Rossputin.com Rational Thinking About Our World

Both the Democratic and Republican leaders in the State Senate, Peter Groff and Josh Penry, respectively, asked the state’s Joint Budget Committee to look for ways to spread spending cuts so that higher education wouldn’t essentially be the only place the state made serious cuts to deal with the current budget troubles. In typical fashion, so-called Republican Don Marostica answer was “Nuts to them. Tell them to go jump in a lake. Josh Penry first, and then all the lemmings will follow.”

With luck, Don Marostica, probably the single worst member of the House of Representatives and certainly the worst Republican, will face a primary challenge in 2010. The challenger, however, will have to be fairly well-off or be able to raise a lot of money because, like last time, Marostica will certainly put as much of his own money into the race as he thinks he has to. He barely beat his last primary challenger, Kevan McNaught, even though Marostica spent something like $150K or $200K of his own money, versus a small fraction of that amount raised and spent by McNaught.

I continue to believe that Marostica is driven by two things: His ego (can’t you just tell that by his hair?), and a desire to use government to increase the value of his real estate holdings.

In addition to trying to help Bill Ritter avoid government spending transparency (by which effort I assume Marostica wants to make it as hard as possible to find out where he’s able to funnel money to help himself), Marostica was the key Republican to support eliminating the Arveschoug-Bird 6% annual spending increase limit for state government. (Read more about Arveschoug-Bird from Ben DeGrow HERE.)

Let me make this clear: Don Marostica is a cancer in the Colorado government and in the Colorado Republican Party. I urge anyone who believes he has or can raise the money to challenge Marostica whom I believe is quite vulnerable just based on his record and his insults of fine men (regardless of what you believe of their political views) like Mark Hillman, Josh Penry, and Jon Caldara.