Lamborn fails first test of democracy
Despite serving 12 years in the Colorado legislature and another dozen in Congress, Doug Lamborn this week somehow failed basic democracy.
To get on the Republican primary ballot in pursuit of his seventh term, the Colorado Springs Republican needed only to gather 1,000 signatures of registered voters in his district.
Lamborn submitted 1,783, but the Colorado Secretary of State’s office invalidated 514 of them, and a successful court challenge by five voters threw out another 327 signatures because the two paid petition circulators who gathered them were not Colorado residents, as required by the law.
With the Colorado Supreme Court’s unanimous decision this week to reject the signatures on little more than a silly — but explicitly required — technicality, Lamborn appears to be a lame duck on his way out of office unless his improbable last-ditch federal-court challenge gains traction.
Although par for the course in Colorado politics these days, hiring signature collectors to put a candidate or issue on the ballot seems like a bastardization of the democratic process — or lazy, at the very least.
Instead of standing outside grocery stores and ball fields himself and with campaign staffers and volunteers to collect signatures to gain a spot on the June 26 primary ballot, Lamborn hired Colora-
do Springs-based Kennedy Enterprises, LLC, who employed the circulators now determined to have no real ties to Colorado.
(Republican gubernatorial candidate Walker Stapleton also used Kennedy Enterprises to collect more than 10,500 signatures that he needed, but then withdrew them upon learning of legal questions about a petition circulator and instead gained access to the statewide ballot by garnering delegates in the GOP assembly. Stapleton, the state treasurer, accused the firm of “fraudulent conduct” by employing a non-resident “trainee circulator” who then passed the signatures he had gathered on to another, legitimate signature collector.)
Lamborn now is asking a federal court to overturn the state petition law, arguing — with some philosophical merit, albeit scant legal footing — that a petition circulator’s residency should have no bearing, and, in fact, throwing out the otherwise legitimate signatures of unwitting registered voters disenfran- chises them.
That Lamborn embarrassingly would struggle to meet even the rather minimal signature threshold in any account speaks volumes of the lackluster impression he has left during his unremarkable tenure. Two years ago, he nearly lost his job when relative unknown GOP challenger Calandra Vargas dominated him in the Republican assembly and came just 18 votes short of precluding him from the primary ballot entirely.
Perfectly polite and well-rehearsed with stock conservative talking points, Lamborn effuses vanilla blandness and consistently has found himself in the right place at the right time to win and stay in office, typically by winning pluralities in split GOP fields without generating any particular passion among voters. Republican? Good enough in the conservative 5th Congressional District.
Lamborn has spent his Washington career as a consummate back-bencher, unable to craft any significant legislation and seemingly incapable of even imagining any policies beyond right-wing pipe dreams of outlawing abortion, removing all restrictions on gun ownership and generally defenestrating any form of effective government.
Perhaps the highlight of his time in Congress — if you can call it that — is when he gained national notoriety in 2011 for invoking the racially loaded term “tar baby” in referring to President Obama. In 2013, he also introduced a non-binding resolution that “strongly disapproves of attempts to ban references to Christmas,” as if such folly — a popular trope in rightwing quarters — has happened at any time, anywhere.
This is not to say that Lamborn hasn’t represented his conservative constituency well, for he has proven to be an unflinching hardliner who never bucks his party, and, what’s more, has reliably supported Donald Trump, despite all that is Trump.
But would we expect anything different with the Republicans who have qualified for the primary ballot — El Paso County Commissioner Darryl Glenn and state Sen. Owen Hill?
At the very least, we know that they seem to have passed the first requirement of democracy: demonstrating popular support.