Senate Republicans flexed their muscles this week in a big way, shooting down a supplemental bill for the Department of Public Safety that seeks to provide more funding for background checks.

The move is the latest in a series of efforts affecting policies and programs that they’ve fought against in both the House and Senate in the past. The chair of the Joint Budget Committee denies it’s a strategy, and defended the actions of his caucus to deny additional funding for a department he says has been less than honest about their needs. But the Senate Minority Leader calls the actions a dangerous new approach, and a “back-door way of affecting substantive legislation through the budget process.”

As passed by the Senate, Senate Bill 15-159 denies a request by the Colorado Bureau of Investigation for about eight more full-time equivalents and about $369,000 to help process concealed handgun permits. In December, the CBI claimed it faced a 54-day backlog of requests for concealed weapons permits, according to Joint Budget Committee Chair Sen. Kent Lambert, R-Colorado Springs.

What the House did to the bill led to a floor fight in the Senate this morning, and for the first time in recent memory jeopardizes a supplemental bill for an entire department.

Rep. Lois Court, D-Denver, asked the House on Feb. 11 to amend the bill to add the $369,000 — money she said they already had as cash funds — to reduce the background checks wait time claimed by the CBI. Court’s amendment was successfully passed even though JBC member Rep. Bob Rankin, R-Carbondale, defended the JBC’s denial, stating that in checking with county sheriffs, he had found the wait list was much shorter, as little as three days in some jurisdictions.

SB 159 originally passed the Senate unanimously and got out of the House on Feb. 12, also unanimously. But when it got back to the Senate on Wednesday, Lambert took the unusual tactic of asking the Senate to adhere to its position rather than attempting to resolve the conflict through a conference committee, which would have been the JBC.

Democrats, including Sen. Pat Steadman, D-Denver, a fellow JBC member, criticized Lambert’s use of the so-called “nuclear option.” Adhering to the position means that unless the House backs off from its amended version of the bill, which provides the requested money to CBI, the supplemental funding for the entire Department of Public Safety, which includes more than just the CBI funding, will fail.

Steadman noted that the bill also would fund peace officer training and money that would cover the costs of testing forensic evidence, such as rape kits.

But Lambert told The Colorado Statesman the CBI’s data on the length of wait times for background checks has not been borne out by facts over the last several years, and he wasn’t willing to go along with it this time, either.

The JBC voted 3-3 during its supplemental process on the CBI funding, which meant the bill went forward without those dollars, Lambert explained. As to the Senate action on Wednesday, “my caucus didn’t want that in there, believing it was extraneous personnel,” he said.

Lambert acknowledged that there may be surges in applications for background checks, tied to, for example, large gun shows or other times when people are buying more guns. He pointed out that two years ago, the CBI had asked for more FTE to process background checks, and the backlog didn’t bear it then, either.

The CBI is “consistently crying wolf,” Lambert said. “I cannot trust what [they’re] saying.”

Lambert is the sponsor of a bill (SB 86) currently awaiting Senate approval to end background checks for the transfers of weapons and the fees associated with those checks, which came from two gun control bills passed in 2013.

Today’s action is the second time Senate Republicans have used the supplemental process to impact a program they haven’t supported in the past. Last month, the JBC, which is split 3-3 Republican-Democrat, voted to deny the Department of Revenue the use of funds it had already collected to fully fund a program that allowed undocumented immigrants to get driver’s licenses.

Without authorization to use the funds, the Department of Motor Vehicles already has in its account — ­around $166,000 — the department had no choice but to shut down all but one of the five offices originally designated to provide the licenses. Appointments with the remaining office for getting a license, which is required by state law, will not be available until next year.

Republicans fought vigorously against the program when it was passed by the Democratic-controlled General Assembly in 2013. SB 13-251 failed to gain even one Republican vote, but was passed by the Democrat majority on the last day of the 2013 session.

Senate Minority Leader Morgan Carroll, D-Aurora, told The Statesman Wednesday that with routine budget decisions, Republicans are using a new approach to eliminate or set back prior policy decisions that they disagreed with when the opportunity presents itself with budget votes.

The budget is always filled with policy decisions, Carroll said. But in supplemental budget measures, lawmakers are not there “to evaluate where you would have passed the original law, whether you liked it or didn’t like it. If it was a lawfully-created program and comes with fee funding that needs continued appropriation, you approve it. That’s what it was collected for.”

Carroll said that in the private sector, if someone collected money for a good or service and then didn’t provide the service, or provided less than was required, it would be called theft or fraud.

“The money is in the bank right now,” Carroll said. “It’s been collected under current law. Now we’re talking about keeping their money and not providing the service or providing a substandard service.”

Whatever disagreements legislators have about past laws, Carroll said, the reality is that the actions are holding up public service unnecessarily, either willfully making people wait longer for driver’s licenses or for a concealed carry permit.

“There’s no reason to make these people wait, other than an ideological objection to past bills,” she said.

— Marianne@coloradostatesman.com