Colorado residents live under two constitutions. One limits the government. The other increasingly limits the people.
The U.S. Constitution grants the federal government a short list of powers and nothing more. The Tenth Amendment reserves everything else to the states and the people. If a power is not listed, the government does not have it.
The Colorado Constitution works in reverse. State governments possess general police power by default — they can regulate anything the document does not prohibit. Colorado’s constitution goes further, imposing affirmative mandates — education funding, TABOR compliance, water rights administration — that land directly on taxpayers.
The legislature has used that authority to add regulations, mandates, and spending obligations every session. That pattern did not begin with the formal Democratic trifecta in 2019. Democrats controlled the House for years before that, and enough Republicans voted with them to advance the agenda regardless of which party held the Senate. The 2013 gun control bills — magazine capacity limits and universal background checks — passed under Governor Hickenlooper while Republicans nominally controlled the Senate.
The trifecta removed the last procedural obstacle, but the policy direction was already set. The legislature introduced 598 bills in 2019. By 2025, that number reached 733.
State Rep. Ava Flanell, a Republican from Colorado Springs appointed to House District 14 last October, described the result in her first session. “Each legislator can introduce five bills during the legislative session, but the majority bends the rules to allow people to have twenty to thirty more bills,” she wrote on March 5. “The result is that most bills never get the serious attention and oversight they deserve.”
In the fourth week of the 2026 session alone, House Democrats passed three bills imposing unfunded mandates on county governments. HB26-1001 overrides local zoning authority to allow nonprofits, school districts, and government agencies to bypass land-use requirements that bind private property owners.
HB26-1018 requires counties to presume Medicaid eligibility and arrange long-term care services before completing verification, shifting nursing home discharge costs to local taxpayers. HB26-1026 eliminates county flexibility in retirement benefits by mandating all PERA employers affiliate with the state deferred compensation plan.
The same week, Senate Democrats advanced SB26-042, legislation reclassifying existing state revenue as constitutional categories exempt from the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights — expanding spending authority without voter approval. HB26-1271 uses the same approach, structuring a 60 percent excise increase on Colorado’s alcohol producers as a “fee” to bypass TABOR.
Flanell connected the volume to the outcome. “It is no surprise that Colorado has become one of the most heavily regulated states and that so many past laws have produced unintended consequences,” she wrote. “Colorado deserves better. The people deserve better.”
The people making these laws often arrive without a public vote. One in four Colorado legislators gained their seat through a vacancy committee — party insiders numbering as few as 40. Those committees pick representatives for districts of 89,000 residents.
Flanell gained her own seat through a 54-member vacancy committee. Supreme Court justices are appointed through a governor’s nominating commission, and fifteen years of Democratic governors have shaped a bench that reflects the party in power.
None of this requires a constitutional amendment or a voter-approved tax increase. The legislature adds mandates, the governor appoints judges, vacancy committees seat lawmakers, and the obligations flow downward — to counties, to businesses, to property owners, to taxpayers who never voted for any of it.
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