Colorado’s Lawmaking Binge Isn’t Productivity

Colorado’s Capitol has been busy. Not the useful kind of busy like fixing potholes or keeping the lights on. The busy kind like a kid with a label maker and no supervision.

The Denver Gazette laid it out: Colorado lawmakers passed 487 bills in 2025, and a report says legislative output is up 56% since 2012. More bills, more words, more complexity, and somehow, regular people are supposed to clap because the paper stack got taller in Denver.

Sure, quantity is a metric. So is spam.

The Bullet Point Brief

• A report cited in the article says Colorado’s legislative output increased 56% since 2012.
• The legislature passed 487 bills in the 2025 session.
• The report says bill complexity increased, measured by more words in the Digest of Bills.
• Statewide ballot initiatives reportedly quadrupled between 2012 and 2024, from four to 16.
• The article says no bills with solely Republican sponsors passed in the 2025 session.

My Bottom Line

Absolutely no surprise here. Zero. In the state where costs have skyrocketed under democrat rule, crime has skyrocketed, regulation has skyrocketed, it can only point to one thing: too damn many bad ideas coming from the state capitol.

Let’s not pretend this is “productivity.” If you need 487 new laws in one year, you are not governing, you are micromanaging. In the Denver/Boulder Bubble, apparently the solution to everything is another form, another mandate, another compliance maze.

Regular families and small businesses pay, the policy class gets ribbon cuttings, and then everybody acts shocked when life gets more expensive and confusing.

Translated: When government gets addicted to passing bills, you get more paperwork, less clarity, and damn sure less freedom.

And when will the great suburban normie wake up? Not when the slogans sound nice. When the costs land on their kitchen table, their insurance bill, their kid’s school, and their ability to run a business without hiring a full-time rule-reader.

The fix is boring, which is why it works: fewer bills, clearer bills, real sunsets, and a serious bias toward local control so Weld County isn’t forced to live like Capitol Hill thinks we should. Measure outcomes, not word count. If a law can’t justify itself in plain English, it doesn’t deserve to run your life.

Source: The Denver Gazette