City and County News

IN POLITICS, AS ABOVE, SO BELOW

When we read of the malefactions of today’s elected officials and the sharp practice that characterizes the behavior of many of them, our thoughts tend to orient toward the upper echelons of that profession. We think of a married Texan US congressman having an affair with an ex-jihadist ‘ISIS bride’. Of US legislators using inside information to benefit from stock transactions. Of a senate leader employing hypocritical double standards for confirming or denying Supreme Court appointments. Or of a former commander-in-chief squirreling classified documents away in the toilet. We are inclined to think of these examples not just because it’s difficult to avoid news coverage of them but also because the higher the transgressor's status, the more impact their misconduct is likely to have on the nation.

When we see similar behavior in public officials at lower strata of government it’s worth examining whether these individuals have taken their cue from what they have observed at the higher levels, perhaps considering such conduct legitimate, or whether the converse is true. Does chicanery work from the ground up or the top down? We might be able to answer by examining examples in familiar territory—the greater Denver area—and look for common denominators.

First, there is the episode involving Westminster City Councilor Bruce Baker, who demonstrated, within a month of his election, his lack of understanding of the Colorado Open Meetings Law (OML) or his disdain for it. The OML bars more than two members of a local body from discussing business matters, whether in person or electronically, or taking formal action, without giving notice and allowing public participation. Whether he knew this or not, Baker sent an e-mail to the four other conservative members of the council (while pointedly omitting non-right wing councilors Ezeadi and Nurmela), urging the four to help pack city boards and committees with members who shared his own political views; part of the process would involve re-interviewing returning board members to assess their loyalty to these views. I am inevitably put in mind of an example from history, in which members of the German Armed Forces and civil servants were obliged, between 1933 and 1945, to prove their fidelity by swearing personal loyalty not to the constitution of the Third Reich but to Adolf Hitler personally. This may appear an extreme comparison but given that Baker was seeking compliance with his ideology in return for continued engagement, it is thematically quite accurate.

Then there is the bizarre January case of the Douglas County School Board peremptorily and ‘without cause’ firing Superintendent Corey Wise, a popular teacher and 25-year veteran of the school district. Four conservative members of the seven-member school board were found by a District Court judge to have violated the Open Meetings Law by communicating their intentions with each other in advance, outside of public view, and without including the other three members. In this case, the four board members are alleged to have conducted a ‘walking quorum’, in which they may have communicated one-on-one to agree on the firing in secret. And although Colorado courts have not specifically identified walking quorums as violations of the OML, other states have considered them as contravening the spirit of those laws.

At about the same time, Thornton City Council took the extraordinary step of ignoring the legal advice of its city attorney and a special counsel and deciding, in astoundingly quick time, that one of its number no longer lived in Thornton and should be removed from her position. Ward 1 councilor Jacque Phillips has a home and law practice in Thornton and bought a property in Alamosa only to enable her to fulfill a one-year contract with the San Luis Valley’s Board of Cooperative Education Services. Once again it was a marginal conservative majority on council that voted to remove a councilor who had, in the past, successfully brought discrimination lawsuits against Stargate Charter School, for whom the then governance board president, Jan Kulmann, is today Thornton’s mayor. And with no additional element of surprise, the search for Phillips’ replacement took not the 2 months+ it had taken to fill a seat in 2019/20 when Kulmann became mayor, but barely three weeks, from mid-February to March 8, 2022.

So we find, within the space of a few months, three examples of questionable conduct not from disgraced national leaders but from local bodies close to where we live. And that conduct could be charitably described as testing the 'guardrails of democracy’ (How Democracies Die, Levitsky and Ziblatt, 2018). More validly, it could be described as ignoring the legacy of forbearance, mutual toleration and transparent conduct that has, for nearly 150 years in this country, allowed our democracy to function. This legacy, much tarnished today, has until recent years been characterized by an atmosphere in which other officials may be rivals but are not considered enemies. It is the poisoning of this atmosphere in the last 30-40 years, starting at the highest national levels, that has led us to the point where democratic governance and legislation is rendered practically ineffective and official behavior is publicly expected to bear marks of chicanery for political advantage.

How was it that the right-wing members of the three bodies cited in this account comported themselves in ways that broke Colorado laws or were at the very least disingenuous? Were they all bad characters who contrived to conceal their true nature until elected? Or did they learn their tendentious behavior from the ground up, so to speak, in a schoolyard-level mindset of ‘it’s only a crime if I get caught’?

I will make the case that this was not quite the process at work. Again, I am being charitable, for I know many officials at different levels of government for whom such ways of working are anathema. But let us suppose that the officials in question have been observing and learning from those in the empyrean of political life in the USA. They would have learned that a president can, apparently, make the furnishing of damaging news about a domestic political opponent a condition of granting foreign aid; that legislatures in several red states have not bothered to hide the fact that their gerrymandering efforts are designed to marginalize minority voting; that a Senate majority leader can show contempt for hundreds of years of bilateral cooperation by blatantly configuring the Supreme Court in his own ideological mold; and that a newly defeated president can attempt to prevail on a state official to ‘find’ thousands of non-existent votes. In none of these cases have we seen miscreants in handcuffs appearing in the halls of justice, partly because justice, in two of these examples, depends on the distribution of parties in Congress. So the message that the normalizing of these behaviors sends to the public at large, including local Colorado officials with specific agendas, is that there is no reason not to follow these practices to promote those agendas. It’s only a crime if you get caught.

I make the argument that the disruption of civilized, responsible and honest practices at the highest levels of government, upon which the legitimate continuance of government from administration to administration, from congress to congress, and from era to era depends, has effects that are felt throughout the continuum of public service in this country, from highest to lowest. In this disrupted state it may well be assumed that ordinary people will not enter public service to be of service to the public but to promote, in whatever ways they can manage, ideological outcomes that may be quite unrepresentative of the people they supposedly serve. And why is this argument so important? Because when we are in this condition, and it manifests itself at all levels of political life including city councils and school boards, there can be no greater danger to the way a democracy functions. By all means be appalled at the goings-on on Capitol Hill and Pennsylvania Avenue and pay attention when you vote. But do not think that your gaze should pass over those councils and boards in your own town, particularly when it is an article of faith, on the side of the political aisle I have cited several times above, for officials to move ever upward through the hierarchy, gaining more power over us as they do. Pay as much attention to the local as to the national level. It is, and you should want it to be, your democracy.

Attention must be paid.