The General Assembly wrapped up its work last week, passing roughly 120 bills in 120 days. And if there’s any theme that kept showing up throughout this session, it comes down to one word: robbery.

State lawmakers engaged in outright theft when they voted to withhold $306 million in surplus state tax revenue that, under the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, or TABOR, must be returned to taxpayers this year and next.

Legislative staffers warned the move was illegal. Lawmakers moved forward with it anyway, claiming it offset a previous year’s overpayment of refunds. They were desperate to use it to patch a $1.2 billion budget hole of their own making.

The governor’s office insists federal budgetary changes devastated state revenue calculations for 2024-25, generating outsized refunds in 2025-26.

We the people got “too much” money back, you see. Ruling Democrats said if only they had known about the congressional changes sooner, there wouldn’t have been TABOR refunds in 2024-25.

So, this is merely “clawing back” money erroneously sent to taxpayers. Or so they say.

Staff analysts for the legislature’s Joint Budget Committee told lawmakers in February that keeping the $306.1 million flouts the law, no matter the basis, and urged lawmakers to “weight the potential legal risks” of doing so.

Apparently, they didn’t. Now, the legislature is stiffing taxpayers on their TABOR refunds because they want the money for their spending sprees.

It wasn’t that long ago that Colorado had a $3.6 billion surplus. Gov. Jared Polis and his merry band of TABOR-pilferers shouldn’t be blaming congressional tax breaks to justify stiffing taxpayers. They ought to look in the mirror.

Ditto for the highway robbery orchestrated by the legislature’s ruling Democrats. At the very end of session, they rammed through HB 26-1430 — a preemptive strike against a pending ballot initiative meant to force lawmakers to direct transportation dollars to highways.

It’s the kind of thing lawmakers were supposed to fund all along, of course, but have skimped on so the money could be used on their mass transit and environmental projects instead.

Initiative 175 — whose supporters are gathering signatures from the public to make this November’s ballot — would direct $700 million in revenue from transportation-related taxes and fees to roads, bridges and highways.

HB 1430 would cut those very gas taxes and vehicle fees by an equivalent $700 million. A genuine tax cut would be a welcome surprise from this legislature. But that isn’t what this is.

It’s a money grab disguised as a tax cut, literally meant to keep roads underfunded.

Initiative 175 is only being proposed because the legislature has proven it can’t be trusted to adequately fund roads — and the fact that HB 1430 is on the governor’s desk proves it.

They are literally stealing votes to prevent road funding. Talk about highway robbery. It’s a subversion of the citizens initiative process — the fundamental right of the public to petition government for change.

It’s not the first time, either. A few years ago, the legislature reclassified property taxes and rewrote state law to undermine a subsequent property tax cut on the statewide ballot.

Here we go again.

Meanwhile, many of the same ruling Democrats are party to a shadow legislative effort to undermine TABOR by bamboozling voters into replacing Colorado’s simple and fair flat tax with a graduated income tax.

The proposal would hike the state’s total take through income taxes by $4.1 billion annually.

Notice a pattern? Steal your refund, rob your roads — and a sidebar attempt to pick your pockets. That’s the 2026 session in a nutshell.