Colorado: Connecticut

Democratic Sens. Mark Udall and Michael Bennet announced today in a joint press release that they are now officially part of a moderate working group/coalition/thingy called "The Moderate Dems Working Group." According to the announcement:
The Moderate Dems Working Group will meet every other Tuesday before the Democratic Caucus lunch to discuss legislative strategies and ideas. The Moderate Dems held their second meeting Tuesday to focus on the upcoming budget negotiations and the importance of passing a fiscally responsible spending plan in the Senate.

Leading the new group are Democratic Senators Evan Bayh of Indiana, Tom Carper of Delaware and Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas.

Awash in the sound and fury of today’s anti-tax crusaders — the refusenik governors, the tea party attendees, the screamers of “socialism,” the Ayn Rand-loving libertarians “going Galt,” the op-ed writing de facto leaders of the Republican party, the just plain fools — you would think there was significant disagreement among the U.S. population on the big tax-spending stimulus package.

There’s not.

All of the racket generated in the days since this surprising piece was published by Republican pollster Frank Luntz at the end of January drowned out what polls have demonstrated: Americans agree the government should spend whopping amounts of tax dollars in order to get people working again and spending money in order to get more people working and spending money.

Since November, when voters passed Colorado’s controversial Amendment 54, and the last day of December, when it became law, 54’s expanding implications have slowly come into focus, spurring heated arguments for and against it.

As a high-powered lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the amendment wends its way to court, detractors and supporters are pleading their cases in the court of public opinion, underlining the fact that the showdown over 54 is just the latest skirmish in a larger battle over the evolution of lawmaking at the ballot box instead of at the Legislature.

Critics of Amendment 54, including the attorneys who filed the suit against it last month, say its sprawling reach is a product of the sloppy approach its authors took in drafting it and of the inadequacies of the ballot-initiative process to make laws.

Lumped together, the House [PDF] and Senate [PDF] versions of the economic stimulus plan number some 1,400 pages, roughly the equivalent of the complete works of Shakespeare.

And some of the language is just as artfully crafted.

The package includes an insurance exemption — but only for companies that work on recreational boats longer than 65 feet. Another provision would lift a Medicare regulation affecting only three long-term care hospitals in the country. There’s also language requiring the Transportation Security Administration to buy 100,000 uniforms from U.S. apparel makers.

In theory and publicity, the package is “earmark free.” But it contains dozens of narrowly defined programs that send money to specific areas or cater to special interests, despite President Obama’s pledge to pass “an economic recovery plan that is free from earmarks and pet projects.