Tessa Cheek and John Tomasic Posts

After months of thorny, stop-and-start negotiations that in recent weeks seemed doomed to fail, Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper announced today that he had succeeded in wringing a truce out of dueling big-money backers of ballot initiative proposals concerning local control over oil and gas development in the state.

In 2000, the Supreme Court ruled that buffer, bubble, zones around abortion clinics were perfectly constitutional. Since then, the court has become more conservative, and states have pushed ever more restrictive abortion laws. When buffer zones are revisited by the court this year – will it change its mind?

A Colorado judge ruled that voters in the upcoming recall elections cannot use mail-in ballots, and must vote in person. The ruling is a blow to Democrats, who wrote the more inclusive mail-in legislation when deciding how the election would be run earlier this year.