Colorado’s legislature appears on the verge of embracing a new motto: “Special security, legal and privacy protections for we — and none for thee.”

Lawmakers are advancing House Bill 26-1422, a 60-page bill to provide new taxpayer-funded protections for elected officials, judges and staff that won’t be afforded to everyday Coloradans.

How ironic, considering the bill is the handiwork of ruling Democrats whose soft-on-crime policies have imperiled public safety for the rest of us. 

The bill is scheduled for a hearing today in the House Appropriations Committee.

Even as legislators reckon with a $1.5 billion deficit of their own making, prompting steep budget cuts, HB 1422 creates two government entities outside normal budget rules.

The bill creates an administrator of legislative safety to coordinate personal security for legislators alongside the Colorado State Patrol, with no apparent guidelines or oversight for pay or other requirements.

It also establishes a new Court Security Authority with its own staff, contracts and grant-making powers — funded by doubling the court security surcharge from $5 to $10 on probate, civil and divorce cases.

And the bill even puts taxpayers on the hook for legislators’ home security systems at a time when countless Coloradans are vulnerable to crimes made easier through lawmakers’ legislative negligence.

Meanwhile, the proposal’s fiscal impact on taxpayers is still largely unknown.

HB 1422 removes candidate disclosure statements from the secretary of state’s website — limiting transparency by making such information “available upon request during business hours.”

It adds elected officials, judges and their staffs to “protected persons,” allowing them to hide their personal information from transparency tools and to sue any private citizen or media outlet who allegedly publishes such information.

This looks like a First Amendment violation waiting to happen, drafted by the same Democratic supermajority that has passed other laws already struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court on First Amendment grounds.

It’s also the same near-supermajority that has spent years undermining public safety and weakening law enforcement tools — gutting qualified immunity for law officers, opposing mandatory minimums on drugs and other crimes, and even narrowing the circumstances for first-degree murder.

Now, it seems they want to protect themselves from what they’ve unleashed on our streets.

Colorado lawmakers pushing the bill cite the killing of Minnesota legislator Melissa Hortman and her husband last June. But if taxpayer-funded protection is now justified for public officials at risk of political violence, why not extend the same courtesy to prominent figures who aren’t elected officials, like Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated last September while giving a speech.

More importantly, what about the everyday Coloradan whose house was broken into, whose car has been stolen three times or whose child died of fentanyl poisoning? They won’t be assigned a personal safety administrator.

Instead, the public must rely on a police force handcuffed by the same legislature now forming its own protective detail and home security systems, courtesy of taxpayers.

This is a period of inflamed tensions and sharp rhetoric. There’s blame to go around for that, and much of it lies at the feet of the very politicians who have fanned the flames — and now seek cover.

They seek one standard for the governing class and another for those they govern — epitomizing the very tone-deaf political elitism that has given rise to our populist age.