The special legislative session that concluded this week wasn’t just forgettable; it was in fact one that Gov. Jared Polis will want to forget. It amounted to a colossal embarrassment that Polis must think is beneath his dignity. Of course, he’s not about to say so publicly.

The governor convened the session to eliminate a $783 million budget deficit. That had to be done. Colorado, like most states, can’t borrow to cover its spending the way Congress can.

But it’s the spending itself that’s the problem — overspending, to be precise — and ruling Democrats refused to address it in any significant way. A news report on the session’s last day, Tuesday, by Colorado Politics made that clear:

“We have not made tough decisions,” said Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer, R-Brighton, who played the skunk at the picnic. “We didn’t cut spending.”

Instead, the legislature just temporarily bridged the budget gap on a wing, a prayer, some chewing gum and bailing wire. Accounting tricks, like selling tax credits; robbing Peter to pay Paul, like dipping into budget reserves. Anything, it seems, but — heaven forbid! — paring government programs to rein in spending.

As if to underscore that point, lawmakers, incredibly, passed a bill that actually increases spending to score points with the “reproductive rights” lobby. They agreed to use state dollars to backfill abortion providers like the politically influential Planned Parenthood, to which Congress temporarily had blocked federal Medicaid reimbursements.

Equally absurd was another bill passed this week and signed by Polis that would siphon off some of the revenue from an upcoming tax-hike proposal the legislature previously had placed on this fall’s ballot. The diverted dollars would be used to fund a food assistance program that could face federal budget cuts down the road under Congress’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Colorado lawmakers had voted last spring, during their regular session, to ask voters in November to raise taxes on upper-income earners to bail out the state’s overburdened free-school-meals-for-all program. That was after the original funding source, a 2022 tax hike, failed to raise enough money. Go figure: It turns out giving away breakfast and lunch to nearly a million public school students a day, no matter how high their household income, is expensive.

In other words, lawmakers plan to rob some of the proceeds of a tax hike that has yet to be approved by voters — and was supposed to cover a shortfall left by a previous tax hike — which in turn was intended to expand a school meal program that made no sense to begin with. And this latest maneuver will subsidize another government program — amid a special session that was convened to address the state’s budget deficit. How’s that for fiscal policy?

We can’t make this stuff up.

Perhaps the Democratic majority is just biding time until a new presidential administration and Congress once again loosen the purse strings on Medicaid spending and other programs. Until then, Colorado’s spending spree will be financed with pixie dust.

Unbelievably, the session was even more embarrassing than that.

Lawmakers also were charged by the governor with revisiting a sweeping law passed in 2024 to regulate artificial intelligence. The new AI regs were so poorly thought through that even Polis, who signed the effort, publicly called for walking them back so as not to smother the development and use of the rapidly advancing technology in our state. The law doesn’t take effect until next Feb. 1, so lawmakers had all this past spring to work on a fix. They punted.

This week, they punted again. Democrats dug in their heels in defense of reckless liability provisions in the law, scuttling compromise legislation. Lawmakers merely pushed off implementation until June. We have no confidence they’ll make more progress by then.

These lawmakers would have been fired by now in the real world. Because they are so far removed from it, they have been able to hide — and hold onto their jobs.

the gazette editorial board