Colorado House Speaker Frank McNulty said this morning that he backs Dick Wadhams for re-election as chairman of the Colorado Republican Party. McNulty told a breakfast meeting of the Arapahoe County Republican Mens (and women's) Club that Wadhams did a  very good job navigating Colorado Republicans through the 2010 elections. "Dick is the right guy to lead us through the 2012 elections," McNulty said. Wadhams has announced that he is running for a third two-year term as chair. A new GOP central committee will elect the state pary's chair on March 13.

In response to my question, McNulty also said that he opposes the Medical Marijuana bill (HB 1043), which would make it easier to grow, sell, prescribe and buy pot. He said pot legislation "will go through several iterations" in the 2011 session of the General Assembly.

In response to a question about cutting the car tax increase that was enacted last year, McNulty said cutting would be a symbolic victory and that he is focused on winning real victories, not symbolic ones. In other words, he's not going to make repealing FASTER or cutting the car tax until he achieves his major goals.

McNulty said that the top priority for House Republicans is to cut state spending and to reform job killing regulations on the oil and gas and other industries. His second and fall back priority, he said, is to stop the Democrat-controlled Senate and Gov. John Hickenlooper from increasing spending.

However, McNulty said, he is not for cutting spending on K-12 education.

Higher education is another story, he said. The most money in the state budget that can be cut goes for higher education, which will take a hit, McNulty said.

When I asked whether the legislature can take power away from the faculty in higher education so that they no longer can block cost cutting efforts, McNulty said that Republicans will try to give the top executives and boards of the state's universities and community colleges more power to cut costs by reforming civil service laws that make it very difficult for them to layoff people. 

I hope to post clips of McNulty's comments this evening.

LINKS:

Medical Marijuana (HB11-1043.