For roughly 15 hours, starting on Thursday and throughout the day on Friday, the Colorado Statehouse floor was serenaded with the sweet sounds of an automated voice reading the entirety of the state budget proposal – more than 650 pages of dry legalese.
It’s a stalling tactic the minority party has successfully used, especially nearing the end of the legislative session, when the timeline is truncated and proposals can pass or fail based on the calendar, although it has apparently never been fully deployed on the exceptionally long budget bill.
Colorado lawmakers are constitutionally required to pass a balanced budget and the plan was to pass the bill by the end of Friday. That was, until Republican Representative Brandi Bradley of Douglas County requested the reading to throw a wrench in House debate over the budget, aptly known as the Long Bill. Her request delayed a key vote by several days.
“I believe that we needed to take a pause,” Bradley said. “When you jam something that’s so important into two days instead of a whole week’s long discussion, then everyone needs to pause and regroup.”
Colorado is facing a $1.5 billion dollar shortfall this year and the powerful Joint Budget Committee spent months combing through the state budget for cuts big and small to address that hole.
Bradley said even after those cuts, the budget remains too big, and the proposed changes, like shrinking Medicaid provider reimbursement rates by 2% and limiting services for people with disabilities, aren’t in taxpayers’ best interest.
“We’re borrowing from Prop 123,” Bradley said, referring to an affordable housing fund approved by voters in 2022, “We’re shrinking the reserve we’re taking from the Unclaimed Property Trust Fund. That is like me taking a credit card, spending frivolously and then claiming bankruptcy. That is not okay.”
Bradley was also using the delay tactic to draw attention to other issues. When she initially requested the Long Bill reading on Wednesday night, she discussed a broken ethical complaint system at the legislature that is “ripe with abuse,” apparently referring to the unsatisfactory result of an ethics complaint she filed against a colleague, Republican Rep. Ron Weinberg, last year. She called on the chamber to “address our own shortcomings, the unjustness of our own rules and bring both light and justice to victims in this House, including myself and others.”
Lawmakers are planning to work over the weekend to make up for time lost to the bill reading, so the Senate can still take up the measure next week. The weekend work is especially bad news for Republicans, who are holding their state assembly in Pueblo on Saturday.
The conflict didn’t seem to bother Bradley.
“ The state assembly will continue,” she said. “I’m here to represent my district and that’s what my district elected me to do. And so I will gladly be here to represent my district.”
But many of her colleagues on both sides of the aisle were annoyed by her decision to request the 15-hour long reading of the budget, and considered it a massive waste of time.
“Everybody’s threatened to read the Long Bill at length,” said Democratic Rep. Brianna Titone of Arvada, who said it was a common negotiating tactic for those in the minority. “In the eight years I’ve been here this is the first time that someone’s actually gone through with it.”
As the automated voice droned on, lawmakers had to get creative about passing the time. Some milled around talking. Others retreated to their offices. Anticipating boredom, Titone came to the Capitol Thursday with her sewing machine, some fabric and a complicated vintage dress pattern.
‘I knew we would just be standing around trying to occupy time,” she said. “You kind of go crazy sitting around.”
The dress took less time to finish than the Long Bill.
“ It’s an unfortunate waste of resources,” she said. “ I’m mostly frustrated about all of the other people who have to work too—alll the front desk people, security.”
Under the House rules, Bradley, as the initiator of the reading, was the only member of the chamber required to sit through the entire ordeal on the House floor. She said it was all be worth it if it draws attention to her perspective. Under those same rules, she had the power to end the reading at any time. But she was not appear inclined to do so.
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