A reality based independent journal of observation & analysis, serving the Flathead Valley & Montana since 2006. © James Conner.

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5 December 2018

The state with the smelliest cheeses
also produces evil smelling politics

Montana's Republican controlled House of Representatives, as reported here last week, has a faction that wants to preserve the power of a 41-vote minority to keep a bill with majority support bottled up in a committee.

Wisconsin produced the great progressives Robert M La Follette, Jr., William Proxmire, and Russ Feingold — but it’s also home to Limburger cheese, which announces itself for miles on a hot afternoon in August, and a gerrymandered legislature that, embittered by the defeat of its union busting Republican governor, Scott Walker, just passed legislation to hamstring Walker’s successor, Democrat Tony Evers. Reports the Washington Post’s Phillip Bump in Wisconsin Republicans shield their voters from the horrors of democratic elections:

The fear, from the top-ranking Republicans in the state legislature, is explicit: They are worried that Evers will advocate for policies and actions that are at odds with a conservative agenda, that he’ll make decisions that Republicans — “many of us” — disagree with.

Well, yeah. That’s how elections work. The person who wins more support from the state’s voters gets to run the state. Many of those voters won’t be happy with those decisions, but more of them, presumably, will be. Arguing that the power of the governor must necessarily be curtailed because a candidate won an election and will advocate the positions he ran on fundamentally goes against the spirit of democracy.

Most of the voters probably would agree with Governor-elect Evers’ positions. According to University of Wisconsin Professor Barry Burder:

Michigan’s Republican dominated legislature, also condemned by the voters to work with a Democratic governor, is also trying to kneecap that state’s chief executive. Both the Wisconsin and Michigan legislatures are working from the playbook used by North Carolina’s Republican legislature two years ago after the voters elected a Democrat as governor.

Montana has been spared a similar assault on majority rule not because the Montana Republican Party is more responsible than its counterparts in Wisconsin, Michigan, and North Carolina, but because (a) we’ve had a Democratic governor since 2005, and (b) the Republicans have not won veto-proof majorities in the Montana Legislature.

But in 2020 Montana could elect a Republican governor, who would then signs bills that shred the social safety net, eviscerate environmental protection laws, and enact laws to harass and humiliate the poor and folks down on their luck (drug testing for food assistance, for example). Suppose, then, in 2024 a Democrat replaces that governor, but Republicans hold the legislature. Would the Republicans then hold a lame duck session to hogtie the incoming Democratic governor? You bet it would. Only the good sense of the voters can prevent Limburger politics from stinking-up Montana.