In a bipartisan rebuke of how a years-long scandal has been handled, a Colorado Senate committee on Monday made the rare move of not approving the gubernatorial reappointment of the top two members of the state’s Commission on Judicial Discipline.

Just months after voters statewide overwhelmingly chose to change how Colorado disciplines judges, the state Senate Judiciary Committee voted — 4-3, with two Democrats joining the panel’s two lone Republicans — to offer an unfavorable recommendation to the full Senate on the reappointment of Mindy Sooter and Jim Carpenter, the chair and vice-chair, respectively, of the 10-member commission.

It was the committee’s last official act as the legislative session rushed to a close on Wednesday.

The full Senate is expected to take up the nominations before the close of the session. The full Senate could affirm the nominations anyway, but senators generally vote for committee recommendations, especially when that recommendation comes from the panel’s chair.

If the Senate does not vote to reappoint Sooter and Carpenter, their term would end on June 30, and Gov. Jared Polis would have to make new appointments, subject to Senate approval in the fall.

The committee put off its vote until after it heard testimony last week from the commission’s former executive director warning of “a scheme of ongoing public corruption and public fraud” that’s percolated since a contract-for-silence scandal erupted in 2019. That scandal led in early 2021 to allegations that it was then-Chief Justice Nathan “Ben” Coats who approved the contract to a former Judicial Department official who was being fired for financial irregularities.

Part of the scandal, according to Christopher Gregory, former executive director of the discipline panel, included the public silence around a voluminous anonymous complaint filed in October with three state commissions and the FBI alleging a far-reaching conspiracy designed to conceal years of alleged lying, retaliation and misuse of public funds.

Sooter and Carpenter maintained the allegations were deemed baseless and Friday for the first time publicly said the voluminous complaint had been dismissed.

In voting against the nominations, committee chairwoman Sen. Julie Gonzales, D-Denver, said “I do think it’s healthy to create new and fresh starts.”

Lindsey Daugherty, D-Arvada, John Carson, R-Lone Tree, and Lisa Frizell, R-Castle Rock, also voted against the re-nominations.

Daugherty is a member of the Colorado Commission on Judicial Performance, which reviews Supreme Court justices and judges of the Court of Appeals for retention.

“It’s not clear to me that the allegations are baseless,” Sen. Matt Ball, D-Denver, said before voting to recommend Polis’ nominations. “If there’s smoke there might be fire. But it’s not clear to me that the two individuals we are charged with recommending are implicated.”

Ball recommended the committee take up special hearings in the next legislative session to address the allegations.

“Now, over six years of seeking to hold the justices of the Colorado Supreme Court accountable for proven violations of the Colorado Code of Judicial Discipline, I am optimistic that our legislators have acknowledged the public’s mandate for Colorado’s judicial nomination, judicial disciplinary, and performance evaluation systems to have legitimacy and integrity, including the need for further meaningful enforcement and reforms,” Gregory told The Denver Gazette in an email after hearing of the committee’s vote.

Gonzales and co-chairman Sen. Mike Weissman, D-Aurora, are the lone committee members to have served on an interim joint legislative panel in 2023 that took weeks of summertime testimony about how Colorado disciplines its judges.

That process began following newspaper accounts that revealed former Judicial Department Chief of Staff Mindy Masias was given a multi-million dollar contract despite being fired for financial irregularities. It was later alleged the contract was to prevent her from going public with allegations in a threatened tell-all sex-discrimination lawsuit that would reveal years of judicial misbehavior had been handled quietly or covered up.

Masias was fired and several other department employees resigned in the wake of the scandal. The discipline commission later sanctioned Coats for his role, the only time a Colorado Supreme Court justice has been disciplined. Separate investigations paid for by the Judicial Department later determined there was no quid pro quo deal promising Masias a contract in exchange for her silence, though a number of witnesses were not interviewed.

During his testimony last week, Gregory revealed that he sought a federal investigation into how the commission handled the scandal, including allegations that it was replete with conflicts of interest.

Gregory was the commission’s chairman when Polis in July 2021 chose not to reappoint him to a second term. The commission hired Gregory as its executive director later that year. Sooter replaced Gregory on the commission board.