Dark, Dark Money

Talk about dark money! What on earth are the Missoula County Republicans up to?

I was looking over my opponent’s latest campaign finance report recently and saw she reported that back in June, the Missoula County Republican Central Committee donated $1,400 to her campaign. That’s a pretty good chunk of cash, and got me wondering whether other Republican candidates had enjoyed the same largesse. And it turns out they did: according to their various individual fillings, Republican candidates in the county had received a total of $7,700 from their central committee.

Now that’s an even bigger chunk of cash channeled into campaigns, and it would be nice to know where it came from. And tracking that down shouldn’t be hard to do, because just like candidates, political party committees are supposed to file reports with the Commissioner of Political Practices detailing where they got their money and how they spent it. You can find that information on the Commissioner’s website. But here’s what the Missoula County Republican Central Committee's reports to the Commissioner tell us:

Essentially nothing.

The Missoula County Republicans have not filed a report since July 27, which means they have failed to account for their activity in August and September, as required by law.

Since the beginning of the year, when they started out with zero in the bank, they report that they have had no expenditures – not one penny – even though the candidates claim they got that total of $7,700.

According to their last report, they have $20,316.19 in the bank, all of which they say they took in during January and February. But again, contrary to the law, they provide absolutely zero information about where that money came from.

So there is $7,700 being spent by Republican candidates in Missoula county that comes from unknown sources. It may be the result of incompetence or negligence rather than anything more nefarious, but any way you slice it, that money’s about as dark as it can get.

By the way, it may look like the Republican candidates are blameless in all this – after all, they can’t force the central committee to file accurate and timely financial reports – but it’s not that simple.  Because guess what? It turns out that two of the candidates getting donations – Adam Hertz and Sashin Hume - are executive officers of the Missoula County Republican Central Committee!

Sad

Last April I posted that while there were certain superficial similarities between Greg Gianforte and Donald Trump, there were also big differences: Gianforte, while not much of an original thinker, was a civil guy and a straight shooter. I didn’t think he would stoop to the abuse, fear mongering, narcissism and falsehoods that come so naturally to Trump.

Well, I spoke too soon.

Last week the Gianforte campaign mailed out fliers attacking Steve Bullock for “bringing Syrian refugees into Montana” and assuring us that if he is elected, Gianforte would “BAN refugees from countries known to harbor terrorists like Iran and Syria.” It was pure Trump, filled with frightening but deceptive imagery, misstatements of fact, and absurd boasts about what Gianforte would and could do to make us all safe.

Like Trump, Gianforte depicts Syrian refugees as masked, armed terrorists, not the kids and mothers and fathers who are being bombed in Aleppo or drowning in the Aegean as they try to escape. He says his heart goes out to these people and that we have a moral obligation to help them. No doubt he believes that, but what is he really prepared to do? It’s a mystery how we can help them if we refuse to provide shelter from the incessant bombs and rocket fire and bullets and poisonous gas that are killing them every single day. The name says it all: they desperately need refuge.

Like Trump, Gianforte exploits the public’s anxiety by claiming that refugees coming to Montana would be “unvetted,” when it has been reported over and over again that nobody entering the United States from abroad is exposed to more comprehensive vetting than refugees are.

Like Trump, Gianforte promises to do something that he cannot possibly do. He either doesn’t understand or willfully ignores the fact that as governor of Montana, he cannot ban refugees from any country, let alone from a list of countries of his own choosing. He cannot stop refugees admitted to the United States from settling in Montana communities. He cannot protect Montanans from violence by preventing refugees from settling here.

And like Trump, when his absurdity and dishonesty are exposed, Gianforte simply denies that he meant what he clearly said.  As the Missoulian reported last week, when asked about the flyer, Aaron Flint, Gianforte’s spokesman, claimed, incredibly, that it wasn’t about refugees, but ISIS. Equating refugees to ISIS fighters may make Gianforte look resolute in the fight against terrorism, but it also reveals a frightening willingness to follow, politically, the path of least resistance.

I assume that Gianforte’s decision to take this position was a calculated one. I imagine he’s looking at polls and finding that the narrow and worn out economic message he has been purveying up until now just doesn’t have legs, and Trump, playing on the voter’s insecurities, is doing a lot better. So Gianforte, if he ever did have reservations about doing politics Trump’s way, has now abandoned them.  Anything to get elected.

As Trump himself likes to say, “Sad.”

Political Amnesia

Gubernatorial aspirant Greg Gianforte, whose only discernable and dubious claim to political fame is that he will do miracles for Montana’s economy, has a problem.

It turns out that during most of the time that Steve Bullock, his opponent, has been governor, the Montana economy has done pretty well. Employment growth has been robust, the unemployment rate is well below the rest of the country’s, and the state’s budget has been managed sensibly. More people than ever have health insurance. Child welfare has improved significantly. And we lead the nation in business startups. With Bullock’s record looking like that, there’s really not much for Gianforte and the Republican Party to hang their hat on when they say they’re going to make things all better.*

So it was no surprise when the Billings Gazette reported last week that a couple of Republican legislative bigwigs – Sen. Fred Thomas and Rep. Jeff Essmann – seized on the news that the state’s economy had shrunk over the past six months** to go after Bullock. The downturn in the economy, which resulted mostly from declines in energy production, agriculture, and transportation, also means that tax collections are lower than expected, that the state is spending more than it takes it, and that we’re going to have less money in the bank than we thought when we close the books next June.

And all of this, according to Thomas and Essmann, is Steve Bullock’s fault.

Yep. According to Thomas, whose economic theorizing is always inventive (to put it charitably), “over the last 12 years, the environmentalists have occupied the governor’s office and the chickens are coming home to roost.” Exactly how the “environmentalists” managed to drive the world price of oil from $100 to $40 a barrel, or produce the cheap natural gas that’s pushing coal out of the market, or depress grain prices, or strengthen the dollar and weaken exports, Thomas, if he knows, isn’t saying.

Thomas claims that "if we’re going to have a natural resource state, we need new leadership at the helm.” But the new leader in question is obviously Greg Gianforte, whose economic strategy so far appears to consist exclusively of big tax cuts for big businesses and wealthy taxpayers. That has even Thomas hemming and hawing a bit: given the current decline in tax revenue, Thomas tells us that he has cautioned Gianforte that he needs to show some “flexibility” in implementing tax cuts. The only problem with that is once he’s been flexible on tax cuts, Gianforte’s got nothing.

Thomas’ take on how the economy works and what Gianforte can do about it may suffer from incoherence, but when it comes to budgeting, Essmann appears to suffer from flat out politically inspired amnesia. According to the Gazette, Essmann “singled out spending based on ‘overly optimistic’ governor’s office revenue projections” as the reason the state has a deficit and is running through its cash reserves.

Well, no, not really.

When the legislature sets the level of spending and builds a budget, it develops its own revenue estimate; it doesn’t rely on the governor’s. And in 2015, when the legislative staff and the governor’s budget guys were coming up with wildly different numbers for revenue, we set up a special joint subcommittee (full disclosure: I was a member) of the House and Senate Tax committees to reconcile the differences and come up with an estimate of our own. We hammered away at it and in the end we – not the governor - created the revenue number that drove the level of spending. And the chair of that special joint subcommittee was none other than -  wait for it! - Sen. Fred Thomas! It’s astonishing that Essmann seems to have forgotten how that all happened.

And if that's not ironic enough for you, consider that throughout budget deliberations the governor kept insisting that whatever the revenue estimate, we needed to limit spending enough to keep $350 million on hand, just in case anything went wrong. Well, something has gone wrong, we’ve needed the money, and we should be glad we have it. Bullock was pushing fiscal responsibility. Without it, by now we’d be slashing programs, laying people off, and making a bad situation worse. And there were a whole bunch of Republicans running around the Capitol in 2015 saying that keeping that much cash on hand was a bad thing – that we should give it back, a la Gianforte, or spend it on infrastructure.

Thomas and Essmann should thank their lucky stars – and Steve Bullock - that that didn’t happen.

*Well, there’s always Donald Trump. Oh wait…

**To be precise, the decline in gross state product occurred in the last quarter of 2015 and the first quarter of 2016. The data are not yet in to tell us what has happened since March of this year.