Barb “Kirkliar” To Help Write Colorado’s Budget

As Colorado Newsline’s Sara Wilson reports, the Colorado Senate GOP minority caucus has selected Sen. Barb Kirkmeyer of Weld County to replace retiring Sen. Bob Rankin on the General Assembly’s powerful Joint Budget Committee:

Senate Republicans elected Kirkmeyer to the position by acclamation on Friday. She was the only nominee for the position.

“I deeply appreciate your support and your vote of confidence that I can handle this job,” Kirkmeyer said Friday. “To all my colleagues … There are areas that I know you are all experts in and I would appreciate it if you would attend JBC meetings. Give me information and tell me what’s going on.”

…Kirkmeyer ran this year to represent Colorado’s 8th Congressional District but was defeated by Democrat Yadira Caraveo. Her current term in the state Senate ends in 2025.

In the closing days of Kirkmeyer’s losing campaign against now Rep.-elect Yadira Caraveo, Kirkmeyer released a controversial and brazenly false campaign ad campaign accusing Democrats in the Colorado legislature of having voted to “legalize fentanyl.” When questioned about this outrageously false accusation, Kirkmeyer’s campaign manager Alan Philp responded that Kirkmeyer’s campaign was delighted to be “haggling” over whether fentanyl was illegal or not, despite the simple irrefutable fact that fentanyl is not now and has never been legalized without a prescription in Colorado.

Kirkmeyer’s brazenly false ad, which her campaign aggressively defended and fellow Republicans doubled down on in the final days before last month’s election, became the subject of a meta-debate in the Colorado press about how to deal with politicians who lie not just with impunity, but as part of a deliberate strategy to shock and corral swingable low-information voters. 9NEWS’ Kyle Clark used the moment to explain the difference between a merely false statement and a knowing, deliberate lie–the difference being that Kirkmeyer knew as a lawmaker who participated in the debate over the legislation in question that what she was saying was not true.

Well folks, as it turns out, a politician willing to lie like a rug until the bitter end is precisely what Republicans want on the Joint Budget Committee! We have to call that a change for the worse, unless you can show us video of Bob Rankin telling a lie of the same magnitude. Rankin wasn’t perfect, but he possessed a degree of integrity that would have made the strategy of lies Kirkmeyer employed against Caraveo unthinkable.

Yes, there is a lot of lying in politics. But politicians don’t all lie, and liars in politics are not always rewarded.

In this case, 2022’s biggest lying loser got one hell of a consolation prize.