'Next 4 years may be a difficult 4 years,' retiring Congressman Ken Buck says at CSU forum

Colorado Congressman Ken Buck first became involved in national politics during a constitutional crisis, and although he didn’t directly call it one, he is exiting during what could be another.

Buck, a five-term Republican from Windsor representing Colorado’s 4th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives, announced Nov. 1 that he will not run for reelection next fall, citing concerns over the direction his own political party has gone in its efforts to deny the results of the 2020 presidential election and downplay the subsequent storming of the U.S. Capitol by supporters of former President Donald Trump.

He first went to Washington, D.C., he said, in the mid-1980s to work in the Justice Department on the Iran-Contra investigation.

“It was a constitutional crisis, and I was a staffer for that,” Buck said Friday while speaking at a Thematic Year of Democracy event at Colorado State University. “... The constitutional crisis was about (then-President Ronald) Reagan and about his actions and about him trying to subvert — he thought legally, and other people thought illegally — the will of Congress.”

Although he didn’t directly call the increasing divisiveness that is crippling our government a “constitutional crisis,” he suggested as much while answering questions students had submitted in advance.

“We could solve the immigration problem,” Buck said of himself and his colleagues in Congress. “The issue is we’ve got so much money flowing into D.C. that keeps people apart that we won’t get to that solution.”

Not until the Republicans and Democrats are able to talk to each other again, without being attacked and ostracized from their own party faithful by doing so.

“If you want to live in an authoritarian country, you don’t need conversation,” Buck said. “One person, usually a male, says this is what we’re going to do, and that’s what you do.

“If you want to live in a democracy, in a healthy democracy, you’ve got to find common ground.”

To prove that common ground can be found, Buck told the 100 or so people in Lory Student Center’s University Ballroom and an unknown number watching an online livestream that he could probably easily find five issues the people in that room don’t agree with him on and 100 issues on which they would generally agree.

More: Governors of Colorado, Utah urge civility in politics in 'Disagree Better' talk at CSU

Although Buck believes we’ll bounce back from our divisiveness eventually, he didn’t hold out much hope of it happening in the current election cycle.

“I think we will come back together,” he said. “It may take more than four years. I won’t go into much detail about that on camera, but the next four years may be a difficult four years, may be a divisive four years.

“After that, I’m hoping that we have candidates for president, we have candidates leading the House and the Senate that can bring this country back together.”

He went on to note that during his work in the criminal justice system — 12 years with the Colorado U.S. Attorney’s Office and three terms as Weld County District Attorney — he dealt with a lot of people with addiction issues. Our country, he said, might be in a similar situation.

“Sometimes, people have to hit rock bottom before they realize that they have to go back up, and maybe, as a country, we’ve got a little further to go. But we will come back, because we are a great country.”

Conversation among Congress members, Buck said, was a lot more civil when everyone was living together in Washington, D.C. That changed, he said, in 1994 when Newt Gingrich, then the House minority whip, urged Republicans to get back to the grassroots to regain control of both houses of Congress. Instead of remaining in Washington on weekends when the House and Senate were in session, he said, members of Congress should return home to their districts. Republicans gained 54 seats in the House of Representatives and eight seats in the Senate in that election.

And most members of Congress, including Buck, have been going back to their home districts on weekends and when Congress is not in session ever since.

“Pre-1994, you had spouses that would get together for lunch,” Buck said. “Well, it’s hard to call someone an SOB when your spouses are having lunch together. It’s hard to yell at somebody when you see them that night at your kid’s Little League baseball game. It’s hard when you have those personal relationships to have the animosity that we have now.

“So, that discourse really, that personal relationship, overcomes political differences and policy differences and helps us find that common ground.”

Buck urged the students in the room to get involved in politics to start fixing the problems the current generation of politicians has not. The national debt, now at more than $34 trillion, should be a huge concern, he said, with interest payments alone now running about $800 million a year.

“If you don’t get engaged, you’ll have nobody to blame but yourselves,” he said.

Politics was a lot different when he got his start in public service than it is now, Buck said.

He took a call from then-U.S. Sen. Dick Cheney, R-Wyoming, who urged him to come to Washington and work as a prosecutor for the Justice Department in its investigation of the Iran-Contra Affair.

It was an ominous call, he said, with Cheney telling him very little while making the job offer other than that a plane had gone down in Nicaragua. Everything else he would need to know, Cheney told him, couldn’t be said on an unsecured phone line.

It was a constitutional crisis, Buck said, involving Reagan, the first president he had ever voted for. Yet there was no talk of impeachment, nobody sending subpoenas to members of Congress.

“We throw the word impeachment around now like it’s something you eat for breakfast,” Buck said. “… Iran-Contra, it involved members of Congress — senators, House members. Nobody ever thought to subpoena a fellow member of Congress. (The investigation into) Jan. 6, they were handing subpoenas out like candy bars to members of Congress.

“It was a different time. It was pre-social media, it was post-Watergate. But not to the point that we have now.”

CSU's Thematic Year of Democracy kicked off in November, with Govs. Jared Polis of Colorado, a Democrat, and Spencer Cox of Utah, a Republican, discussing how people could disagree better. Upcoming events include a public conversation between actress and noted political activist Jane Fonda on Feb. 2 that is already sold out but will be livestreamed and an April 30 talk by well-known political strategist Donna Brazile. Registration and additional event listings are available online at thematicyear.colostate.edu.

Reporter Kelly Lyell covers education, breaking news, some sports and other topics of interest for the Coloradoan. Contact him at kellylyell@coloradoan.com, twitter.com/KellyLyell or facebook.com/KellyLyell.news. 

This article originally appeared on Fort Collins Coloradoan: Congressman Ken Buck tells CSU crowd next 4 years could be 'difficult'