Just Answer The Question, Please.

Last week the Missoulian began to print the responses of candidates to its legislative questionnaire – you know, those questions that it sends out every other year before the November elections, asking would-be solons how they stand on the issues. I (and I hope most voters) read the candidates’ answers pretty carefully. After all, how else are we going to get beyond the sound bites, pretty pictures, TV attack ads and robocalls that constitute political communication these days?

Of course, if candidates really want us to know what they think, they’ve got to answer frankly and honestly the questions they were actually asked. But unfortunately, when it comes to at least some questions, all the Republican candidates whose answers have been printed so far have given us anything but frankness and honesty.

Here are the questions.

 Do you support additional restrictions on abortion in Montana? Should the Legislature continue to approve federal money to family planning clinics, including Planned Parenthood?

And here are the answers.

Rep. Nancy Ballance: I do not support any federal or state funding of abortions.

Dick Haines:  I cannot support abortions except to save the life of the mother or a mother and child.

Lyn Hellegaard: In 2012, Planned Parenthood revealed a total income of $1.14 billion. Taxpayers shelled out $542 million through federal and state grants and contracts (or 45 percent of its entire income). At the same time, Planned Parenthood cut back non-abortion related programs like adoption, breast cancer screenings and infertility treatment, and demanded that all its affiliate centers offer surgical abortion. Abortions should be privately funded. For the sake of argument, let’s assume I believe that life begins at conception. If that is what I believe, how can I be anything but pro-life.

Rep. Jerry O’Neil: Being pro-life, I would like to see less abortions performed in Montana, but am not willing to outlaw birth control pills in order to reach that result.

To be clear about this, the questions the Missoulian is asking here are not hypotheticals. In every legislative session I have served in, conservative Republican anti-choice legislators have introduced bills to interfere with access to abortion. In at least the last two sessions, they have also attempted to prevent the state from receiving and spending the Federal Title X money which goes to support family planning clinics. And when that effort failed, the Ravalli County commissioners, down in Rep. Ballance’s country, turned down the money and shut their county clinic, despite the fact that not one cent of Title X money pays for abortions; it’s all spent on family planning and women’s health programs. 

So what we have here are real questions about important issues that affect a lot of Montanans. We deserve  honest and complete answers. But what we get are answers that range from the totally irrelevant through the deliberately deceptive and on to the hopelessly absurd.

Not one of these folks actually tells us if they would “support additional restrictions on abortion.” Haines gets the closest, I guess, by saying that he only supports abortions to “save the life of the mother or a mother and child.” I leave to your imagination what he can possibly mean by an abortion to save the life of a child.* Whether he would actually support legislation to restrict abortion to these cases he doesn’t say, and whether or not he is aware of the fact that such legislation would fly in the face of Roe v. Wade is unclear.

O’Neil tells us that he would like to see fewer abortions performed in Montana, but would be unwilling to “outlaw birth control pills . . . to reach that result.” Well, that’s a relief! Not that anybody is proposing anything that crazy, but how O’Neil thinks that outlawing birth control pills could lead to anything other than more unplanned pregnancies and more abortions is an utter mystery.

Not one of these candidates tells us if the Legislature should “continue to approve federal money to family planning clinics, including Planned Parenthood.” Ballance and Hellegaard both say that they oppose public funding of abortions, which is not the question at issue when it comes to spending Title X funds. Hellegaard hints at her hostility to Planned Parenthood (okay, okay, it’s more than a hint) by citing how much revenue and public funding it receives, but without telling us that the numbers refer to Planned Parenthood nationwide nor explaining what, if anything, that money has to do with supporting family planning clinics in Montana. And in an absurd attempt at craftiness, Hellegaard tells us that if, “for the sake of the argument,” she believes that life begins at conception, she has to be pro-life. Myself, I’d rather know that she really is pro-life than to have to contemplate this sophistry.

I suppose we need to understand what a tough position these questions put conservative Republican candidates in. After all, winning elections means having to hold your base and at the same time capturing voters in the center, and in this case, never the twain shall meet. The conservative Republican base is staunchly anti-abortion and just queasy enough about sex to think that we shouldn’t help anyone engage in it by providing them with birth control.  Folks in the middle, on the other hand, don’t want to further restrict abortion access, and think that if you don’t like abortion, the last thing in the world you should do is defund the family planning that obviates the need for it.

What is a poor Republican candidate to do in this situation?

Well, as we see here, the answer is duck and cover.**

* Haines’ responses to the Missoulian, which you can find here, are worth an additional look. Among other things, he says, with regard to the referendum to end election day registration, “I support the referendum. I saw too many bus loads of students that had had a hamburger and beer arriving to vote at the last minute. I admit I could be wrong, but I suspect many in the ‘last minute’ crowd had voted somewhere else as well.” Funny how those duplicate registrations didn’t pop up all over the place in the Missoula County Elections Office.

** In the cases of Ballance and O’Neil, of course, ducking is a bit of a problem, because they have actual voting records. So just so you know: Both earned a score of zero from NARAL Pro-Choice Montana (you can find NARAL’s 2013 voting score card here). O’Neil didn’t get a chance to vote on Title X in 2013, but as a member of the Appropriations Committee, Ballance voted against an attempt by Rep. Kim Dudik to amend HB2, the general appropriations bill, to include Title X funding.  Both voted for HB2 when it left the House, but when the Senate added Title X back in and returned the bill to the House, they voted against it (although that could be because they objected to some other Senate amendment). 

Unfounded Fears

I hoped when I posted recently about paranoia on the Republican right that I could safely forget about the topic for a while. After all, trying to respond to every accusation about the evil intentions of the Federal government, or the Bullock administration, or the Democratic Party, or the Responsible Republican caucus could easily become a full time, crazy-making job. But I couldn’t quite ignore it when I came across this post from Rep. Kerry While, on his Facebook page.*

What’s apparently set off alarm bells for White is that the Interim State-Tribal Relations Committee recently passed a resolution in support of the Salish Kootenai water compact, which White, as you can see, doesn’t like one little bit.  This worries me some, because I’m pretty sure the compact will be coming back to the 2015 Legislature, I’ll be supporting it, and I can just about see White’s hand flying to the red button when the bill hits the House floor.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that supporting the compact is in White’s job description as a member of the Montana House. But it is in his job description that he consider bills carefully, listen to all sides, and ultimately base his yea or nay on sound, legitimate reasons and not on unfounded fears. But so far, unfounded fears appear to be all he’s got.

Case in point: White is afraid that because the Flathead compact recognizes tribal water rights off the reservation, all the other tribes in Montana “will surely reopen their compacts” and claim the “rest of our state water.” But there is no way that could happen. Every tribal water compact that has been negotiated contains language that requires all the parties to agree before the compact can be reopened. Every compact states that it is the final settlement, for “all time,” of all tribal water rights claims. And no Montana tribe, other than the Salish and Kootenai, has ever asserted a claim to off-reservation rights.**

White is afraid that the compact “gives over” state water to the Federal government (in trust for the Tribes), that the Federal government will “gain control” of constitutionally protected state water, and that property owners will be required to “relinquish all claims to their life blood.”

Now I’m not sure that White has actually read the compact, but if he has, he should know that what it does is recognize and quantify various tribal water rights and put a lot of side boards on how those rights can be exercised.  As every water right holder in Montana should know, what a water right allows its owner to do is use a given amount of water in a particular way, and it also tells the owner where they stand in line when, as sometimes unfortunately happens, there’s not enough water in a basin to satisfy every claim on it. Tribal water rights are the same thing. They don’t give ownership of water to anybody or in any way diminish the state’s constitutionally recognized ownership of the underlying resource. They don’t give “control” over water to anybody. They don’t give the Tribes (or the Federal government, if you insist) anything that thousands of other Montana water rights holders don’t have.  And recognizing that one party (tribe, rancher, household, business, or what have you) has a senior right to water from a particular source does not “take away” the junior rights of other parties to water from that source.

In one respect, the compact, far from taking away the water rights of property owners, will actually enhance them. It works like this: as a matter of long established law, the Tribes water rights are senior to everybody else’s. And being senior, the Tribes could, at a time when there wasn’t enough water to go around, tell all those juniors to stop using water. This is termed “making a call” on juniors, and here’s the thing: in the compact the Tribes have agreed either to waive their right to make a call, or have made their senior claims modest enough that the likelihood of most such shortages occurring in the first place is very, very small. Most junior water users across Montana don’t enjoy that kind of protection.

One other thing: you may be wondering about White’s obscure remark regarding Tutvedt and the $22,000 the Tribes contributed to his PAC. Needless to say, I am not a Republican insider, but anybody who’s paying attention knows that Bruce Tutvedt and Kerry White are on opposite sides of the Republican Great Divide. Last spring, when the two factions were running primary campaigns against each other, the Tribes made a $22,000 contribution to the PAC Tutvedt put together to support his side, presumably because his side supports the compact.*** There’s been a certain amount of tongue wagging  on the Republican right about all this, the suggestion being that there's something inappropriate about the Tribes making campaign donations to Republican legislators who support the compact. But for better or worse, that's the way the system works: donors support legislators whose positions they agree with. And in this case, at any rate, that's crystal clear. There's no dark money, no mysterious donors, no hidden agendas,

That's not to say that we shouldn't be worried about the oceans of money in politics or PACs, and their donors, throwing their weight around. But it strikes me as a little unseemly of White to raise the issue. After all, almost 60 percent of the money that he raised in his primary campaign this year came from – you guessed it – PACs. You can find his campaign finance report on the Commission of Political Practices website.

*This is a screenshot, but last time I checked, the post was still up on White’s page and available to all you Facebookers out there. Click here.

** The basis for the Salish and Kootenai claim to off-reservation water rights is specific language in the Stevens treaty that established the reservation. No other tribe in Montana negotiated a Stevens treaty and no other tribal treaty has comparable language. If you want to delve further into what the completed tribal compacts actually say (as opposed to what White apparently thinks they say) click here.

***Full disclosure: Bruce Tutvedt and I co-authored an opinion piece supporting the compact, which I posted here back in August.

Twisting Words

I’m calling a foul on Sen. Alan Olson.

At a meeting of the Energy and Telecommunications Interim Committee on Sept. 8, Sen. Olson took me to task for what he apparently believes, or wants you to believe, is my indifference to the wellbeing of the coal miners he represents. I don’t care about these folks, he says, because after all, there are no coal miners in Missoula, and that makes me “flippant” about the impact of the EPA’s proposed carbon standards on his constituents.

It just ain’t so.

What apparently got Sen. Olson’s back up here was a letter that I and four other legislators (who somehow managed to escape Olson’s wrath) wrote back in August, objecting to a proposal by Rep. Keith Regier that the committee write to President Obama expressing adamant opposition to the EPA carbon standards. The draft letter Regier proposed to send was rife with indisputable errors of fact, and  no matter what position it took on the standards, had it been sent it would have reflected badly on the Montana legislature.*

One point in particular in Regier’s letter that we disputed was the claim that the EPA rules would have a “devastating” effect on Montana. Here’s what we said about that:

Although reducing carbon emissions will inevitably require reduced domestic use of coal (unless cost-effective sequestration can be brought on line), at this point it is impossible to know how much Montana’s production will be reduced. Suffice it to say that nothing in the proposed regulations suggests that production will be eliminated, and any reduction in output and employment in the coal industry that does occur will represent a very small fraction of output and employment in the state as a whole. Moreover, to the extent that the regulations call for accelerated development of renewables and energy efficiency investments, there will be positive impacts on employment and output offsetting negative impacts in the coal industry. Accordingly, it is incorrect to conclude that the impact of the regulations will be “devastating.”

And that’s it. That is the sum total of what we said about potential lost jobs in the coal industry: that they would “represent a very small fraction of … employment in the state as a whole.” Indeed, as Thomas and Donovan Power pointed out in a Missoulian column earlier this week, jobs in coal mining amount to about two-tenths of one percent of all the jobs in the state. And you’ve got to remember that even in the worst case, only a fraction (currently unknown) of those jobs will be lost due to enforcement of the EPA regulations.

What we didn’t say in our response to Regier’s letter was that we didn’t care about what happened to coal miners. We didn’t deny the hardship experienced by workers and their families when they lose jobs and livelihoods. We weren’t “flippant” about anything. And we don’t question Sen. Olson’s good intentions when he fights to keep the people in his district working.

But he should fight clean. We offered a reasoned and, I believe, correct assessment of the potential impact of carbon regulations on the Montana economy.  Knowing what that impact will be is critical to formulating the state’s response to the rules. If Sen. Olson disagrees with that assessment, he should explain why. Twisting words to make us sound callous and indifferent is no substitute for that.

*You can read both Regier’s letter and our critique here.