With 2019 firmly in the rear-view mirror, the roiling cauldron of events that shaped Colorado’s political scene is more clearly coming into focus.

The year began with the swearing-in of Democrat Jared Polis, the state’s first gay governor, and Jena Griswold, the first Democrat elected secretary of state in 60 years, and a General Assembly with a female majority for only the second time in the nation’s history. It ended with two Colorado congressmen helping draw the partisan distinctions surrounding the impeachment of a president, as U.S. Reps. Joe Neguse, a Lafayette Democrat, and Ken Buck, a Windsor Republican, staked out their party’s positions in historic House Judiciary Committee hearings.

In between, there were instances that helped define 2019.

One was on Oct. 23 when U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn delivered Chick-fil-A to Republican lawmakers who had stormed the secure facility in the Capitol basement where House committees were holding closed-door impeachment hearings.

Another was when Denver mayoral candidate Jamie Giellis stumbled over an answer in a May 14 interview, as the political neophyte struggled to remember what the initials NAACP stood for, giving Michael Hancock’s campaign an opening to divert attention from the incumbent’s simmering scandals and widespread discontent over Denver’s direction under Hancock.

Need proof Denver voters were ready to throw curve balls? Just a week before Giellis’ flub, the city passed a ballot measure to decriminalize psychedelic mushrooms, becoming the first jurisdiction in the country to do so.

But no other time was more critical than a three-week period in March, when a series of events took place that perhaps best embody the politics of the final year of a whipsaw decade, while casting a shadow into the new year dawning.

Warning: Some objects are closer than they appear.

March 11 — Senate Democrats take speed reading to new heights. Facing a state government entirely controlled by Democrats in the wake of the 2018 election, Republicans at the Capitol used every tool at their disposal to slow down the legislative process and force the majority to reckon with the minority. The standoff peaked midway through the session when GOP senators invoked an obscure clause in the state constitution to demand that bills be read at length before lawmakers voted on them, gumming up the Democrats’ rush to pass major legislation.

Democratic leadership responded by feeding the bills into computers programmed to spit out the gibberish on the Senate floor in what a judge later ruled was an “incomprehensible speed.” Republicans sued and won a court order declaring the Democrats’ too-clever-by-half move unconstitutional, preserving at least one arrow in the opposition’s quiver.

March 13 — The Bomb Cyclone. As a freak weather phenomenon that was later determined to have been the strongest Colorado storm ever recorded bore down on the state, Senate President Leroy Garcia dismayed observers by keeping the Senate in session while the rest of the state hunkered down. Still smarting from Republicans’ mounting delay tactics, Garcia forced the chamber and Capitol staff to conduct business as usual even as the weather turned positively frightful.

Plenty of factors contributed to the demise of legislation to require businesses to provide paid family and medical leave to employees, one of the Democrats’ signature 2019 proposals, but holding a poorly attended hearing on the bill while the storm outside was one hammerhead short of a Sharknado didn’t help.

March 14 — U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner votes against blocking President Trump’s emergency declaration. After criticizing Trump’s order shifting billions of dollars from the Pentagon budget to fund construction of sections of steel fence at the Mexican border, Gardner fell in line with the administration and OK’d the move, prompting The Denver Post to publish an editorial rescinding its 2014 endorsement of the Republican.

There were more viral moments in 2019 that brought to life Gardner’s evolution, from calling on Trump to end his presidential campaign in 2016 when the “Access Hollywood” tape surfaced — refusing to answer a gaggle of reporters’ questions about the propriety of Trump asking a foreign leader to investigate a political rival comes to mind — but in a state where the president remains wildly unpopular, Gardner’s bid for a second term in 2020 could hinge on his decision to throw in with Trump.

March 15 — Jared Polis signs National Popular Vote Act. It wasn’t one of the flashiest or most contentious legislative battles as it moved through the legislature, but a bill that would join Colorado to a national compact pledging the state’s Electoral College votes to the presidential candidate who wins the most votes nationwide, rather than the candidate who carries the state, could prove among the most consequential. Republicans immediately seized upon the bill as an indisputable example of Democratic “over-reach” and vowed to overturn it with a 2020 referendum.

The measure to keep the law from going into effect soon qualified for the ballot with the highest number of petition signatures ever gathered by volunteers in Colorado, setting up a contest Republicans are confident will motivate occasional voters in November with a simple argument, asking if Colorado voters want to let voters in California and New York determine who wins the White House.

March 30 — Ken Buck teaches Democrats to spell recall. The three-term GOP congressman was elected chairman of the Colorado Republican Party in a four-way race that went down to the wire, eventually prevailing over state Rep. Susan Beckman in a series of votes of the party’s state central committee. Rumor has it that the former Weld County district attorney is teeing up a rematch with Democratic U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet in 2022, but it was a line in Buck’s speech that echoed through the year.

“We’re going to teach (Democrats) how to spell R-E-C-A-L-L,” he said to wild applause, describing the Republican response to losing elections up and down the ballot in the last election.

Six recall attempts later, Buck’s promise rings hollow, though one Democratic lawmaker targeted with a recall, former state Rep. Rochelle Galindo of Greeley, resigned her seat after criminal charges surfaced during the campaign. The other recall efforts — against Polis, Garcia, state Rep. Tom Sullivan of Centennial and state Sens. Pete Lee of Colorado Springs and Brittany Pettersen of Lakewood — failed, some spectacularly. Organizers behind the campaign to recall Garcia, who won election in 2018 to his Pueblo seat without a Republican opponent, needed 13,506 valid signatures to force an election but after much bluster on Oct. 18 turned in just four valid signatures.