Some local officials aren’t worried
The 4th District touches 21 counties. A couple of county commissioners contacted by The Denver Post were nonplussed by the empty House seat. It will mostly be a “non-issue” for Douglas County, by far the district’s most populous, said Commissioner George Teal.
That’s in large part because Buck eschewed earmarks, which are congressional spending measures aimed at funding particular projects in a particular district. So there are no promised infrastructure projects suddenly in danger of getting spiked because he’s gone, Teal said.
“He didn’t believe in pork-barrel politics,” he said of Buck.
Wendy Buxton-andrade, a commissioner in Prowers County, said she and her colleagues don’t think the temporary lack of congressional representation will have a “huge impact on us right now.” Prowers County, home to Lamar and Granada, rides up against the Kansas state line in Colorado’s southeast corner.
U.S. Sens. Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper “will probably pick up the slack for three months, and if we need to have our voices heard during the three months, we can reach out to them,” she wrote in an email.
Bennet is planning to meet with residents in the 4th District “this spring and summer,” said his deputy press secretary, Patrick Barham Quesada. Meanwhile, Hickenlooper’s office said the junior senator will look out for the interests of Buck’s former constituents during the vacancy, including “handling any casework for residents in the 4th.”
Both senators are Democrats, and the 4th is the state’s most Republicanleaning district. But not everything connected to Congress is partisan — constituent services, such as assisting residents in obtaining passports or Social Security cards, are some of the pedestrian tasks lawmakers do for those they represent.
Vacancies in Congress have been more common in other states. In an academic paper Tyler Ritchie, a graduate of Columbia Law School, wrote last year for the Columbia Journal of Law and Social Problems, he noted that in the quarter century from 1997 to 2021, there were 136 vacancies in the House.
Four seats are vacant currently, according to the Cook Political Report, including that of former House Speaker Kevin Mccarthy of California, who resigned Dec. 31.
Those vacancies have gotten longer in recent years, Ritchie found. The average length of an empty seat in the first five years of that period clocked in at 104 days, but in the past five years, the average absence had increased to 173 days.
The longest was 359 days — from December 2017 to November 2018 — after the resignation of Michigan U.S. Rep. John Conyers Jr., according to his research.
That puts Colorado Gov. Jared Polis’ decision to set the special election in the 4th Congressional District for June 25, timing that’s within the guardrails set by state law, at the shorter end of the House vacancy spectrum. It will fall on the same day as the district’s party primaries for the regular election in November.