Republican Politics: The Art and Jesse Show

If you are at all inclined to wade into the morass that passes for Republican party politics these days, here’s a bit of advice: don’t call Art Wittich an extremist. It makes him really testy and the results are not pleasant. Just ask Jesse O’Hara.

O’Hara is a recently retired Great Falls school teacher and moderate Republican member of the Montana House who is now termed out. He had the temerity recently to publish an opinion piece in which he took on the Republican leadership of the Senate, including Majority Leader Wittich, for derailing the GOP. O’Hara has a lot to say about “dark money,” Republican “purity tests,” obstructionism, Libertarians running as phony Republicans, failure to govern and so forth. None of that seems to have upset Wittich, but what did get his goat was being called an extremist, and his response, published last week, shows just how badly his goat was gotten. It is also a marvel of personal offensiveness and political inventiveness unjustified by the facts.

On the personal side, Wittich says he was surprised by O’Hara’s piece, because O’Hara, after retiring, moved to Florida, where, Wittich claims, “the only time he leaves his beach chair is to walk to the mail box to  collect his teacher pension and state health care benefits.” One has to assume that Wittich doesn’t actually have spies on the beach in Florida, and denigrates O’Hara here with a snarky tongue-in-cheek, but the implication lingers: O’Hara, and by extension, I suppose, all retired teachers receiving their TRS checks (full disclosure: I’m one of them) are wallowing at the public trough. Chiselers. Welfare queens.

Wittich carries this particular canard with him when he tries to shed the extremist label by claiming that all he did was “lead 75 percent of the Senate Republican Caucus in opposing the backroom political wheeling by O’Hara and his crossover Republicans dealing with the Democrats.”  One of these nefarious deals was “passing a $125 million …bailout of the state employee pension system, making taxpayers… again guarantee O’Hara and his friends’ retirement, instead of their own.”

How Wittich can apparently forget that these public employees spent their lives teaching our kids, or patrolling and plowing the highways, or assisting the disabled, or firefighting, or otherwise serving the public is beyond me. When they were hired to do all those things, they were told they would get paid, have health insurance and eventually receive a retirement check. The compensation package wasn’t lavish, but it was the deal the state offered and the deal the employees took. And it was the deal that Democrats and moderate Republicans were honoring when they “bailed out” the retirement systems, which had been hammered in the financial meltdown, to the tune of about $1.25 per member of the public. But when the going got tough, Wittich would apparently have preferred that the public renege on its deal with its employees. You can decide for yourself whether a deadbeat and an extremist are the same thing.

Another bipartisan effort Wittich is proud to have opposed was the attempt to expand Medicaid coverage to over 70,000 more people even when “they are able but unwilling to work.”  The 70,000 people Wittich is talking about here are low income Montanans – men, women, and children – living at or below 138 percent of the poverty level, and it’s hard to imagine that anybody – let alone a state Senator - can be so deluded about the workings of poverty to suggest that unwillingness to work is its principal cause. Has Wittich really never heard of the working poor?*

But it’s worse. Even when Wittich had the opportunity to vote on a bill to expand Medicaid coverage just to poor people who had jobs or were looking for them, he voted against it.**

If you are sensing a theme here, it is probably that Wittich and his political allies believe they are surrounded by people – public employees and low income families to name a few – who are trying to exploit them, to get something for nothing, to feather their own nests. It’s the politics of resentment and class warfare, and as far as I can see, O’Hara’s got it right: It’s extremism.

*If he hasn’t, he should take a look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics publication A Profile of the Working Poor, 2010.

**HB 623. You can look at voting records, follow debates, and read the text of the bill, as amended in the Senate, by clicking here.

Background Check Funny Math

As I noted in an earlier post, Missoula Mayor John Engen and Nancy de Pastino had a fine column about gun violence in the Missoulian last week, in which they called for enhanced background checks for gun sales. And as anyone could have predicted, angry responses are beginning to pop up on the op-ed page.

Daniel Kostelnik’s letter in yesterday’s paper is a case in point. Kostelnik lards his letter with some offensive and bizarre accusations – he apparently believes, for example, that Engen is in cahoots with “rich and powerful people … who are working to disarm all American citizens” – but his main point seems to be that background checks don’t really keep guns out of the hands of people who shouldn’t have them.

Kostelnik claims that “out of thousands of people denied gun purchases, all but 17 were cases of mistaken identity.” In others words, thousands of people (except for those 17) were denied their legitimate Second Amendment right to buy and bear arms. Where he got this ridiculous number he doesn’t say, but it certainly doesn’t square with this U.S. Department of Justice report that in 2010, the last year for which data is available, only 24% of denials were appealed, and only a third of those appeals resulted in the denial being reversed. So about 8% of all denials (there were 2.1 million denials between 1998 and 2010) were eventually reversed. So Kostelnik is asking us to believe that 2.1 million people (minus 17) were denied the ability to purchase a gun because of mistaken identity, and only 8% of them were able to get the error corrected (if they even tried, which most of them didn't)! Believe that if you want, but if you do, I have a bridge to sell you.

According to the DOJ report, about 1.8% of all applications for gun transfers are denied, and opponents of background checks often cite that low number as evidence that the checks don’t work. “See! Those pesky checks hardly stop any felons or abusers or mentally impaired people from getting guns!” Indeed, that’s Kostelnik’s point, although he blows it way out of proportion: the way he figures it, over 118 million background checks have only prevented 17 sales to people who shouldn’t have guns.

But even if the numbers are correct, the reasoning is faulty, because presumably there are a fair number of those folks who shouldn’t have guns who never tried to purchase one (legally) in the first place, precisely because they knew they couldn’t pass the background check. In other words, use whatever numbers you want, the DOJ’s or Kostelnik’s; you still won’t know how effective background checks are at deterring attempts to purchase guns illegally. 

Vote Facey!

For me, at any rate, one of the awkward results of legislative redistricting is that I no longer represent a group of constituents who voted for me in 2012, expecting that I would represent them in the Montana Senate for the next four years. That happened because the Redistricting Commission shifted the boundaries of my district a bit, which added some new territory but took away some as well, mainly in the heart of Missoula.

The good news is that when the Commissioners shifted that territory out of my district, they shifted it into Senate District 50, where Sen.Tom Facey is running for reelection. The neighbors in the area couldn’t ask for a better legislator.

I’ve known Tom for quite a while, but it was only during last year’s session that I had the chance to work with him in Helena. He’s a life long teacher, so he brings to the Legislature a deep commitment to education. He understands school finance (which is a challenge to most us), pension systems, workmen’s compensation, labor law, human rights and several other issues that he has worked on, and become an expert about, over the years. In everything he does, he is level headed, thoughtful and a good listener, the type of guy who really can “work across the aisle” and not just talk about it.

So if you’re one of the voters who’s leaving my district, good bye! It’s been a pleasure and a privilege serving as your representative in the Senate. Now when Tom Facey comes around knocking at your door, and he will get there, let him know he has your support. You'll be glad you did.