The nation’s leading anti-tax crusader, Grover Norquist, and his organization, Americans for Tax Reform (ATR), are taking aim at a conservative Colorado lawmaker as well as one of the state’s leading conservative voices, the Colorado chapter of Americans for Prosperity.

In a press release today, Americans for Tax Reform criticized Republican state Sen. Jerry Sonnenberg of Sterling – who is rumored to be toying with the idea of running for the 4th Congressional District seat held by U.S. Rep. Ken Buck – for his sponsorship of compromise legislation to raise revenue during the 2017 General Assembly.

Sonnenberg was one of four lawmakers, along with his House counterpart, Republican Rep. Jon Becker of Fort Morgan, to carry Senate Bill 267, which reclassifies the state’s multimillion-dollar hospital provider fee program. Under the law, the provider fee was reclassified into an enterprise – a government-owned business – which spared hospitals around the state from a half-billion dollar cut in fiscal year 2017-18.

As part of the deal crafted by the four lawmakers, which included Democratic Senate Minority Leader Lucia Guzman of Denver and House Majority Leader KC Becker of Boulder, the state’s revenue limit under the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR) was dropped by $200 million. That’s far short of what many conservatives, both inside and outside the state Capitol, wanted. Critics of the deal, including Jon Caldara of the Independence Institute and the Colorado Union of Taxpayers, have blasted Sonnenberg and other Republicans for months, stating the TABOR revenue limit should have been lowered by the amount of the provider fee revenue, about $800 million and that the deal betrayed TABOR.

It’s Sonnenberg’s support of 267, and a legislative report card released last week by the Colorado chapter of Americans for Prosperity, that has Norquist seeing red. AFP’s report card rated lawmakers on their adherence to economic policies such as TABOR. Sonnenberg was one of only six members of the state Senate, all Republicans, to earn an “A”.

Whoa! Just a minute there, said Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform. In a news release Tuesday, ATR said they were “extremely disappointed to learn that the Colorado chapter of Americans for Prosperity (AFP), a group we consider an ally and for which we have enormous respect, gave an ‘A’ and ‘Champion of Economic Freedom’ legislative rating” to Sonnenberg, “the elected official responsible for blowing a hole in the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, the most important tax-expenditure limitation measure in the nation.”

ATR called the measure a “$550 million annual tax and a $1.8 billion debt increase, the largest increases without a vote of the people since TABOR passed 25 years ago.”

Norquist added that “You cannot destroy TABOR and be a ‘Champion of Economic Freedom.’ AFP cannot claim to be a TABOR advocate and give a ‘Champion of Economic Freedom’ award to the guy who destroyed TABOR. That just doesn’t make any sense. Hopefully they will reconsider,” Norquist said.

Meanwhile, AFP is reconsidering its ratings, although whether Sonnenberg will lose his “A” is not yet known.

AFP State director Jessie Mallory told Colorado Politics Tuesday that a major bill had been left out of the calculations and that they were reissuing the scorecard sometime in the next few days. He refused to say who else might get an “A”, and who might lose theirs.

But several of the state Senate’s most fiscally conservative lawmakers got lesser grades in the first version, such as Sens. Kent Lambert of Colorado Springs and Kevin Lundberg of Berthoud, both members of the Joint Budget Committee. Lambert got a “B” in the original scorecard; Lundberg got a “C”.

Mallory called the ATR news release “unfortunate timing” but said he had reached out to the organization.