Founding Principles, Lakewood’s Code Reversal, and the HD51 Primary Field

Kim Monson’s Thursday broadcast on May 14, 2026, kept returning to one question: how does the Declaration of Independence measure the laws, taxes, and conversations of the present day? First American State Bank founder Jay Davidson walks through a recent essay on Justice Clarence Thomas’s University of Texas speech; in-studio author Brad Beck previews a weekend column on talking politics with a Democrat neighbor. Karen Gordey reports Lakewood scrapped its wildfire code, House District 51 candidates Nancy Rumfelt and Amy Parks make their primary cases, and former Lt. Col. Brad Miller flags tomorrow’s ticket-sales cutoff for the Duty to Disobey documentary.

The Declaration as a Moral Standard

Start listening at 67:26 – Hour 2

Jay Davidson, founder and CEO of First American State Bank, is working through a recent essay by William Brooks on the speech Justice Clarence Thomas delivered at the University of Texas at Austin. The Brooks piece, which Davidson circulates to a reader group of his own, argues that the Declaration is not a document to be admired but a moral standard to be lived. Davidson reads the founding sentence aloud, then steps through the implication: the rights to life, liberty, and ownership are endowed by the Creator to one person at a time, not to a nation or a class.

From there Davidson presses on the modern accretion. Each new tax, each new fee, each new statute shrinks the individual’s right to self-choice in ways the founders never authorized. He calls the federal SAVE Act redundant, because non-citizen voting is already illegal, and faults his own party for piling new laws on top of constitutional protections that, if enforced as written, would do the same work. Progressive taxation gets the same treatment: a higher share from the high earner for the same public services is a structural violation of equal treatment under law.

Kim brings in an anecdote of her own. As president of the Colorado Union of Taxpayers, she recently voted against a Republican-sponsored income-tax cut whose means test carved out a favored group; she keeps the legislator and the specific bill anonymous on air. The principle, she and Davidson agree, has to apply even when the giveaway is one you would have personally benefited from.

“The Declaration judges us. We don’t judge it.”

Jay Davidson, founder and CEO, First American State Bank

Talking Politics Over a Beer

Start listening at 31:00 – Hour 1

Brad Beck, co-founder of Liberty Toastmasters, previews a column he plans to publish this weekend. The premise is a quarterly beer with a long-time Democrat neighbor. They have different politics, mutual respect, and ground rules. Beck’s thesis is not about the issue they happened to discuss but the conversational habit that lets two neighbors disagree productively: refuse to play “topper,” the move where one comment escalates the previous one. Ask where an idea came from. Ask for a source to read. Come back with one of your own.

The example Beck walks through is a recent conversation about the Second Amendment. The neighbor kept invoking Samuel Johnson’s 1755 dictionary as the authoritative source on “well-regulated”; Beck named for him, in the moment, the other resources the founding generation also leaned on: Blackstone, Bailey’s Universal Etymology of the English Language, the pamphlet literature, the colonial reading lists. Eighteenth-century “regulated,” Beck told him, did not mean government-controlled; it meant well-ordered or properly disciplined.

Kim widens the frame to surveillance: Xcel smart meters, drive-by water meters, Chinese-made cars that ship driving data back home, airport facial-recognition cameras. Beck ties it back to the column’s premise. Without civic friction between actual neighbors, the data-collection infrastructure goes unchallenged because no one is in the room to push back.

“Our founders sat down in a tavern over a grog or a beer or whatever they’re drinking, a Madeira, and argued versificely at these ideas of the American founding.”

Brad Beck, co-founder, Liberty Toastmasters

Lakewood Drops the Wildfire Code

Start listening at 07:10 – Hour 1

Karen Gordey, owner of Radiant Painting and Lighting and a leader of the Lakewood Citizens Alliance, reports the Lakewood City Council voted Monday to postpone the wildland urban interface code indefinitely. The ordinance had stacked extra requirements on top of the state’s WUI floor, and Gordey told councilors at second reading the city should either match the state baseline or pause for a third reading.

More than 100 residents turned out for a Saturday community meeting at the Green Mountain Recreation Center. Council members stayed past 3 p.m. answering questions one-on-one. By Monday’s third reading, the mayor pulled the WUI code from the consent agenda and announced it would go back to the Board of Adjustments with only the state floor adopted while the city studies a path forward.

Gordey credits the turnout, not the testimony. The mayor specifically named the “overwhelming community engagement” before reversing course. The takeaway, Gordey says, is that engaged residents in volume change council decisions in ways individual citizens at the podium cannot.

“Third reading was Monday and unbelievably, at the very beginning of the meeting, the mayor, you know, she’s talking about the agenda. She says we’re going to see some changes on the agenda. We’re pulling some things off the consent agenda. But most importantly, we are postponing indefinitely the WUI code.”

Karen Gordey, owner, Radiant Painting and Lighting

A Last-Minute HD51 Filing in Loveland

Start listening at 17:47 – Hour 1

Nancy Rumfelt, a former Thompson Valley School District board director, says she filed at the last minute for House District 51 in Loveland after the prospect of the former Loveland mayor winning the seat became unacceptable. The district covers the city of Loveland and is the last Republican-held seat fully inside Larimer County.

Her case, she says, is a record of fighting in the trenches: signatures for Protect Kids Colorado, work on the Thompson Valley school board, and a willingness to take on city councils. She singles out Senate Bill 26-135 as what she calls a Trojan-horse assault on TABOR, and says she would join Representatives Bradley and Ken DeGraff in the fights ahead at the Capitol.

Rumfelt notes she has a primary opponent and has real concerns the other Republican could win it. She tells listeners outside the district that conservative support still helps: “We need people who have a record of showing up to fight.”

“It’s not just worth saving. It’s worth saving for our children and our grandchildren.”

Nancy Rumfelt, HD51 candidate

A Water Policy Specialist Joins the HD51 Race

Start listening at 103:00 – Hour 2

Amy Parks, a communications specialist in Colorado water policy, also makes her case for House District 51. She has worked the past decade on Republican races in Larimer and Weld counties, and frames the seat as the last GOP-held district fully inside Larimer County, a piece of geography she says is worth defending.

Her opening move at the Statehouse would be the budget. The state has a spending problem, she argues, and the just-finished session is an opportunity to look at waste and start returning money to taxpayers.

Parks closes with a broader frame: the legislature has been working to constrain citizen-led initiatives, and her job, if elected, is to push back on that pattern. “They’re coming after the voters in our voice any which way they can,” she tells Kim.

“We were seeing the legislature come after these citizen led initiatives and it’s wrong. And they’re they’re coming after the voters in our voice any which way they can.”

Amy Parks, HD51 candidate

Duty to Disobey: Ticket Deadline Tomorrow

Start listening at 106:28 – Hour 2

Former Army Lieutenant Colonel Brad Miller returns to flag tomorrow’s ticket-sales cutoff for the June 30 Duty to Disobey premiere. AMC venues in Fort Collins, Colorado Springs, Denver, and Castle Rock need 50 percent of seats sold by Friday to confirm their slots.

The film documents the roughly 100,000 service members who lost their careers refusing the military’s COVID shot mandate. Miller frames the story as far broader than the military itself: it sits at the heart of the tension between collective public health and individual rights, a tension he says is resurfacing as similar mandates are debated again.

Tickets are $20 at dutytodisobeyfilm.com. Miller acknowledges that the military is an orders-based institution, but he emphasizes service members are taught from their earliest training that they have an obligation to refuse unlawful orders.

“There were approximately 100,000 service members that lost their careers because of the unlawful and destructive COVID shot mandate.”

Brad Miller, former Army Lieutenant Colonel

Real Estate Check-In

Start listening at 60:25 – Hour 2

RE/MAX Realtor Karen Levine gives the April Denver-metro market read. Inventory is up, which is normal for the April-May window, and median and average sales prices have held steady against the increased supply. Motivated sellers are negotiating more aggressively, including offering seller concessions toward buyer closing costs.

The result is more choice and more negotiating room for buyers without a sharp downward move in prices. Levine and Lorne Levy will be in studio together next week to walk through both sides of a transaction.

“There are choices out there, and there is opportunity.”

Karen Levine, RE/MAX Realtor