George Markert is running for U.S. Senate. He’s already been in the room.

By Jen Schumann | Rocky Mountain Voice

Dinner one night back in 2018 was seafood and gator sausage, with family around the table. Before long the conversation landed where it usually does in the Markert family—service.

George Markert was on official Marine Corps business at the time in Pensacola, Fla. Markert was leading a high-level investigation as a colonel.

His uncle got word he was in Pensacola and insisted they get together before he left. The worn Constitution changed hands at the end of a family dinner in Pensacola.

When Markert flipped it open, he saw a handwritten note.

“The note read, ‘This was your grandfather’s, and he held it sacred,’” Markert said.

“He did a tour in Washington, D.C. in the Navy back in the 1950s and used to take my dad and his three siblings to the Library of Congress to see the Constitution and the Declaration. And so he passed that copy to me for safekeeping. I must have a 1,200-book library in here, but I keep this thing in its own special place. It’s probably 75-80 years old.”

On the wall of his home office hangs a shadow box with medals from three generations—his grandfather’s Navy service, his father’s and Markert’s own 30 years as a Marine colonel.

The Constitution sits nearby. The two artifacts together tell you most of what you need to know about why Markert is running for John Hickenlooper’s seat.

“It just kind of all came together for me in a moment where I realized that our entire family was devoted to service to this country, and that we held the Constitution sacred, just like my grandfather did. First and foremost, the primary duty is to safeguard the freedoms articulated in there—and then everything else kind of flows from that.”

After 30 years of grinding the mission, retiring wasn’t what he expected.

“When you live a life like I did, you become this mission machine,” he said. “And then you retire and there was something missing. I had this intense desire to serve and I couldn’t find an outlet for that in the private sector. It was usually just, ‘Make money, make money.’ Fine. But it left some emptiness.”

George Markert in dress blues with his mother. Thirty years of service on his chest. (Photo courtesy George Markert)

By early 2024, Markert found himself watching Colorado politics more closely. Hickenlooper’s reelection was drawing near. Watching transformed into a thought—that didn’t go away.

“I couldn’t shake it. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It kept me up at night. I said, this is your moment. This is the moment to do the right thing on behalf of the American people.”

When Operation Epic Fury launched against Iran’s nuclear and military infrastructure earlier this month, most Senate candidates offered measured statements. Markert offered something different—two decades of firsthand context.

One of Markert’s last assignments as a colonel placed him at U.S. Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base, serving as chief of staff for a directorate at the headquarters now directing the campaign against Iran. He spent two years there overseeing conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen. The region wasn’t new to him—he had deployed to the Middle East repeatedly from 2001 through 2020.

Markert addressed the conflict directly in a video posted to his campaign Facebook page on March 14.

“This is by far the weakest Iran has been in five decades,” he said. “After working in the Central Command headquarters as a senior officer, I can assure you that the United States has been developing contingency plans for a conflict such as this for many years. The era of inaction or weak national security policy is over—not on my watch.”

In his RMV interview, he went further.

“Coming face to face with Iranian small boats with missile launchers mounted on them, having to deploy Marines with machine guns onto the decks of the ship to chase them away. For 47 years, Iran was the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the world, and they were never going to stop in their pursuit of a nuclear program regardless of what we did.”

The targets now being struck are not new to him.

“All these capabilities being hit right now—their naval capabilities, their command structure—those are targets I’ve been aware of for close to a decade and knew were on the table for a very long time. Just never acted on. And so now their command structure has been decimated. Many of their critical capabilities are no longer in existence and they’re as weak as they have ever been.”

He sees the operation as something larger than Iran.

“This is not just about tactical actions in Iran. It’s about geopolitics and global strategy. We’ve taken away key partnerships between China, Russia and Iran—or at least degraded them. They’re taking notice of the fact that we have a president who has the will to act decisively and to solve problems and not admire problems.”

Ask Markert what the U.S. Senate actually does on a given week and he won’t give you a civics textbook answer.

The most common function, he’ll tell you, is voting on nominations—judicial appointments, generals, cabinet secretaries, ambassadors. These are not abstract figures to him.

“I dealt with cabinet secretaries, I would go to D.C. and brief these people. I worked in the Pentagon as a major—my job was to facilitate decision making. At every time I worked at a higher level headquarters or was out forward in a combat zone, I would get a visit by members of Congress, senators, congressional delegations. We would brief them and help them understand what was going on so they could go back to D.C. and influence voting.”

He also wrote the testimony.

“I used to write testimony for both the House and Senate Armed Services Committees. I would actually sit in there, question generals, help them practice how they were going to answer questions, write everything out for them as well as for the committee member. I go in with a body of knowledge. I don’t necessarily need a whole lot of staff prep—because I lived it.”

Markert reads a book a week. Over the past 20 years, Markert figures he’s read close to a thousand books, most of them presidential biographies or works on world affairs.

He spent several months making his way through Robert Caro’s four-volume, 3,000-page series on Lyndon Johnson. Johnson isn’t a personal hero, Markert said, but the books offer a clear look at how power actually works in Washington.

He studied leadership at the master’s level and spent his first six months as a second lieutenant learning the hardest form of it.

“Peer leadership is the most difficult form of leadership. I learned 33 years ago how difficult it is to tell a guy who doesn’t necessarily work for you how to do something and do it well. The goal of all leadership is to get people to transcend self-interests for the good of the country or the organization. That’s why when I talk about putting together the resume for the U.S. Senate, it started 15, 20 years ago. I didn’t start when I filed with the FEC. I started working a long time ago thinking, ‘When I get there, will I have everything I need to do the job well?’ The answer is yes—but it took decades of work.”

On the trail, Markert is direct about what he sees as Hickenlooper’s failure.

“I think the worst thing is his inaction. There are times where our inaction creates a greater catastrophe than being aggressive and making mistakes—an error of omission versus commission. Where was he when we had open borders? Where was he standing up saying, ‘This is going to devastate Colorado from two standpoints—economic and public safety’? I didn’t see any critical thinking. I didn’t see anyone taking responsibility for errors. I saw weakness in three primary issues: the border, energy and law enforcement.”

Back in his home office, the 75-year-old Constitution sits on its shelf. The medals are in the shadow box. And Markert is clear about what drives him now.

“The American people deserve better. Imagine the lesser tax burden on people and how the economy could grow if you could clean things up. I would love to be in there asking those hard questions, providing that oversight, making sure people don’t get away with these things anymore. As a service member, if you made one little mistake, you were held accountable. Meanwhile we’ve got people tossing billions out the door with no accountability.”

Coloradans who want to learn more or reach out to Markert directly can email him at [email protected] or visit markertforsenate.com.