“Thank you,” newly elected state Senate President Kevin Grantham, R-Canon City, said in a speech that launched the chamber’s business on its first day of the 71st General Assembly Wednesday. “And welcome … to all of the holdovers, the crossovers, the do-overs, our re-elected members and our two new members: Senators Fenberg and Smallwood,” he said.

It was a memorable line.

The holdovers in the Senate are the 17 lucky senators who didn’t have to run for reelection this year.

The crossovers are the eight who came to the Senate from the House.

The do-over is Sen. Rachel Zenzinger, D-Arvada, who was appointed to the Senate in 2013 to fill a vacancy, lost the seat in a tough election a year later and then won it back this year.

There are seven senators this year who won re-election.

And there are the two genuine newbies, men who have never previously served at the Legislature: Sens. Steve Fenberg, D-Boulder, and Jim Smallwood, R-Parker.

It was hard not to watch the two of them in the chamber as the lawmaking wheels started to turn.

Fenberg, who ten years ago launched path-breaking youth voter-registration and politics group New Era Colorado, sat back in his chair, surveying the landscape, grinning now and again.

Smallwood is the founder of a successful insurance brokerage firm. His eyes seemed barely to blink, his hair was perfect, his smile spread from ear to ear. Between procedural activities, speeches and swearings-in, he made the rounds, shaking a lot of hands. “Everything’s new to me today,” he said, shrugging his shoulders next to the reporters table, making conversation.

Fenberg has landed some pretty fancy Senate real estate. He scored a middle row aisle seat, just steps from the dais, directly behind Minority Leader Lucia Guzman, D-Denver. Right next to him is battleground District 25 Sen. Kevin Priola, who won one of state Republican’s toughest elections in November.

Smallwood too won a spot in the front row, in a locked-in middle seat, which is pretty much where you’d expect a rookie to have to sit.

Fenberg has been assigned by Democratic leaders to the Agriculture, Natural Resources and Energy Committee, which is big league, as they say now in Washington. Members of the committee consider bills on perennial hot topics in the state, topics like water, the environment, and the fossil fuel and renewable energy industries. Fenberg has also been assigned to the State Affairs Committee, the chamber’s so-called kill committee, the legislative equivalent of a car trunk. Republican leaders will calmly invite what they see as problem bills into the committee and then there will be a moment of wrestling and then no one will hear from those bills again. The job of the two Democrats on the five-member committee is to make strong cases for the record about why the doomed bills deserve better treatment and also to find a way to decry partisan overreach in a way that seems fresh and genuine. It’s wearying work suited only to the most ideologically reliable and electorally secure caucus members.

Smallwood has been assigned to committees that neatly match his areas of interest and expertise: the Business, Labor and Technology Committee and the Health and Human Services Committee.

Fenberg, who represents the state’s liberal stronghold university town, told The Statesman last month that he nevertheless had no intention of running any message bills – the kind of proposals intended more to make a point than to make it to the governor’s desk to be signed into law. “No purely ideological shots,” he said.

But Smallwood, it came out Wednesday, has put his name on what is sure to be one of the most fraught bills of the session. He is the sponsor of Senate Bill 003, which aims to repeal Colorado’s Obamacare health insurance exchange. Smallwood’s bill is likely to generate increasingly heated debate in Denver as Republicans in Washington work to dismantle the federal healthcare law, which has already served tens of millions of Americans and on some level remade the health care industry.

Grantham touted Smallwood’s bill in his opening day remarks. All of the Republicans clapped. Not a single Democrat clapped.

– john@coloradostatesman.com