By Cory Gaines | Commentary, Colorado Accountability Project
There but for the grace of God goes Colorado
I was corresponding with someone recently and they mentioned something interesting. This person is a lawyer and said they were in a 10th circuit (Federal) courtroom recently and overheard an appellate case out of New Mexico about gun control.
I am not sure if you remember, but New Mexico’s governor made quite a splash a while back by declaring a public health emergency related to guns, trying essentially to use that to take away the Second Amendment rights of the citizens of that state.
Those orders, and later iterations of same, have been working their way through the courts ever since. The first link below is to that case if you’re curious.
This person asked a neighbor why it was that the solicitor general for New Mexico had an Australian accent. They were told that the lawyer didn’t work for New Mexico, the lawyer worked for Everytown. Everytown the gun control group (see the second link below).
Apparently Everytown supported the move by New Mexico and was thus there to defend it.
This was striking not only to the person I was emailing with, but to me as well. I shared their incredulity that a state would turn over litigation of a state policy to an advocacy group.**
Anybody that’s even scratched the surface of the explosion of gun control legislation in our state over the last few years knows that national gun control groups have been behind many if not all of those efforts; they know (especially lately) that Colorado is a fertile ground to try out all of their wildest and wackiest gun control policy and legal theories.
Can Colorado be far behind in letting those same gun control groups mix into our other constitutionally-created branches of government? I look at New Mexico and think that there but for the grace of God goes our state.
**This person’s quip regarding this was, to quote my email, “But we may not be far behind if Griswold is the next AG.” Yup. She’s already been caught letting Planned Parenthood in the back door.
How much is AG Phil Weiser charging the state to sue Trump?
Per the Westword article linked first below, AG Phil Weiser has sued the Trump administration 15 times now. This has happened over the span of 3 months.
He’s sued on everything from objecting to Federal funding cuts to stop an executive order that would dismantle the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Minority Business Development Agency, to (the most recent) block cuts to Americorps (see Related content).
Whether this is grandstanding, politics to help him in the gubernatorial race, driven by a belief in what he’s doing, or some combination, I will leave up to you to decide.
I have my own opinions on the matter, but I wanted to get (and share) a sense of how much this is all costing. I gathered up some resources below and so you have plenty to dig through in order to get as detailed an answer as you’d like. What I write here will be a summary.
Let’s start with the result of a CORA request I put in to the AG’s office. The second link below is to a 3/12/2025 memo from the AG’s office to the legislature’s Joint Budget Committee (JBC).
I would point you first to the table in Appendix A of the memo. It’s a tabular collection of all the lawsuits our state is currently pursuing against the Feds. Note, that as he often does, our AG is not directly suing the Feds but is rather doing the legal equivalent of raising one’s hand and saying “yeah, I disagree too!”. That is, a different state sued the Feds and Weiser signed Colorado on to their suit.
Obviously, our AG is not a fan of Trump, nor a supporter of what he’s trying to do. As such, since (apparently maybe even before?) Trump took office the AG’s office has been busy. Screenshot 1 attached is from this memo and details the outlay of time and resources from his staff current up to 3/12 when the memo was written.
As the memo authors note, this level of busy-ness is not sustainable, and they want more money. They warn that not getting it could mean Colorado couldn’t follow Trump’s actions as closely, have to satisfy themselves with merely watching and supporting others’ lawsuits against the Trump administration, or perhaps end up missing a chance to sue for something unique to Colorado that other states wouldn’t sue over.
Screenshot 2 (also from the report) gives this rationale in their own words.
And lastly we arrive at the bill, at the estimate for what the AG thought they’d need as of 3/12/2025.**
Pages 10 through 12 give a breakdown of the AG office’s esimtate. Screenshot 3 attached is the summary table from page 12. Putting aside the fact that a yearly salary of $285K for a senior attorney makes me regret becoming a teacher, the toplines are that they wanted an extra $600K the first year and an additional $630K to stay on top of and sue the Trump administration.
That’s not a small amount, especially with as tight as the budget was this year. The AG later sent another memo (more coming) proposing to get the money by tapping into a governement fund meant for other uses, but this didn’t happen. It would have required a chance to statute which didn’t happen.
As far as I know, the only money that went anywhere to help sue Trump was the bill that allotted a $400K slush fund to the governor to spend on Trump-related issues.
One more resource to share. It gives a little more context to this issue and is a handy thing to know about to better follow the state’s budget.
The third link below is to the legislative council staff’s budget overview page. This is a handy reference for things beyond the Department of Law (the home for the AG’s office): it’s the storehouse for different reports and budget requests that departments present to the legislature’s Joint Budget Committee over the year.
If you follow the link, you’ll note it already had its search settings winnowed down to the Department of Law and running from Nov 2024 to Oct 2025. The settings are easy to change if you’d like to see other things.
Most of the reports shown are for general budget requests. The Department of Law is listing out how much money they need, where it goes, etc. They cover how many people they’ll need, how much extra they’ll need based on new legislation, etc. This doens’t mean they’ll get it, it just means this is what they want. If you’d like a history and overview of the Department of Law’s yearly budget, have at it.
The alternative funding source for the lawsuits put forth by the AG’s office is from the topmost report, the one dated from 3/21/2025 and labeled as a “Comeback Request”. Much of what is in this report is the same as in the memo, but screenshots 4a and 4b list out their idea for how to get that extra $600K to keep the lawsuits rolling!
Why not just repurpose money earned from something else and intended for other things?
**A bill passed later in the session provided $400K to the governor’s office to help fund lawsuits and fill funding gaps if the Feds stopped paying out.
https://www.westword.com/news/colorado-lawsuits-against-president-trump-administration-24409604
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1h0ub6GgNUj_rbSggabs4W_io0mEgjSOY/view?usp=sharing
https://leg.colorado.gov/content/budget?field_department_topic_target_id[]=2341&field_budget_doc_type_target_id=All&field_date_value[min][date]=11/01/2024&field_date_value[max][date]=10/31/2025
Related:
Love journalism which takes a perspective? You’ll love the Colorado Sun article linked below.
From the title on down a wonder of opinion masquerading as news.
How could we cut Americorps when it does so much good? Cue the booing and hissing when you get to the subtitle and read the word DOGE.
https://coloradosun.com/2025/05/11/colorado-americorps-mile-high-youth-corps-doge-cuts/
Colorado’s AG Phil Weiser isn’t just suing Trump with tax money, he’s supporting gun control cases with it.
Let’s tie the previous two posts together, the first about gun control lawsuits along with the second about AG Phil Weiser’s briefcase-load of Trump lawsuits, with a final post today showing some of the gun control lawsuits (appellate level) our AG has been pursuing.
AG Phil Weiser is endorsed by many gun control groups and has a history of supporting gun control measures (along with an assault weapons ban — the image heading this post is from his most recent AG campaign website and I used it when I discussed his gun control history in the older newsletter linked first below).
While gathering research materials for the previous post about the AG’s office suing the Trump administration, the memo returned from my CORA request (linked second below for convenience) had something interesting all the way down at the bottom.
Appendix A attached to the memo is a table of the current (as of the memo’s date of 3/12/2025) lawsuits Colorado is/was pursuing against the Federal government. Screenshot 1 attached is the final, appellate-level lawsuit rows.
Two of the three are our AG supporting cases defending ATF rules.**
If you look at the middle and far-right boxes of the table, you’ll see the AG’s rationale for joining the lawsuits. I would highly recommend that you not stop there, however.
I don’t have time to go into the details of each lawsuit, but I would remind you that there are two sides to every legal case. If you Google the names of the cases, you’ll find more infomration (e.g. that Butler v. Garland deals with an ATF rule that would have required collectors who might like to buy sell or trade firearms to have to be licensed firearms dealers).
As much as anything too, I’d like you to note that, despite the rhetoric coming from our AG and his office, despite language about defending Coloradans’ rights, our AG is mostly playing politics. He was silent on Biden’s excesses, he joins in lawsuits to support actions by the Biden administration, and he sues the Trump administration.
And he’s using your money to do it all.
**When you see the language “Intervening Defendant-Appellate” in the table this means that Weiser put us in as a defendant at the appellate level to work in support of Biden’s ATF and Attorney General while they responded to the lawsuits referenced.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1h0ub6GgNUj_rbSggabs4W_io0mEgjSOY/view
This commentary by Gaines first appeared on his Substack, The Colorado Accountability Project.
Cory Gaines is a physics instructor and author of The Colorado Accountability Project on Substack, where he explores issues of transparency and government oversight. A native Coloradan and frequent contributor to outlets including Complete Colorado and The Colorado Sun, Gaines brings a research-driven approach to civic commentary, inspired by what Richard Feynman called “the pleasure of finding things out.”
Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in commentary pieces are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the management of the Rocky Mountain Voice, but even so we support the constitutional right of the author to express those opinions.