Roughly half the membership of the Colorado Republican Party’s state central committee on Saturday voted overwhelmingly to approve a resolution expressing “no confidence” in state GOP Chair Brita Horn’s leadership and calling for her immediate resignation in an online meeting Horn says wasn’t authorized and will have “zero impact.”
The 250 Republican party officials who convened Saturday also approved resolutions freezing Horn’s spending authority and ordering her to bring an end to all legal activities surrounding prolonged litigation stemming from attempts nearly two years ago to depose her predecessor.
“Brita, in her own weird way, found a way to unite our party,” said state Republican Party Secretary Russ Andrews, who organized and chaired Saturday’s central committee meeting, which was held on the Zoom teleconference platform.
State Republicans will have the chance to vote on the same questions again in a little over a week at a separate online meeting called by Horn for March 2, with an identical agenda.
Declaring that Andrews’ formal call for Saturday’s meeting “lacked authority and is invalid,” Horn said in an email to central committee members that the meeting she’s organizing next month will be the only one that complies with party bylaws.
As Saturday’s nearly three-hour meeting neared its conclusion, a spokesman for Horn reiterated the party chair’s contention that the meeting then underway was not authorized.
“It’s an illegal meeting,” said Alec Hanna, the state party’s executive director, in a text message. “It has exactly zero impact on the operation of the Colorado GOP.”
Hanna declined to comment further on Saturday’s meeting.
Andrews told Colorado Politics earlier this month that he called the meeting of the party’s governing body in response to a petition submitted by Horn’s critics last fall, despite having initially rejected the petition.
Horn, for her part, said the petition, circulated by Colorado Springs Republican Ray Garcia, prompted her to call the March 2 meeting in an email to Republicans. However, she disputed Andrews’ interpretation of the sequence of events that he claimed permitted him to act on his own.
Andrews and others at Saturday’s meeting urged Republicans in attendance to show up for the other meeting and “vote the same way.” That sentiment, however, wasn’t unanimous, with one central committee member calling on Republicans to skip the meeting because he didn’t want to “legitimize anything Brita does.”
Horn, a former Routt County treasurer and longtime party activist, was elected to chair the state party at the end of March 2025, following a tumultuous previous year when a faction of Republicans that included Horn spent months trying to remove her predecessor, former state Rep. Dave Williams, from the party’s top position.
Since taking over, Horn has faced criticism for poor fundraising while racking up more than $100,000 in legal costs in an attempt to recover legal fees from a group of Republicans who tried to join a lawsuit that originated when Williams was party chair.
Last week, an El Paso County district judge ruled against the state GOP’s attempts and chastised everyone involved for dragging out the litigation, noting that the original lawsuit had been dismissed seven months earlier.
Before voting in favor of the resolution to constrain Horn’s spending authority at Saturday’s meeting, central committee members approved an amendment proposed by Williams to continue paying Hanna, the state party’s executive director, and to permit spending on the GOP’s state assembly, scheduled for April 11 in Pueblo.
Horn was elected party chair along with a slate of officer candidates that included Andrews and Darrel Phelan, who served as vice chair for about three months before tendering his resignation over what he characterized as frustration at being “systematically sidelined” by Horn.
Former state Rep. Richard Holtorf, who won an election to replace Phelan as vice chair last summer, announced earlier this month that he intends to step down at the end of February, calling it “impossible” to work with Horn.
Holtorf, who attended Saturday’s meeting, spoke in support of the “no-confidence” resolution, which was amended before it passed to include a demand that Horn resign “immediately.”
“What Brita does is up to Brita, but this is a declaratory statement from the body that, hey, you know, it might be time to think about doing something else, because we’re not getting it done,” Holtorf said, acknowledging that the resolutions by themselves can’t force Horn from office.
“I’ve gotten on the lifeboat and started paddling, because the Titanic has been sinking now for a month or two or more,” he added. “We need new, fresh leadership so we can move forward as a party, not (have) this vindictive lawfare and this backstabbing, circular firing squad that I have witnessed.”
Also during Saturday’s meeting, Andrews asked Republicans in attendance to sign a new petition that began circulating last week to call for yet another meeting, this time to consider whether to recall Horn from office.
According to a court ruling handed down in response to efforts to remove Williams from his position nearly two years ago, it takes the votes of 60% of the committee’s total membership to oust a state party officer. That would be about 300 votes, taking into account the fluid nature of the roughly 500-member central committee, which is made up of county party officers, bonus members from the largest counties and Republican elected officials.
It could be a high hurdle for Horn’s critics.
Although each of the resolutions at Saturday’s meeting passed with the support of at least 90% of those voting, that amounted to an average of only about 200 votes against Horn, far short of the 300 that would be needed to force her from office.
Leave a Reply