Prove It!

One of the canards about the Salish Kootenai Water Compact that opponents never tire of trotting out is that the compact will take away the water rights of private citizens living all over western Montana. If you attend enough public meetings up in the Flathead, or read the letters to the editor, or listen to Tea Party legislative candidates, you’ll hear this claim all the time, coming from all sorts of people, including a handful of legislators who should know better and be a lot more careful about their public pronouncements. I don’t know if these folks really believe what they are saying or are simply following the advice of the propagandist who claimed that if you say something often enough, people will begin to believe it, but I do know this:

I’m getting really fed up with this nonsense.

Part of the problem is that I serve on the Reserved Water Rights Compact Commission, which is the outfit that is negotiating the compact on behalf of the state. The Commission, and especially its staff, have put in endless hours negotiating a settlement that carefully protects the rights and interests of Montana citizens living on and off the Flathead Reservation, so when someone comes along and tells us that we have violated our oath of office, defiled the Constitution, exceeded our authority and sold our fellow citizens down the river, I take it pretty badly.

Of course the real problem here is not my ruffled feelings. It is, rather, the fact that the claim is just not true: The Compact doesn’t take anybody’s water or property rights away. Proving that is not as hard as it sounds but it does take some time. Obviously, there’s no clause I can steer you to saying “This compact doesn’t take away anybody’s water rights;” a list of clauses saying everything the compact doesn’t do would potentially be infinitely long. But if you comb through the document (I’m not suggesting you actually do that, but if you want to, here’s the link) and try to find a provision, any one little provision, that actually effects the taking of a water right, you won’t find one.

Now I can almost hear compact opponents howling that you most certainly will; that the fatal provision is in there somewhere and you just haven’t looked hard enough. But here’s the thing: not once, not one single time, have I ever heard anyone cite any provision in the compact to back up the claim that water rights are being taken. And if they can’t do that, the claim is hollow.

So here’s a challenge to the people who are going to stand up at negotiating sessions and public meetings and legislative hearings and claim, yet again, that the compact is a bundle of takings: Prove it. Show us the provisions you think make takings happen. Tell us clearly just what water rights you believe are being taken. In short, be responsible for the truth of what you say. That’s the price of admission to a civil and productive conversation about any issue we really care about.

Getting Family Planning Funding Straight

As I mentioned in my last post, in preparation for Election Day the Missoulian has been asking legislative candidates about their positions on a handful of critical issues, including whether or not the Legislature should “continue to approve federal money to family planning clinics, including Planned Parenthood.”

Now I admit that for me funding family planning adequately is a no-brainer, and in the interests of full disclosure I need to tell you that I served for several years on the board of Planned Parenthood here is Missoula, but really, it’s not just me; for all Montanans, this question is important. What’s at stake here is millions of federal Title X dollars that come to Montana to support family planning clinics that provide birth control, cancer screenings, HIV testing, fertility counseling and treatment, and a whole lot more.* Why would anyone not want to spend federal dollars for services like that?

Well, as it turns out, some Title X money goes to Planned Parenthood clinics that provide abortions. And that fact has provoked conservative Republican anti-choice legislators into  trying, repeatedly, to block all Title X funding for everyone, even though by Federal law no Title X money is, or can be, used to pay for abortion services. Best I can figure, these folks believe this money is tainted and shouldn’t be touched, but as abortion opponents, they’re biting off their noses to spite their faces: there surely can’t be any better way to respect the autonomy and privacy of women and at the same time prevent abortions than by avoiding unintended pregnancies in the first place.

So as I say, the issue is important and anyone running for public office should be able to come up with a decent answer when the Missoulian asks about it. I’m not saying a would-be legislator has to agree with me – for example, there’s certainly a place in the room for folks that think that family planning should be a private matter – but I do think that whatever the answer is, it should at least be sensible and reasonably well informed. Is that too much to ask of a person who wants to go to Helena, occupy a legislative seat, and make decisions critical to the welfare of his or her consituents?

Well, apparently it is, because at least three Republican** candidates’ answers that have appeared in the Missoulian don’t pass that test. Here’s what I’m talking about:

Rep. Ed Greef: Title X funds many good programs that benefit the health needs of women. These are important to our communities. It’s too bad the federal government includes abortion in the package, thus creating a situation of all or nothing in the package. Unreasonable tactic.

Brad Tschida: I believe we should be using any available federal dollars paid to entities like Planned Parenthood to assist our seniors, veterans and special needs citizens. Money for the needs of those citizens is a far better use of such funds.

Gary Marbut: Federal funding? I am under the impression that Congress (in D.C.) approves federal funding, not the Legislature (in Helena).

So there you have it. When confronted with the critical question of whether or not the Legislature should continue to appropriate federal family planning money, one candidate, Greef, who is also a sitting legislator, says no, because he thinks the money pays for abortions, which it doesn’t. Another, Tschida, says no because he would rather spend the money on something other than family planning, apparently unaware of the fact the federal family planning money has to be spent on, well, family planning. And a third, Marbut, doesn’t think he needs to answer, because evidently he doesn’t know that the Legislature appropriates, and can chose not to appropriate if it wants, hundreds of millions of Federal dollars every biennium.

Come on. Don’t voters deserve better thought-out and more carefully informed answers than these from folks who want to represent them in Helena next January?

*You can learn more about the services these clinics provide, and find a clinic near you, at this Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services website.

** Actually, one of these guys, Gary Marbut, although he has run as a Republican in the past, this time around is running as an Independent. Against Kim Dudik, who will no doubt whup him about as badly as last time.

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).