The sound and fury about gridlock that has marked news-release language and news-conference presentations over the last two weeks may come to nothing at the Capitol — which isn’t to say it won’t make for effective election-campaign fodder this fall.

Colorado lawmakers now well into the second half of this year’s legislative session are expressing exasperation over the stalemates that have stymied efforts on both sides of the aisle to strengthen big-ticket education and transportation programs.

Republicans and Democrats are pointing fingers and throwing up hands. They see different problems and they’re pushing different solutions.

“We’re the minority party. We have a voice but not the vote,” said Senate Minority Leader Lucia Guzman, D-Denver. She was speaking Tuesday at a meeting with reporters that seemed more like a campaign event. Her office was filled with a small crowd of Coloradans who have testified in support of Democratic bills that have been defeated this year in Republican-controlled Senate committees.

Guzman said Republicans have voted against bills designed to protect and further “the Colorado way of life.” She mentioned bills that would have advanced environmental safeguards, secured gender-based equal pay for equal work, established full-day kindergarten and shored up crumbling roads and bridges.

“Senate Republicans are on the clock,” she said. “We’re not going to give up. These people here today with us care about making a level playing field.”

To help make the point, the Democratic caucus posted a Senate Republicans countdown clock on the Web. At press time, it reads 50 days, 5 hours, 50 minutes and 41 seconds.

Senate Democrats assembled for the event lamented an estimated budget shortfall this year of $190 million and again pushed a proposal to reclassify the state’s hospital provider fee, a move that would allow the state to keep hundreds of millions of dollars in new revenue and spend it on state programs starved of funds during the recession.

Senate Republicans reading Twitter reports from the press conference dismissed the arguments as politically motivated hyperbole.

In a press conference last week, Senate President Bill Cadman, R-Colorado Springs, said state budget writers have already come close to matching this year’s spending to the projected revenue shortfall.

“The sky isn’t falling,” he said. “The numbers actually look pretty good. The reality is, now that we’ve had some adjustments, we’re in a place where we’re within $64 million of being budget neutral. That’s pretty close to on the mark.”

Cadman has strongly opposed the hospital provider fee change as a stop-gap move that doesn’t address larger budget problems. He says the state is spending way too much money on health care in general and Medicaid in particular.

“There is $141 million more than ever before going into health and human services,” he said, adding that he believes that’s the reason there is so little money for roads and schools and it’s why the hospital provider fee change will not fix the problem. “The money will go to a program (Medicaid) that’s bankrupting every state. We know that,” he said.

Republicans on Tuesday said they have yet to see any compromise from Democrats that would make the hospital provider fee proposal more attractive.

Earlier this month, House Speaker Dickey Lee Hullinghorst, D-Gunbarrel, said she was still hopeful some agreement could be reached on the hospital fee — but the areas of potential give-and-take she mentioned at the time seem now to have all but vanished.

She said that a hospital fee bill could, in effect, earmark any retained revenue for education and transportation projects. Republicans don’t believe it’s possible to earmark the money. They say that, in effect, any extra revenue has already been spent in Medicaid payments.

Hullinghorst mentioned that she was “open to talking about partial refunds” for taxpayers. But, with new budget numbers coming in, it looks as though there will be no refunds for taxpayers at all.

Indeed, Senate Democrats on Tuesday said they came to the press conference with no compromise offer with which to win over Republicans. They said only that they hoped President Cadman would allow a hospital fee bill to be debated on the floor of the Senate, where the amendment process and full debate could run its course.

“That’s how we do things,” said Guzman. She meant that’s how they should do things, theoretically. But that’s not how things often go.

What the leaders of the party in power do — the Democrats in the state House and the Republicans in the state Senate — is send bills they oppose to a kill committee to disappear so that lawmakers don’t have to debate them on the chamber floors and so are relieved of worry about video of unflattering debate performances appearing in election campaign commercials.

— john@coloradostatesman.com