On opening day of the Colorado legislature, which is largely ceremonial, elected representatives try to set the tone for the session ahead. State Rep. Sal Pace, D-Pueblo, the new House Minority Leader, hit the ground with a partisan thud on Wednesday. His full remarks are in the video above, with some of it transcribed below, including his recognition of Rep. Frank McNulty, R-Highlands Ranch, the new Speaker of the House.

“Mr. Speaker, I’d like to wish you my best wishes, my hope that we can work productively and well together over the coming months. My thanks for keeping the podium warm for the next two years. And, I love what you’ve done with the office.”

At the 5:23 mark, Pace gets highly partisan and turns up the rhetoric in order to, ahem, “call on all of us in this room to put aside the partisan differences that divided us during this past election, and turn down the rhetoric.”

“State government is not a solution for all that ails our state,” he said. “Indeed, Colorado is a government that is necessarily, constitutionally, limited in scope. But it can and should be a force for good in people’s lives. Our job is to take that small government and make sure it works as well as possible. But to neglect programs or slash services without method, to penalize hard working state workers and teachers to score political points, to demonize people because of their skin color or national origins, and to balance our budget on the backs of the poor, the elderly, the sick, and the young – these are not acceptable solutions to the people of Colorado, and they should not be acceptable to any of us.

“If cynicism and fear influences the choices we make in this room over the coming months, then we will all fundamentally fail the people of this great state. In that spirit, I call on all of us in this room to put aside the partisan differences that divided us during this past election, and turn down the rhetoric.”

I asked Rep. Mark Waller, R-Colo. Springs, the new Assistant Majority Leader, for his thoughts about the morning’s remarks.
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“Well, I enjoyed hearing Speaker McNulty’s speech,” said Waller. “Certainly, I thought that was a step in the right direction. But I’ll be honest, I was a little bit disappointed with Rep. Pace’s speech. I thought it was incredibly partisan and a bit over the top for a day of ceremony like today.”

“This is going to be all about having to work together to come to real solutions for the people of the state of Colorado. We can’t balance this budget unless it has bipartisan, Republican and Democrat support, and that’s the tone we need to be setting today: that we are going to be working together to balance the budget and get the economy moving for the people of the state of Colorado.”