[guest post by Dana]

Following the ruling of the Colorado Supreme Court concerning Donald Trump, the state Republican Party, unsurprisingly, wants to cancel the Republican presidential primary:

The Colorado GOP is threatening to try to withdraw from Colorado’s Republican presidential primary in March — or ignore the results — if Donald Trump isn’t on the ballot, heaping uncertainty onto the fast-approaching contest and setting up a possible legal showdown with state elections officials.

The Colorado Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that Trump can’t appear on the ballot because he engaged in an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol and therefore is disqualified from holding office again. The decision will be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, but there’s little time for a resolution before the Jan. 5 state deadline to set the ballot. Ballots start being mailed to military and overseas voters on Jan. 20. Election Day is March 5.

Colorado GOP Chairman Dave Williams told The Colorado Sun…that if Trump isn’t on the ballot, the party would ask the state to cancel the Republican presidential primary. Instead, Republican voters would caucus to select delegates to the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee next year.

The report explains that “Colorado law does not allow a presidential primary election to be canceled at the request of a political party. If the Colorado Republican Party attempts to withdraw from the presidential primary or ignore the results of the election, this would likely be a matter for the courts.”

Additionally: State law says “each political party shall use the results of the (presidential primary) election to allocate national delegate votes in accordance with the party’s state and national rules.”

According to Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, she intends to “follow the court decision that is in place at the time of ballot certification.”

You can read the opinion here.

—Dana

[guest post by JVW]

National Review Online points us to a CNN Story:

President Joe Biden has privately flashed impatience to his senior advisers as his White House struggles to change public opinion on his economic record ahead of the 2024 election, expressing deep frustration that he can’t show off physical construction of many projects that his signature legislative accomplishments will fund.

The president is said to have griped that even as he travels the country to tout historic pieces of legislation like the bipartisan infrastructure law, it could be years before the residents of some of the communities receiving federal funds see construction begin, according to three sources familiar with Biden’s comments to his top aides.

“There’s immense frustration in that, and he has vocalized that very clearly,” said one administration official.

It’s almost funny, isn’t it? We know that Joe Biden is a man of middling intelligence to begin with, and we of course are acutely aware that he appears to be in ongoing cognitive decline. But for a man who has spent a half-century mucking around in the federal outhouse to only now discover that big government tends to move rather slowly pretty much defies belief. A cynic (like me) might even suggest that Democrats, including the President, knew damn well that these projects wouldn’t be completed on any sort of reasonable schedule, and certainly not as quickly as proponents were promising they would in order to sell this orgy of spending as a stimulus measure to a gullible public. It was never going to be the case that environmentalists, OSHA, and various regulatory busybodies would stand down in the name of expediting these projects. And it was certainly never going to be the case that thousands and thousands of literature, marketing, or social justice majors would suddenly learn how to put up drywall or operate a cement-mixing truck; we were always going to be constrained by the limited number of skilled constructions workers who would be able to take on these projects. California makes this sort of mistake all of the damn time: promise all of this building and public renewal only to run up against the reality that we don’t have the workforce to complete it, and we can’t bring workers in from out of state because it’s too damn expensive to house them here, even temporarily.

Jim Geraghty, who reported on President Biden’s frustration, reminds us that this over-promising and under-delivering is nothing new for progressive big-spenders:

Back in March 2021, a White House “Fact Sheet” — more like an “Assertion Sheet” — claimed, “the president’s plan will accelerate transformative investments, from pre-development through construction, turning “shovel worthy” ideas into “shovel ready” projects.”

Those of us with long memories are having flashbacks, as yet another Democratic president remembers that construction and infrastructure projects, touted as being “shovel ready” and prepared to quickly create lots of jobs, turn out to be more tied up in red tape than expected.

It’s true, I’ll readily admit, that a number of Republicans in Congress were happy with the idea of using federal playmoney to sponsor blue-collar jobs, enough so that their blundering ensured that Democrats were able to talk Joe Manchin into wasting a couple more trillion than otherwise would have been spent. The leading contender for the GOP’s 2024 Presidential nomination has in the past been a strong proponent of this sort of cooperation between government and the private sector, even at the expense of continually blowing up our national debt. So it’s not as if either party has completely clean hands in this matter, though clearly it is Democrats who are the most wasteful, while also being the most joyfully cynical about it.

Just another day in Washington, DC, where nobody seems to be willing to own up to the serious problems we face.

– JVW