a bill is not important enough to have a good discussion with ample time, it should wait till next year. I have chosen not to ask for any late bills.
Last Friday, we passed a resolution commemorating the Holocaust. I had the pleasure of reading an essay written by Eloria, a senior at New Vista High School in Boulder. She wrote about her experience of visiting Poland last summer and her strong feelings of hurt and shame for the horrific mass executions of hundreds of thousands of Jews and others by the Nazis in World War II. She pointed out that many had forgotten or had never learned the horrific events of only 70 years ago. She lamented that the death camps of Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, and Majdanek were places to refect on the disastrous combination of hatred mixed with apathy.
Eloria recounted her experience of taking a stand against peers who made fun of the tragedy of the millions who died, and she enforced the idea that American education has become American-centric, which she argued is a huge mistake and will result in forgetting important historical lessons. She concluded by driving home the fact that hatred kills and apathy destroys.
The resolution brought to my remembrance the first time that I visited the Holocaust museum in Washington D.C. at the behest of Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell and Linda Campbell. I stayed in the museum for hours, horrified by the death, the mounds of naked bodies, and of how, like sheep led to slaughter, they went without a fight. The first thing that Hitler removed from the populace was guns. I was also horrified by the way mainstream German people followed, without question, the very popular Adolf Hitler. Again the people followed like sheep while ignoring the atrocities that occurred directly under their noses. May it never be so in the United States of America!
J. Paul Brown represents House District 59 in Colorados General Assembly. The district encompasses San Juan, Archuleta and La Plata counties and parts of Montezuma County. Contact Rep. Brown at (303) 866-2914 or by e-mail at jpaul.brown.house@state.co.us.
