Trump's First 100 Days | Colorado's congressional delegation reacts to president's flurry of actions – ColoradoPolitics.com

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From left, U.S. Reps. Jeff Hurd, Gabe Evans and Jeff Crank, all Colorado Republicans, pose for a selfie on the steps of the Capitol after their election to Congress on Nov. 15, 2024, in Washington.
U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, a Colorado Democrat, announces his candidacy for governor in the 2026 election on Friday, April 11, 2025, at City Park in Denver.
U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, a Colorado Republican, questions Denver Mayor Mike Johnston during a House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing on sanctuary cities on Capitol Hill on March 5, 2025, in Washington.
U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper, a Colorado Democrat, speaks at a reception for former Interior Secretary Ken Salazar on Sunday, March 23, 2025, at the Denver Art Museum in Denver.
U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse, a Colorado Democrat and the assistant House minority leader, speaks during a news conference to introduce the Democratic House leadership for the 119th session of Congress on Capitol Hill on Nov. 19, 2024, in Washington. 
U.S. Rep. Brittany Pettersen, a Lakewood Democrat, holds her 9-week-old son Sam as she speaks on the House floor in support of a proposal to let new parents vote by proxy, on Tuesday, April 8, 2025, at the U.S. Capitol in Washington.
U.S. Rep. Jason Crow, a Colorado Democrat, holds a press conference just outside Buckley Space Force Base, in Aurora on Feb. 3, 2025. 
FILE PHOTO: During a campaign rally in Aurora on Oct. 11, 2024, then-candidate Donald Trump, promised to create a task force to address the issue of unauthorized gang members and a death penalty for immigrants who kill Americans.

From left, U.S. Reps. Jeff Hurd, Gabe Evans and Jeff Crank, all Colorado Republicans, pose for a selfie on the steps of the Capitol after their election to Congress on Nov. 15, 2024, in Washington.
U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, a Colorado Democrat, announces his candidacy for governor in the 2026 election on Friday, April 11, 2025, at City Park in Denver.
U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, a Colorado Republican, questions Denver Mayor Mike Johnston during a House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing on sanctuary cities on Capitol Hill on March 5, 2025, in Washington.
U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper, a Colorado Democrat, speaks at a reception for former Interior Secretary Ken Salazar on Sunday, March 23, 2025, at the Denver Art Museum in Denver.
U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse, a Colorado Democrat and the assistant House minority leader, speaks during a news conference to introduce the Democratic House leadership for the 119th session of Congress on Capitol Hill on Nov. 19, 2024, in Washington. 
U.S. Rep. Brittany Pettersen, a Lakewood Democrat, holds her 9-week-old son Sam as she speaks on the House floor in support of a proposal to let new parents vote by proxy, on Tuesday, April 8, 2025, at the U.S. Capitol in Washington.
U.S. Rep. Jason Crow, a Colorado Democrat, holds a press conference just outside Buckley Space Force Base, in Aurora on Feb. 3, 2025. 
FILE PHOTO: During a campaign rally in Aurora on Oct. 11, 2024, then-candidate Donald Trump, promised to create a task force to address the issue of unauthorized gang members and a death penalty for immigrants who kill Americans.
As President Donald Trump passes his 100th day in office — marking the end of a commander-in-chief’s traditional “honeymoon” period — it’s been anything but business as usual for members of the state’s congressional delegation.
In just over three months, the Trump White House has flooded the zone with daily — sometimes hourly — actions, starting with a flurry of executive orders issued on the first day, through a campaign to freeze federal grants, begin shuttering down some agencies, step up deportation enforcement, lay off federal employees, reverse previous administrations’ regulations, and, most recently, pursue tariffs changes.
Detractors see the president’s actions as chaotic — “100 days of chaos,” is how Democratic U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper put it on X on Tuesday — saying Trump’s tariffs policy, for example, has left the stock market shaken and the public bracing for possible economic shocks.
The Republican’s defenders, however, view Trump’s moves as decisive, insisting he’s doing what he said he’d do on the campaign trail and delivering for the American people. As GOP U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert tweeted: “We have just witnessed the most productive and successful 100 days of a presidency in American history!”
Weeks after Trump was sworn in, Democratic U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, Colorado’s longest-serving senator in more than 50 years, began to consider whether he could have more of an impact outside Washington. Earlier this month, he launched a run for governor in next year’s election.
After becoming only the 14th member of Congress to give birth while in office, U.S. Rep. Brittany Pettersen, a Lakewood Democrat, put herself and her newborn son in the national spotlight as the faces of a fight over whether to change House rules to let new parents vote remotely, spurred by a procedural vote in the narrowly divided House to advance Trump’s legislative agenda.
Two of the state’s Democratic House members, U.S. Reps. Joe Neguse and Jason Crow, have become fixtures on cable news shows and in other venues this year, voicing complaints about the latest news from the White House, while articulating a vision of the future of their party, particularly following last year’s election losses nationally. Neguse, his chamber’s assistant minority leader, co-chairs the task force charged with coordinating the House Democrats’ legislative and legal responses to Trump. Crow leads the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee candidate recruitment effort ahead of next year’s midterms.
Boebert, the only Republican House member from Colorado who’s been in Washington for more than a few months, has been one of Trump’s most consistent and vocal supporters, lauding the administration’s illegal immigration crackdown, workforce reductions and general tone. Freshmen U.S. Reps. Gabe Evans and Jeff Crank, for their part, have struck similar tones. Meanwhile, U.S. Rep. Jeff Hurd, who replaced Boebert in the 3rd Congressional District after she moved across the state last year, has expressed some qualms about Trump’s approach, particularly with calls for Congress to assert its constitutional authority.
Through it all, Colorado’s Democratic members of Congress and statewide officials have sounded a constant alarm, while the state’s Republicans have nearly universally applauded the president’s moves, contending that the administration is making good on campaign promises to slash spending and rein in a government that long ago grew beyond its means.
“I think that this moment is a perilous one for our republic, as we see an administration that’s undermining the rule of law and issuing executive orders that are having dramatic and harmful impacts for countless Americans across our country,” Neguse told Colorado Politics. “It’s clear that Congress has to take a comprehensive approach in responding and pushing back against these abuses of power.”
Boebert told the audience on a telephone town hall in late March that she is thrilled with Trump’s approach.
“For far too long, we have had a government that seems to only want to control the people, but you are the ones who are ultimately in control under our constitutional republic in the United States of America, and it has been a wonderful year so far,” Boebert said.
Celebrating the passage earlier this year of the Laken Riley Act, which requires federal authorities to detain undocumented immigrants facing certain criminal charges, Boebert told callers that Trump’s deportation program is a success.
“We are cracking down hard on violent, illegal, criminal aliens who have no business being here,” she said. “And let me tell you, under President Trump’s leadership, we’ve seen border crossings drop like a rock. We are working to not only secure the border, but we are draining that swamp, and we are draining it faster than our irrigation ditches in August in the 4th District. We’re proving that strong policies work for America.”
With Republicans controlling the presidency and both chambers of Congress, Democrats from Colorado have taken varied approaches to counter Trump’s agenda to reshape the federal bureaucracy — mostly by hammering Trump verbally while organizing responses in an attempt to galvanize public opinion. Additionally, Neguse’s task force and state Attorney General Phil Weiser have joined a flurry of lawsuits and filed briefs challenging the administration’s actions in court.
The Democrats’ rhetorical resistance has ranged from regular press conferences to sending a lot of letters urging the Trump administration to reverse its decisions.
In February, Crow gathered reporters outside Buckley Space Force Base in Aurora to demand that the military’s mission not be compromised by housing immigrants subject to deportation on the base.
In his role as a recruiter for House Democrats, Crow told Colorado Politics that he has a straightforward description of the party’s vision in the Trump era.
“We are the party of the working class,” he said. “We’re the party of fairness, of leveling the playing field, and we’re not going to guarantee outcomes for folks. We’re not trying to enforce a certain outcome. What we’re trying to do is make sure that if people who are willing to put in the work or might need help when they’re down, are willing to do that, and we’ll be there for them.”
Earlier this month, U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette, the ranking member on the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s health subcommittee, joined her fellow subcommittee members outside the Department of Health and Human Services to demand a meeting with Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. to discuss cuts proposed by the Department of Government Efficiency.
Among a steady stream of letters signed onto by Democratic members of the delegation, Hickenlooper released a slew of the missives in the last full week of April, including one calling on Small Business Administrator Kelly Loeffler to protect the nation’s more than 34 million small businesses from what the senators characterized as threats posed by Trump’s tariffs. Another, signed by Hickenlooper, Bennet and Neguse, demanded that the Commerce Department reverse planned cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other Colorado-based research centers.
A third letter Hickenlooper signed asked Trump to comply with the Supreme Court’s unanimous order to “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the U.S. from the prison in El Salvador, while also condemning Trump’s efforts to deport other immigrants to the same prison without constitutionally guaranteed due process.
“Your unprecedented actions threaten the constitutional protections of all Americans and violate the fundamental principles on which this nation was founded,” the 26 senators wrote.
GOP lawmakers, meanwhile, have largely backed Trump’s decisions.
“The Department of Education is DONE! Thank you, President Trump!” Boebert said in a post on X last month in response to an order largely dismantling the federal agency.
Noting that the department’s budget has grown over the years while student proficiency has worsened by some measures, Boebert added: “Our children deserve a REAL education, not the federal mess we have now. Now the money will go back to the states and we’ll get QUALITY education again.”
Crank, a longtime Colorado Springs political operative serving his first term, said he’s been “incredibly vocal” in his support for eliminating the education department. Evans, a former police officer and state lawmaker from Fort Lupton, told Colorado Politics that Trump’s order will let parents make more decisions about their children’s education. 
“For too long, Washington bureaucrats have been making reckless decisions that have led to lower test scores and poor morale across our nation’s classrooms. Education is essential to success in life and I look forward to working with the president to protect education funding and to support students, not systems,” he said. 
Evans, the freshman Republican from Fort Lupton, said change is “desperately needed,” given that “60% of kids can’t read at grade level and 70% can’t do math at grade level.”
And Hurd, a Grand Junction attorney first elected in November, said he shares Trump’s concerns “about the failures of federal education policy,” adding that he believes Washington’s “top-down control burdens schools, undermines parental authority and ails students.”
But Hurd also distanced himself from the Trump White House when it comes to the president’s tariffs. 
Hurd, the only attorney among the state’s Republicans, led a bipartisan bill that seeks to check Trump’s authority to impose tariffs unilaterally without congressional review, citing what he described as a clear constitutional requirement.
Hurd told Colorado Politics that while he supports the aims behind Trump’s executive orders, some will require congressional action.
Referring to one of Trump’s earliest targets, the U.S. Agency for International Development, Hurd said in an interview, “There is a role for executive order orders, as it bears on USAID, but fundamentally this is an institution that was created by Congress, and that I think long-term, systemic change would require some action by Congress. And I say that as somebody that believes in the preeminence of our first branch of government, in the legislative branch.”
Hurd added that it’s without question the president’s prerogative to issue executive orders and understands “the driving motivation behind so many of these orders, and also the support that I think so many of them have from people,” who he said “feel like government is wasteful, it’s inefficient, there’s little accountability, there’s little insight into where these dollars are spent.”
“I’m completely sympathetic, but what I would say is, fundamentally, we need to make sure that we respect the role of Congress and how that exactly looks in this context,” Hurd said. “I think that will need to be determined. But fundamentally, I think we will require some congressional action for a lot of these changes if they’re going to be permanent and if they’re going to be effective.”
After formally launching his campaign for governor at Denver’s City Park in early April, Bennet told Colorado Politics that he stood by his decision to vote in favor of confirming about a dozen of Trump’s cabinet nominees, saying that it benefits Coloradans when he can communicate with department heads, including the secretaries of agriculture and veterans affairs.
“We have one of the highest percentage populations of veterans in Colorado. I understand there are people who believe that I should have voted against every single nominee as a protest vote,” said Bennet, who got national attention for his aggressive questioning of Kennedy, the health secretary nominee, and Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence.
“I have chosen, where it made sense to me and where I thought it made sense to Colorado, to approach it differently,” Bennet said. “I’ve supported a handful of nominees in the hopes that it will help Colorado.”
Launching his campaign, Bennet told more than 100 supporters he decided that running for governor — and potentially giving up the seniority he’s accrued in the Senate — made more sense than staying in Washington to fight Trump, though he emphasized that, “Everything we care about now is at stake in our country.”
Bennet said years of economic stress have left Colorado families feeling like there aren’t any good political alternatives.
“We can show that people can still work together to get things done together,” he said. “We can make this the best state to live, work and raise a family, and we can be an example for the rest of the company country on how to fight Trump and drive a stake through Trumpism, which I am committed to do every day.”
U.S. Rep. Jeff Hurd, a freshman Republican from Western Colorado, is sponsoring legislation amid President Donald Trump’s rapidly shifting tra…
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