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The Republican Party has a knack for raising the alarms against its most virulent members only after it is too late. The county chairs and candidates now denouncing Dave Williams are the most recent example.
Their protests come so late in the election cycle, not only will Williams avoid accountability until after the 5th Congressional District primary election June 25, but he may have the last laugh. With ballots already in the mail, Williams may already be ready to measure for curtains in a new Washington D.C. office.
Before Williams, the serious and intellectual crowd in the Republican Party split themselves among presidential candidates in the run up to the 2016 election. Gov. Jeb Bush, Sen. Marco Rubio, Sen Ted Cruz, and others. Donald Trump was a buffoon with a penchant for publicity stunts; nobody considered him a serious contender, and, consequently, nobody attempted to stop his momentum until it was too late. Even throughout the general election he was treated more like a circus clown barker than a potential president.
We all know how that went.
But a funny thing happened afterward. Republicans fell in line behind Trump delivering the entire party to his every whim. And they have not been able to change course since.
In 2020, a small woman with a big gun on her hip and an even bigger mouth screaming conspiracy theories took on a long time incumbent on Colorado’s Western Slope. Longtime political players believed the high school dropout without any substantive policy chops presented a minor inconvenience. Then-Rep. Scott Tipton was so convinced that he kept hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank for the general election.
I wrote the first column recognizing that Lauren Boebert could win that primary and then lose the general election.
Boebert did win the primary, got by against a milquetoast Democratic candidate in the fall, and then eked out another victory in 2022. But despite near adoration by the far-right center of the current Republican party, she understood her luck would run out in 2024 and skipped town for flatter pastures on the Eastern Plains (where the anti-Boebert candidates will likely split the vote enough to usher her back into office).
It appears I was two for two on my predictions, it just took a little longer for the second to come to fruition.
That brings us to Dave Williams.
He has been the most inveterate purveyor of virulent rhetoric and hateful speech in the state for nearly two decades. Those stunned by his use of Colorado GOP resources to attack the LGBTQ+ community in such a disgusting manner must have been wilfully ignorant. This is the same Williams who used his position as the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs student body president to undermine funding for LGBTQ+ groups on campus in 2008.
And he escaped any censure then, too. At the time the school chancellor imposed no discipline for violating the student constitution for viewpoint neutrality because “the students had adequate remedies in the political process.” The CU Board of Regents declined to review the chancellor’s decision, despite two dissents from centrist Republicans.
This is what happens when people sit on the sidelines as dangerous people gain power. The power snowballs, corrupts every organization it touches, and eventually destroys the host.
Williams went on to run for multiple offices, from county commissioner to U.S. Congress, winning a state house seat and eventually the race for GOP state party chair. At the time, I wrote that only the braindead would put a despot like him in charge.
Yet the Republican political crowd stuck with him. They stuck with him when he filed a lawsuit with disgraced and disbarred attorney John Eastman, they stuck with him when he used party resources to solicit funds for indicted election denier Tina Peters, they stuck with him when he drew a Federal Election Commission complaint for using party funds for his personal gain. Republicans stuck with him despite the very obvious autocratic characteristics he proudly put on display.
Now they may be stuck with him.
The attempt to oust Williams is unlikely to succeed. But it certainly will not be heard or resolved until after the primary election. If Williams wins, he is the odds-on favorite to be elected to Congress from the Republican-heavy congressional district; he won’t necessarily need the state party position any longer.
That does not mean he will not keep it. And it certainly does not mean he will not seek revenge against those he perceives as enemies. Already his supporters in Jefferson County have censured the county chair leading the charge against him. In a chiling example of gaslighting, they did so because they wanted the chair to “stop doing stuff that wasn’t approved or got authorization to spend funds on.”
If Williams goes on to beat Jeff Crank in the congressional primary in just over a week, his Republican opponents will have no one but themselves to blame for waiting too long to do anything about it. Again.
Mario Nicolais is an attorney and columnist who writes on law enforcement, the legal system, health care and public policy. Follow him on Twitter: @MarioNicolaiEsq.
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