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Montana Legislature party leadership reflects on 2023 session day after adjournment – Daily Montanan [1]

['Blair Miller', 'More From Author', '- May']

Date: 2023-05-03  

A day after Montana lawmakers adjourned the 2023 legislative session, leadership from both parties said they were generally feeling good about the work they did over the 87 days of the session.

The Republican supermajority that came to Helena with a surplus of more than $2 billion sent the governor bills on many of its top priorities, including tax cuts and rebates to the tune of about $1 billion, facilitating charter schools, giving raises to prison workers and funding more workforce housing in Deer Lodge and Warm Springs, a $100 million police pension reform measure, trying to steady what it felt like was an uneven balance of power among the three branches of government, and more red-meat issues addressing the likes of abortion, energy and the LGBTQ+ community.

Democrats, who held 48 of the 150 seats between the House and Senate, found some wins as well, caucus leadership said, including closing the Medicaid reimbursement rate gap, expanding child care access by lowering costs for low-income Montanans, passing several bills addressing issues in Montana’s Native communities, fending off constitutional amendment proposals, and finding a voice to push back against what they called the Republican attacks on the LGBTQ+ community and reproductive rights.

And while the legislature did pass in the final day of the session a combined workforce and affordable housing bill that mashed together pieces of proposals from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle – portions of which Democrats praised and which Senate Majority Leader Steve Fitzpatrick, R-Great Falls, called a “flagship” piece of legislation – both parties acknowledged that addressing the rising property taxes in Montana, which came into the session as a top priority, could have ended with better results.

Republicans lauded the $1,000 property tax rebates that will be sent to homeowners this year and the next, saying they felt that more work needed to be done in conjunction with local governments – perhaps something over the interim, as House Speaker Matt Regier, R-Kalispell, said Wednesday.

“I think that’s a misnomer that people have is that, you know, property tax is a function of what we do here in the state, and it’s not. It’s really function of what’s done at the local level,” said Senate Majority Leader Steve Fitzpatrick, R-Great Falls. “And I hope that the citizens out there that have paid attention this session have learned that they need to go and hold their local elected officials accountable … because (local spending) is going to have a direct role in what you pay in property tax.”

Democrats said the refunds hardly scratch the surface of what is truly needed for what they feel is the issue that most needed addressing by the 68th Legislature.

“What we heard from our constituents is that they need property tax relief. Democrats brought proposal after proposal, and Republicans left this building, having a supermajority, without addressing permanent property tax relief,” said House Minority Leader Kim Abbott, D-Helena.

While Republican leaders in the House and Senate noted that many bipartisan bills passed, and Democrats acknowledged none of their legislation could have passed without support from some in the other party, news conferences with House Republicans and both chambers of Democrats on Wednesday showed the deep divides between the parties are not likely to close soon and that their philosophies are entrenched moving into the interim.

Republicans still feel that the protesters who yelled down from the House gallery at them when Rep. Zooey Zephyr, D-Missoula, would not be acknowledged on the floor – for what Republicans agreed were decorum violations – levied attacks on them and the legislature as a whole.

“This has been done in the face of a faction of leftists that incorporate hate and harassment as a political weapon in an attempt to slow the progression of legislation,” Regier said. “The minority [Democratic] Party condoned those actions in the Montana House, stating that police in riot gear is a normal part of democracy.”

Regier continued to say that the story of what happened last Monday “has not been told” after blaming the press last week for its framing of the controversy involving Montana’s first transgender woman lawmaker.

“It’s just an embarrassment to the Montana House and embarrassment to the state of Montana and I really wish the minority party would have come out with more opposition to that,” the speaker said, adding that he had called for the gallery to be cleared and that law enforcement enforced his decision, bringing in police in riot gear and eventually arresting seven people on trespassing charges.

Abbott, a former organizer, has said that Republicans should have expected the protests the Capitol saw after running several bills attacking the LGBTQ+ community, and after Zephyr was not called upon, then banned from the House floor. She had told Republicans they would have blood on their hands because of their support of the bill that bans gender-affirming care in Montana, which opponents say will lead to more suicides among LGBTQ youth. On Wednesday, she said those actions by Regier were “unprecedented.”

“I think that Montanans will notice that, and I hope the speaker has regrets about the way that he made decisions down the stretch,” she said.

Several bills that mirror nationwide trends of attacks on abortion access, transgender and nonbinary people, drag shows, and schoolteachers, librarians, and reading materials were characterized by Republicans on Wednesday as protecting individual liberties, personal freedoms, and Montana’s children.

“Kids need to be kids, and Republicans will hold firm in shielding our children’s innocence,” Regier said.

Democrats said they had to spend much of the session fighting those bills, which they said were blatant and harmful attacks on Montanans’ live-and-let-live attitudes, their constitutional rights to privacy, and flew in the face of the Republican claims of protecting anything but their own personal values.

“There were attacks against the LGBTQ community that will have a broad and harmful impact on people across the state, but we set out every day to fight for the folks that sent us here,” Abbott said.

Senate Republican leadership was mostly pleased with their work, acknowledging there were different factions of their own party they needed to parse at times, as well as some disagreements with House leadership they dealt with over the session, which Senate President Jason Ellsworth, R-Hamilton, said had mostly been quelled by sine die.

“We ended up with a House that actually got through our legislative priorities, so I’ll count that as a win. I have no interest in looking backwards and criticizing anything that may have happened on the front end of the session,” Ellsworth said. “I look at what is the result, and the result for the citizens of Montana is two different bodies coming together and getting things done for Montanans – and then having a governor having the courage to sign those things.”

Fitzpatrick had initially been angry when the Senate abruptly adjourned Tuesday afternoon, saying they had left millions in rebates and other measures on the table. But he was already mostly past those feelings hours later, and even more positive on Wednesday afternoon – even pleased by some of the legislation that will not make it into law because of the decision to adjourn.

“I’m not disappointed. I would say at where we ended up, we could have done a little bit more. There’s always hindsight here. But overall, I’m 98% happy with the session,” he said.

Moving ahead, Republicans said they were excited about dozens of study bills that will be considered and changes to the interim they made that will give them more power on committees.

But both parties also said that the supermajority is not likely to stick around – particularly after new legislative maps were finalized earlier this year that are ripe for Democrats to gain a few seats back.

Abbott and Senate Minority Leader Pat Flowers, D-Belgrade, said they feel the campaign season starts this week and that the statewide and national spotlight shined on the events of the past few weeks and months, combined with the new map, could work in their favor.

Abbott said she believes that since about 43% of Montana classically votes for Democrats, the party should be able to hold somewhere around 43 seats next session in the House — compared to 32 this year — if Montanans decide the Republican legislature and Republican governor did not meet their needs or asks.

Flowers said he believes the work of Republicans this session – and a lack of Democratic bills the caucus believed truly addressed Montanans requests surrounding housing, schools, and personal freedoms making the governor’s desk – could work in their favor in a state that had a Democratic governor through 2020 and an equal footing in at least one of the chambers 14 years ago.

“I think we’re going to do everything we can to highlight all the damage that was done by this majority,” Flowers said. “And it’s up to Montanans to look at that and say, ‘Is that what you want from your legislature?’ I don’t think so. And I think we’ll see that in the next election season.”

Fitzpatrick, who is term-limited in the Senate but said he would run for a House seat, said he did not necessarily believe that Democrats perhaps winning back a few seats was a bad thing and could bring “more cohesion” to the Republican Party that would make it more effective.

“I think what happens is when you get such large majorities, you naturally get these sub-caucuses in the caucus,” he said. “In a weird way, it seemed easier on many days to pass legislation in prior sessions because I could find one bloc of people and that would be enough to move the bill. Now, there’s a group of five here and there’s a group of 10 here.”

He said that the surplus led to tension within the party and between the legislative and executive branches at times because every lawmaker had ideas on what bills to move and what to do with the money that he said deserved to be considered.

“Just because you’ve got a supermajority of Republicans doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to get a very strong conservative policy. Now this session, I’m very confident we passed very conservative-backed bills,” Fitzpatrick said. “But you know, if we stay this way for 10 years, I think you would see a little bit more of a reversion to the middle like you do in other states.”

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