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If your aim is to keep property tax dollars in your pocket, here’s a look at some of your options on Election Day
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If your aim is to keep property tax dollars in your pocket, here’s a look at some of your options on Election Day

By Independence Institute Coloradans have several options to try to address rising property taxes in 2024.   The state legislature passed SB24-233 with bipartisan support at the end of the 2024 legislative session. Voters could choose to keep SB24-233 or eschew the bill for either or both Initiatives 50 and 108.   Despite being a better alternative than if no legislation had been passed in 2024, property taxes would still rise in 2025 under SB24-233. Meant to head-off future acute property tax spikes rather than cut existing taxes, the new law modestly reduces both residential and non-residential assessment rates and adopts a 5.5 percent limit on revenue growth for some local districts. As a result, most Coloradans would still see their...
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Move to Classify Colorado Nuclear as ‘Clean Energy’ Killed
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Move to Classify Colorado Nuclear as ‘Clean Energy’ Killed

SOURCE: INDEPENDENCE INSTITUTE On Wednesday, January 24, 2024, Independence Institute’s Energy and Environmental Policy Analyst Jake Fogleman testified on SB24-039 in the Colorado Senate Transportation & Energy Committee. The bill would have amended the state’s statutory definitions of “clean energy” and “clean energy resources” to include nuclear energy. The committee ultimately voted not to pass the bill at the end of the hearing. Senators Faith Winter (D.), Kevin Priola (D.), Lisa Cutter (D.), and Tony Exum (D.) voted against the bill, while Senators Nick Hinrichsen (D.), Byron Pelton (R.), and Cleave Simpson (R.) voted in favor of it. READ FULL TESTIMONY ON I2I.ORG
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Democracies, Republics, and TABOR
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Democracies, Republics, and TABOR

By Rob Natelson, Independence Institute In 2011, a group of politicians and special interests sued in federal court to void Colorado’s Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR). The case was Kerr v. Hickenlooper. The plaintiffs’ primary argument was that TABOR violated the U.S. Constitution’s Guarantee Clause (Article IV, Section 4), which says in part, “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.” The plaintiffs contended that to be a “republic,” a state must make taxing and spending decisions through elected representatives only. They based this on a misreading of James Madison’s Federalist No. 10 essay—while ignoring everything else Madison and other Founders said about republican and democratic governance. The plaintiffs pointed o...
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Evaluating Gov. Polis’s Tax Reform Agenda: Tax Expenditures vs. Broad-Based Tax Relief
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Evaluating Gov. Polis’s Tax Reform Agenda: Tax Expenditures vs. Broad-Based Tax Relief

By Fiscal Policy Center | SOURCE: INDEPENDENCE INSTITUTE Colorado’s governor, Jared Polis, champions increasing state revenue by eliminating provisions of the tax code that benefit special interests—what state budgeters call “tax expenditures.” Rather than use the new money to grow government or redistribute surplus revenue through tax handouts and Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR) refunds, however, the governor argues the state should use the revenue to provide tax relief for all Colorado taxpayers through income tax rate reductions. As far back as 2018, Polis campaigned on this tax reform approach. This report evaluates Governor Polis’s progress in advancing these tax reform goals. By calculating the revenue impact of each tax expenditure modification, it determines whether legislatio...
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Colorado Lawmakers to Consider Pro-Nuclear Bill
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Colorado Lawmakers to Consider Pro-Nuclear Bill

By Jake Fogleman | SOURCE: INDEPENDENCE INSTITUTE Colorado lawmakers are set to consider their first nuclear energy bill of the 2024 legislative session later this week. SB24-039, dubbed “Nuclear Energy as a Clean Energy Resource,” is scheduled to go before the Senate Transportation and Energy Committee for first reading on Wednesday. The bill seeks to level the playing field for carbon-free energy technologies under state law by including nuclear energy in the statutory definition of “clean energy.” Nuclear is presently excluded by name. According to the text of the measure: The statutory definition of ‘clean energy’ in current law determines which energy projects are eligible for clean energy project financing at the county and city and county level. The statu...
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How States May Respond to Illegal Immigration, Part V: About Birthright Citizenship
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How States May Respond to Illegal Immigration, Part V: About Birthright Citizenship

Rob Natelson | SOURCE: INDEPENDENCE INSTITUTE This essay was first published in the Jan. 13, 2024 Epoch Times. Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV of this series on how states may respond to illegal immigration summarized war powers retained by the states. Those installments explained how states can use those powers to check illegal entry at the Southern border. This series is based on an academic study researched and written with Massachusetts legal scholar Andrew T. Hyman, and scheduled for publication in the British Journal of American Legal Studies (pdf). This fifth and final essay recounts what we discovered about (1) the Constitution’s words “natural born Citizen” and (2) the claim that U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants are “bi...
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Understanding the Constitution: How States May Respond to Illegal Immigration—Part IV
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Understanding the Constitution: How States May Respond to Illegal Immigration—Part IV

By Rob Natelson | SOURCE: INDEPENDENCE INSTITUTE This essay was first published in the Jan. 12, 2024 Epoch Times. Part I of this series showed that the unauthorized mass migration into states at the Southern border qualifies as an “invasion” as the Constitution uses the term. That Part also pointed to a constitutional canard—the false claim that federal power over war, immigration, and foreign commerce is “exclusive,” and that the states have no authority over those subjects whatsoever. But as Part II and Part III demonstrated, the Constitution explicitly recognizes state authority to wage defensive war when invaded. This Part IV examines a particularly thorny problem: To what extent may the federal government interfere when states exer...
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Understanding the Constitution: How States May Respond to Illegal Immigration—Part III
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Understanding the Constitution: How States May Respond to Illegal Immigration—Part III

By Rob Natelson | SOURCE: INDEPENDENCE INSTITUTE This essay first appeared in the Jan. 10, 2024 Epoch Times. Part I and Part II in this series explained that: The Constitution grants the federal government the exclusive power to wage offensive war; but the states as well as the federal government may wage defensive war; the states may wage defensive war against insurrectionists and against actual or threatened invasions—including invasions by those international criminal gangs the Founders called “enemies of the human race;” and the historical record shows that the mass illegal immigration at the Southern border is an “Invasion” as the Constitution uses that word. A Not-So-Hypothetical Situation As part of our research into state war ...
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Understanding the Constitution: How States May Respond to Illegal Immigration—Part II
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Understanding the Constitution: How States May Respond to Illegal Immigration—Part II

By Rob Natelson | SOURCE: INDEPENDENCE INSTITUTE This essay first appeared in the Jan. 9, 2024 Epoch Times. Part I of this series showed that under the Constitution, an “invasion” triggers powers and obligations for both federal and state governments. It also showed that mass unauthorized immigration at the Southern border meets the constitutional definition of an “invasion.” This Part II explains federal and state responsibility in the face of invasion. Further, this Part introduces the topic of trans-national criminal gangs, and how states may respond to them. All the installments in this series are based on a research article I co-wrote with legal scholar Andrew T. Hyman (pdf). READ FULL ARTICLE ON INDEPENDENCEINSTITUTE.COM
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How States May Respond to Illegal Immigration
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How States May Respond to Illegal Immigration

By Rob Natelson, SOURCE: Independence Institute This essay was first published in the Jan. 8, 2024 Epoch Times. As unauthorized foreigners continue to flood across the Southern border, state officials continue to cast about for solutions. In normal times, the federal government would remedy the problem. But these are not normal times: The administration of President Joe Biden actually seems to be aiding the influx. State officials are hampered by a Supreme Court doctrine called “implied federal preemption.” The courts use this doctrine to void some state laws as contradicting federal statutes, even when the federal statutes do not explicitly override them. For example, the Arizona legislature adopted four measures to address illegal immigration. They were consist...
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