{"id":25595,"date":"2019-06-18T09:12:00","date_gmt":"2019-06-18T15:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.summitdaily.com\/news\/opinion-mike-littwin-now-that-sullivan-recall-bid-has-failed-does-state-gop-know-enough-to-be-embarrassed\/"},"modified":"2019-06-18T09:12:00","modified_gmt":"2019-06-18T15:12:00","slug":"opinion-mike-littwin-now-that-sullivan-recall-bid-has-failed-does-state-gop-know-enough-to-be-embarrassed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kift\/local-news\/opinion-mike-littwin-now-that-sullivan-recall-bid-has-failed-does-state-gop-know-enough-to-be-embarrassed\/","title":{"rendered":"Opinion | Mike Littwin: Now that Sullivan recall bid has failed, does state GOP know enough to be embarrassed?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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For those who wonder why Republicans keep losing in Colorado, we give you the latest GOP fail, in which Kristi Burton Brown, vice chair of the state Republican Party, officially ended her doomed-from-the-start recall effort against Rep. Tom Sullivan.<\/p>\n

The idea, as I may have written before, was not simply wrong-headed, but also a textbook case of political ineptitude.<\/p>\n

We can sum up the ineptitude in one sentence: Republicans sought to recall a murder victim\u2019s father for sponsoring a bill he had campaigned on \u2014 in his son Alex\u2019s name \u2014 that he hoped would save the lives of other people\u2019s sons or daughters.<\/p>\n

The ineptitude is embarrassing but hardly surprising. Even if they had somehow gotten the 10,035 signatures required to put the recall on the ballot, they had no chance of actually winning the recall.<\/p>\n

The bill in question, of course, was the red-flag bill, which allows a judge to temporarily remove guns from someone who is deemed dangerous to himself or others. The bill became law, and Sullivan became a recall target, one in a campaign of recalls that Republicans had promised as a strategy to counter the fact that they keep losing in regular elections \u2014 including the 2018 disaster that included the GOP loss of every statewide constitutional office.<\/p>\n

And if this attempted recall of Sullivan \u2014 whose son Alex was killed in the Aurora theater massacre \u2014 seemed ridiculous to you, it seemed that way, too, to many around the nation when they heard of it.<\/p>\n

Apparently not everyone seemed to understand how this would play out. We should start with Burton Brown, who claimed that she was leading this effort as a private citizen and not as a party official. I wasn\u2019t there to see it, but I\u2019m assuming she said this with a straight face. And here\u2019s a line from the unintentionally funny Facebook post she wrote when she ended the failed campaign: \u201cWe have been able to confirm everything we already knew: Tom Sullivan\u2019s days as a State Representative are almost over.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then, of course, there are the Neville wing of the state GOP, led by House Minority Leader Patrick Neville, who promised a series of recalls and must not have understood that it\u2019s a bad idea to choose a recall with national ramifications that you have little chance of winning.<\/p>\n

And there\u2019s Ken Buck, the congressman who inexplicably decided to also run for state party chair and inexplicably won. In his bid for the job, he vowed to teach Democrats how to spell recall. Let\u2019s just say it\u2019s not spelled S-U-L-L-I-V-A-N.<\/p>\n

But mostly this was a production of Dudley Brown and his Rocky Mountain Gun Owners\/Nuts. Strangely \u2014 and I don\u2019t know how else to put it \u2014 the RMGO boys had helped defeat Sullivan\u2019s opponent in 2018, GOP state Rep. Cole Wist, for Wist\u2019s support of a similar red-flag bill. And a year later, Brown decided to go after the man he had just helped elect.<\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t just look crazy. It is crazy. And Wist, to his credit, said so while rejecting the recall effort.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is unfortunate but crystal clear,\u201d Wist said. \u201cRMGO owns the Colorado Republican Party.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dudley Brown had conceded the other day to The Denver Post that they were having trouble getting enough signatures. Of course they were.<\/p>\n

I mean, what was their pitch \u2014 folks, it\u2019s time to recall the guy who ran for office because he thought not enough was being done to protect people from gun violence, and so, in the name of his murdered son, he actually tried to do something about it?<\/p>\n

OK, bad enough. Dumb enough. But Dudley Brown is not only disliked by Democrats, but also by many Republicans, who are convinced (as they should be) that he\u2019s a disaster for the Republican Party.<\/p>\n

But not a single party leader, Wist said, was brave enough to call out Brown for the ugliness of the 2018 campaign against him.<\/p>\n

\u201cI keep hearing that not all Republicans are fans of Dudley Brown, but not one of them had the courage to say so,\u201d Sullivan said. \u201cNow would have been the right time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now Sullivan wants to do something to make it more difficult to launch what you might call gratuitous recall efforts. He understands there are constitutional considerations and has discussed the matter with Attorney General Phil Weiser.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are good reasons for recalls \u2014 high crimes and misdemeanor, malfeasance, corruption. But there\u2019s a fine line on this.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is a fine line when the system is being abused. But for Colorado Republicans \u2014 who remember the brief glory days of 2013 gun-related recalls \u2014 it\u2019s now a matter of political self-abuse.<\/p>\n

Mike Littwin writes the biweekly column \u201cFair and Unbalanced\u201d for The Colorado Independent. He previously worked at The Denver Post, Rocky Mountain News, Los Angeles Times and Baltimore Sun. Contact him at mike@coloradoindependent.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

via:: Summit Daily<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For those who wonder why Republicans keep losing in Colorado, we give you the latest GOP fail, in which Kristi Burton Brown, vice chair of the state Republican Party, officially ended her doomed-from-the-start recall effort against Rep. Tom Sullivan. The idea, as I may have written before, was not simply wrong-headed, but also a textbook […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[97],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-25595","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-local-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-12 03:46:01","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KIFT - The LIFT FM","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kift","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kift\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kift\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kift\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kift\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kift\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25595"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kift\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25595\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kift\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kift\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kift\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}