Facing spirited challenges from the left — in the final hours of races each thought would be a walk in the park — Colorado’s two Democratic U.S. senators are doing what comes naturally to politicians. Pandering.

How else to explain their opposition, reported Sunday, to the pending nomination of respected and rock-solid U.S. District Judge Dan Domenico in Denver to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit? It’s in fact an about-face for one of the senators, who supported Domenico for U.S. District Court in 2019.

This is of course no ordinary year for the Democratic party. Anyone who follows the news knows the Democratic Socialists are coming, and they want the hides of their party’s establishment. 

And Colorado’s senior U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, in his run for governor, and junior U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper, running for reelection, are feeling the heat heading into today’s primary election. They are being depicted as asleep at the switch by energized Democratic rivals.

Indeed, both Bennet and Hickenlooper seem to have fallen off the radar since a wince-worthy bid by each of them for president. (Perhaps you’d forgotten?)

Now, you can almost see the sweat beading up on their foreheads. What to do to get back in the spotlight? 

Dump on Trump! Or any development remotely connected to this administration. It’s the one safe target that unites Colorado’s Democratic players — and that could ingratiate the likes of Bennet and Hickenlooper with the left.

Hence, the near-constant broadsides from their camps denouncing all things Trump. It borders on self-parody; a Hickenlooper press release this week, for example, asserts, “Hickenlooper, Colleagues Introduce Bill to Stop Trump from Using Military to Interfere with Elections.”

So, we get it; the fact Domenico was appointed to the federal bench in the first place by a Republican administration means no one can expect Colorado’s dominant Democrats to be cheerleaders. 

But playing petty election politics with a federal appellate nomination and denigrating fellow Coloradan Domenico — simply to woo their party’s left flank — is a mark of desperation. All the more so when their professed reasoning is so specious.

Hickenlooper’s press shop disingenuously denounced Domenico’s alleged “refusal to say who won the 2020 election” when the judge appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week. It was a wild distortion of what he actually said and a feeble attempt to cast Domenico as a denier of that year’s defeat of President Trump.

As our news affiliate Colorado Politics reported, the question put to Domenico in the committee hearing was one put to all the administration’s judicial nominees by the committee’s notoriously Trump-obsessed Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut. Like the other nominees, Domenico wisely and appropriately declined to play the game, pointing out “commenting on a matter of political debate like that is inappropriate for a sitting judge.” It was a lot like what U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson had to say about 2020 during the 2022 confirmation of her nomination by the Biden administration.

Bennet, meanwhile, crowed via a press aide, “…we are considering Judge Domenico for this new position at a moment when the Trump administration has spent years undermining the rule of law and eroding the independence of the federal courts. I cannot support his nomination in this context.” 

In other words, guilt by association is enough for a “no” vote.

Let’s hope and trust the full U.S. Senate sees through such political smoke and mirrors.

However today’s balloting turns out for Bennet and Hickenlooper, it’s embarrassing they felt they had to stoop so low just to keep their political ambitions afloat.