“Never let a serious crisis go to waste,” as former Barack Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel once quipped. This is especially true when no crisis actually exists and entrenched politicians see the opportunity to solidify a permanent political and consultant class, while masquerading as a pro-democracy populist movement. So is the case with the Colorado presidential primary bill HB 16-1454 that was introduced less than three weeks after Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump declared the Colorado system he effectively chose not to compete in was corrupt and unfair.

The bill is now being rammed through the Colorado legislature by Establishment leaders of both major political parties at rapid speed, despite the fact that the next election it will impact is in 2020! Why so fast? Because the iron is hot, and the politicians don’t want the public, particularly the grassroots base of both parties, to see what the bill actually contains.

House Bill 16-1454, sponsored by Democrat Rep. Dominick Moreno and Republican Rep. Timothy Dore, would bring back a government operated and funded presidential primary to the State of Colorado after it had previously been repealed in 2003. For 80 years prior to 1992, and since 2003, Colorado Democrats and Republicans managed their own nomination processes, using their own volunteers and money, through neighborhood caucus and assembly/convention systems. Under the caucus/assembly process, every registered Republican and Democrat had the opportunity to become a delegate and participate in the process of selecting their respective party nominees. A presidential primary would require the local state parties to allocate their committed delegates to the national conventions proportionally based on the outcome of the primary election.

While many would cheer this bill for restoring “power to the people,” only the opposite is true. As is typically the case — the devil is in the details.

HB 16-1454 does not create a closed primary system where only Republicans could choose the Republican nominee and Democrats choose the Democrat nominee. HB 16-1454 would require the political parties to include the votes of unaffiliated voters when determining the allocation of delegates Colorado will send to the national party conventions. In other words, non-Republicans are allowed to choose Republican presidential nominees and non-Democrats are allowed to choose Democrat nominees.

The bill does not create more interest and participation in the political process as some claim. Rather, it creates a legal fiction known as a “temporary affiliated elector,” which allows unaffiliated voters to vote in either a Democrat or Republican primary of their choice, and then automatically drops them back into the pool of unaffiliated voters once the primary is over. Why would any unaffiliated voter have an incentive to become more active in the political process or more specifically, the nomination process? To the contrary, it encourages voters not to participate in caucus or learn more about the political process that will continue to govern selection of delegates, party platforms and other important races for public office.

While the bill contains requirements for the allocation of delegates based on the outcome of the primary election, it also qualifies this and a number of other requirements by allowing for national party rules to override the effect of the law. By incorporating exceptions for national party rule changes into the law, the bill is essentially giving national party leadership legal authority over the conduct of the nomination process on a local and state level in Colorado.

Finally, one must wonder why the General Assembly is so keen on obstructing the 1st Amendment rights of political parties to promote their desired public policy issues and elect their own leadership, while subsidizing intra-party elections to the tune of over $5 million in taxpayer funds.

The late Justice Antonin Scalia perhaps said it best in 2000 when he opined, “In no area is the political association’s right to exclude more important than in the process of selecting its nominee. That process often determines the party’s positions on the most significant public policy issues of the day, and even when those positions are predetermined it is the nominee who becomes the party’s ambassador to the general electorate in winning it over to the party’s views.”

If the People of Colorado, and Donald Trump supporters in particular, are concerned about ridding the system of corrupt Establishment party insiders, the remedy is not to institutionalize their authority and governance in law. The remedy is to learn the system, organize and beat them at their own game.

Don’t accept the bone politicians are throwing to keep the grassroots at bay — demand more and demand better — and oppose HB 16-1454.