Senate President Bill Cadman, R-Colorado Springs, played down news Monday that Republican Attorney General Cynthia Coffman officially agreed with state Democratic leaders that reclassifying the state’s hospital provider fee would be constitutional.

Cadman also minimized the same opinion when it was offered a little more than two weeks ago by former Attorney General John Suthers, a Republican who is now mayor of Colorado Springs, and by Jon Anderson, chief counsel to former Republican Gov. Bill Owens.

In a meeting Monday afternoon in his office crowded with reporters, Cadman had clearly moved on from the idea that legal opinions about the constitutionality of the hospital fee even mattered that much at all anymore to the debate, which has been surfacing every other week or so since the beginning of the legislative session in January.

“The bottom line is, we need a little bit of time for the (legal) folks who we rely on here to make decisions to digest it,” he said, picking up and then dropping a copy of the opinion. “It’s another opinion,” he added. “The courts are full of attorneys with conflicting opinions.”

“This says you could enterprise (the hospital fee), not that you should.” Cadman said that’s what separates the judicial branch from the legislative branch.

It was a large step away from the place where Cadman was standing on the issue just a month-and-a-half ago.

The week before the legislative session began, Cadman touted an opinion written by the Legal Services office at the Capitol that argued that reclassifying the hospital fee as an enterprise fund would not be constitutional.

Back then, it was House Speaker Dickey Lee Hullinghorst, D-Gunbarrel, who was playing down the value of a legal opinion.

“Lots of lawyers will have lots of different opinions,” she said. “But most importantly, the Legislature is the lawmaking body in this state, so that we can address problems just like these.”

This likely will not be the last time this session that arguments go topsy turvy on the hospital fee.

In addition to being complicated and bureaucratic, the topic is tangled in basic Republican versus Democrat ideological differences about taxing and spending. It also comes in a presidential election year and there is already a truckload of political capital invested in the debate.

Coffman’s 16-page opinion came in response to a narrow legal request made by the office of Gov. John Hickenlooper.

The governor has been pushing the plan to reclassify the fee for two years — and he has pushed it much harder this year than he did last year when Republicans killed a bill that would have made the change.

Hickenlooper and legislative Democratic leaders have embraced the plan as a way to transfer hundreds of millions of dollars out of the state general fund in order to make room for that much more tax money before the state hits the spending caps put in place by the Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR).

If the last few weeks are any measure, Democrats may win the battle of legal opinions only to lose the war over the hospital fee.

“This could be overcoming one hurdle, but not all the hurdles,” said Cadman about the Coffman opinion. “We’ve been down this road for a year-and-half and we’re still here.”

He said that he doesn’t think any of the legal opinions offered so far address the question of whether it is legal to transfer the hospital fee out of the general fund without then “resetting the base” from which the TABOR spending caps would be calculated.

He added that he thought reclassifying the hospital fee would almost certainly bring expensive lawsuits.

And he said that reclassifying the fee does nothing to address what he sees as the real problem with the budget, which is the steady increase in health care spending that is gobbling up greater and greater shares of the budget, leaving little money to pay for popular programs such as education and transportation.

“The downside, if (the reclassification) were passed and litigated and overturned, is that we the taxpayers — all of you all who pay taxes here — would be on the hook for the entire amount that was used for this and the 10 percent penalty,” Cadman told reporters. His eyes moved from face to face as he waved at budget numbers scrawled on a white board.

“This year’s budget is $141 million of new money,” he said. “Brand-new general fund, additional general fund, more general fund than ever in this governor’s budget is going to health and human services. That’s not speculation. That money is already committed to health and human services. The reality is you can’t keep writing checks to solve your problems when there’s not more money coming in.”

Ultimately, the life or death of the hospital fee reclassification proposal rests with Cadman — for this year, at least. Republicans control the Senate by one vote and Cadman is the lawmaker who will assign any bill passed by the Democrat-controlled House to either a Senate committee that might pass it or one that will most-assuredly kill it.

Cadman is term limited and so less subject to the slings and arrows of the campaign trail this year than are most of his Republican colleagues.

Arguing against the hospital fee reclassification as a matter of protecting TABOR and against new spending will be a winning argument among Republican voters. But what about among the unaffiliated voters who decide elections in Colorado’s swing districts?

The hospital provider fee reclassification is an arcane budget proposal, the kind of issue that can be expected to fill Capitol hallway conversations, not candidate stump speeches. Yet all of the major media outlets in the state are reporting on it. Small-government group Americans For Prosperity is rallying for it in neighborhoods and on Twitter. A steady stream of news releases about it filled inboxes all day.

And it’s an issue that can play well with voters on both sides.

School administrators all across Colorado would relish more money from the state to pay for textbooks and teacher salaries. Towns want better roads. So do business lobby groups. And Hickenlooper knows it. He told reporters Monday that it would “become very difficult to find money” for education and transportation without reclassifying the hospital fee. The budget he presented this year would slash some $20 million from higher education.

Members of the media who have been reporting the story’s back-and-forths, pressed Cadman on why he didn’t think it would be best to use the new Republican-penned opinion from Coffman as a starting point from which to bring his caucus over on the hospital fee proposal while wringing concessions in other areas from legislative Democrats who seem ready to make a deal.

Cadman stuck to his guns. He said he saw the issue as a matter of principles and priorities.

“Voters and taxpayers have been ignored by this administration and the Democrats for 10 years, and they’re wondering why we don’t help them fix their problems,” he said. “They’re ignored every time Democrats take money out of education and spend it on health care not required in the Constitution. Every dollar they match with Obamacare is a dollar coming out of current spending for the real needs of all 5.4 million Coloradans.”

— john@coloradostatesman.com