Colorado’s junior senator, Republican Cory Gardner, is only 44. And he’s part of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s leadership team.
In 2014, he defeated Democratic Senator Mark Udall, an environmentalist who ran a dispirited campaign. Gardner did that mostly by smiling and looking happy. Before that, he represented the Centennial State’s sprawling, conservative 4th Congressional District. Gardner's from Yuma, Colorado, on our state’s Eastern Plains. He defeated incumbent Democrat Betsy Markey for that seat in 2010. In these pages, we have previously described Gardner as a chipmunk disguised as a politician.
For years, Gardner has championed the move of the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management out of Washington DC to Grand Junction, Colorado, a city of fewer than 60,000. The BLM controls more than 247 million acres of public land, all of it west of the Mississippi River.
On Monday, Gardner gleefully announced that the BLM headquarters will move to Grand Junction, a city only a few miles east of Utah on Colorado’s Western Slope. A few top BLM officials are slated to be the first to move out of our Nation’s Capital. The BLM has 11,621 employees.
When associate solitary reporter Melissa Smith asked Gardner how much it will cost to move BLM headquarters from Washington to Grand Junction, he shrugged and said, “Melissa, I don’t care anything about our budget deficit, I just wanna get re-elected. I don’t even like to live in Washington, but I stay here out of loyalty to Senator McConnell and Mr. Trump, even though I voted against him after the Access Holloywood tape came out just before the 2016 election.”
“There are twelve members of the Democrat Party running against me,” Gardner reminded ASR Smith, “and eight potential Dems who might run against me, including Superstar Secretary of State Jena Griswold, who’se only 34; she ousted my close personal friend Wayne Williams in 2018."
“They say I’m the most vulnerable Republican in the Senate in 2020, but with my superb victory on moving the BLM to Western Colorado, those Dems don't have a chance, especialy since they’re so fractured."
Elsewhere, associate solitary reporter Sophia Kenwood told Massachusetts Cape and Islands District Attorney Michael O’Keefe that he never should have dropped charges against formerly famous actor Kevin Spacey (a.k.a. President Frank Underwood) for assaulting a man in a bar.
“#MeToo goes both ways,” Kenwood said.