Staying with guns, here I feel obliged here to make a confession: I honestly couldn’t imagine the Colorado recalls succeeding. I never wrote anything to that effect, preferring to cover the major players without comment, but the effort privately struck me as being unlikely to succeed. Advocates were outspent and outgunned, and, having seen what as much as anything else was a rejection of the recall process in Wisconsin in 2012, I anticipated that Coloradans would refuse to indulge their initiatives too. I got it wrong. Not only did voters in conservative-leaning Colorado Springs remove their senator — also the president of the state senate — but in deeply Democratic Pueblo an apolitical 29-year-old plumber orchestrated a successful grassroots campaign that will go down in history. Toward the end of the year, in a third recall that I openly argued was a “bridge too far,” Senator Evie Hudak elected to resign rather than take her chances at the ballot box. I was wrong — three times. I failed to see coming a great story about people standing up for their most basic rights. This was a salutary lesson to those who would dismiss the power of citizen activism.

Like an awful lot of other people, I thought that the Republican party would respond to its defeat in 2012 by jumping blindly toward immigration reform and passing whatever the Democrats said was necessary. The Senate’s immigration bill is one of the worst pieces of legislation that have been passed in recent years, failing as it does to address the problem, vastly expanding legal immigration of low-skilled workers, and making the structural economic problems of the United States worse, not better. I never quite thought that the Senate’s immigration bill would be passed into law as is, but I am genuinely surprised that we have emerged from 2013 without there having been a House–Senate conference that allowed the president to sign something.