We all felt it, but when we saw the tears begin to well up in Sen. Jim Isgar’s eyes, we realized just how much pressure we were under.
After all, we thought that if the big guy from Southwest Colorado was knuckling under to the intense stress at the end of the 2003 legislative session, what chance did the rest of us have to cope?
The final three days of any legislative session are always high pressure ones. Bills moving from one committee to another, from one legislative chamber to the other as lawmakers do a mad dash to get the votes they need for their measures before the clock runs out on the 120-day session. Amid all that is a general fatigue that everyone – lawmakers, lobbyists, legislative liaisons and, yes, the press – always experience, almost like we’re all suffering from a serious bout of post traumatic stress disorder.
But that year was different.
Republicans, who had taken back control of the Colorado Legislature in the 2002 general election, had something else in mind for those final three days.
They wanted to redraw congressional district lines even though the Legislature – or more accurately, the courts – had already done so the year before when the Democrats briefly held the majority in the Colorado Senate.
These days, we call that time “Midnight Redistricting.”
Even though lawmakers debate bills for four long months, it actually takes only three days to get a measure through the Legislature, a lesson we learned all too well. That takes some careful planning, however, and the votes in the 100-member statehouse, of course.
Under legislative rules, a bill cannot have two floor debates within the same 24-hour period in the same chamber.
The 17 Democrats in the 35-member Senate, of which Isgar was a ranking member despite his still-freshman status at the time, formulated a plan on the GOP’s redistricting bill that required them to delay its progress as much as possible. Doing so could kill the bill, but that meant working until midnight every single one of those days. Though the Legislature isn’t Congress and doesn’t have rules that allow for a filibuster, it was as close to staging that as the rules allowed.
Isgar, like everyone else in the Capitol during those days, knew it was folly. The Republicans had the votes in the Senate and House (and governor’s office), so the Democrats’ delaying tactic was unlikely to succeed.
Still, then-Sen. Joan Fitz-Gerald, the Democrat’s minority leader, insisted they try. And try they did.
Lawmakers immediately realized that bills still had working their way through the legislative process were dead, and that was a hard thing for someone like Isgar to take.
Though legislators are always advised never to marry their bills, Isgar couldn’t help it. He took the process seriously. The bills he worked on were like children to him. They needed care, they needed nurturing and they needed love. He had a heart big enough to give them all three.
Wiping the tears from beneath his oversized glasses, Isgar pleaded with Fitz-Gerald to let it go that day. He knew that the same courts that had approved the state’s congressional district map in 2002 ultimately would strike down this GOP attempt, which it later did. But the minority leader strongly believed it was wrong, and the Democrats had to fight it as best they could.
It wouldn’t be the last time we would see Isgar tear up in the Capitol. It happened only a few times in his eight years under the gold dome. That emotional attachment to his measures didn’t diminish his message, and to doing what he felt was right regardless of ideology. It earned him wide respect, and deservedly so.
Few people in the Capitol knew were Hesperus was before his arrival, and many still don’t today. But everyone, regardless of political affiliation, knew who Isgar was and what he stood for, and his legacy endures as a result.
He was a true statesman, and will be missed.
Charles Ashby is a reporter for the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel who has covered state politics and the statehouse for 20 legislative sessions, the first seven as Denver bureau chief for The Durango Herald. Reach him at charles.ashby@gjsentinel.com.
