On Point: Wrong call on Allard

Published April 18, 2006 at midnight

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Time magazine is partly right: Don't expect to see Colorado Sen. Wayne Allard brokering major legislation or mapping out trailblazing proposals and pushing them into the public debate. He's dull, dull, dull and cautious to a fault, and his modest verbal skills undoubtedly cramp his influence in a legislative body full of smooth characters with the self-confidence to match their ambition.

But one of the five "worst" senators, as Time maintains? Get serious.

Yes, Allard would wield more clout if he were a persuasive dealmaker able to spit out new ideas with the luxurious ease, say, of Newt Gingrich. But with Allard, you at least get the package advertised in his two Senate campaigns: a conservative vote on taxes, spending, regulation and trade, and a hard-working advocate for Colorado interests.

Shouldn't Time's list of worst senators be confined to the flakes, scamps and rudderless frauds who also infest the world's "greatest deliberative body"?

What about those with two faces - one for the folks at home and a second for Washington?

In compiling its "worst" list, Time did manage to home in on two flakes - Jim Bunning, R-Ky., and Mark Dayton, D-Minn. - as well as another senator, Conrad Burns, R-Mont., tarnished by tight ties to convicted loybbyist Jack Abramoff. But it's just weird to throw Allard into that disreputable mix, especially when such low-lying fruit as the over-the-hill Robert Byrd were still ripe for the picking.

Altogether unbelievable

Oh, it's good to be majority leader in the Colorado House of Representatives. Your pet projects can become the projects of the entire state. All you have to do is sponsor legislation to make them so and entice your colleagues into offering support.

Which is what Alice Madden is doing in the case of the Energy & Environmental Security Initiative at the University of Colorado School of Law. The majority leader not only sits on the initiative's board, she's sponsoring legislation that would, among other things, appropriate $316,000, or the equivalent of four full-time staffers, so it can produce a "Colorado Energy Profile." In the words of her bill, the profile would chart the state's "current and projected future energy resources, encompassing supply, production, generation, transmission, distribution and consumption."

Reasonable people might disagree over whether the state would benefit from such an energy profile, particularly since one of its major purposes, as described on the law school initiative's Web site, would be crystal-ball gazing. To wit: It would provide "detailed future projections of how that profile will change over time."

What is altogether unbelievable, however, is the legislation's assurance that the energy profile will confine itself to "policy-neutral analysis."

The Energy & Environmental Security Initiative was created, according to Dean David Getches and director Lakshman Guruswamy, so students could learn how to transform law and public policy to promote an environmental agenda based upon the premise that the "the world is rapidly approaching the end of the age of oil."

There is hardly a speck of policy-neutral language anywhere in Getches and Guruswamy's nine-page outline of the project's purpose - and there's unlikely to be much neutrality in any energy profile it oversees, either.

Vincent Carroll, editor of the editorial pages, writes On Point several times a week. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.

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