A friend, fond of paradoxes, once said of a man who’d just outsmarted himself, “he gamed it out, but he didn’t think it through.” That’s as good a description as you’ll ever get of what the Republicans in the Montana House of Representatives did to themselves the last four months, and why the legislature adjourned last week without passing a budget.
The key events occurred in the interregnum following last fall’s election. Meeting in Helena to choose their leaders for the new legislature, the Republicans tapped Scott Sales for speaker of the house, and Michael Lange for majority leader.
“My job,” said Sales, a Bozeman investments specialist beginning just his third term, “is to show no quarter to the Democrats as they try to push their liberal agenda.” Fond of military metaphors, Sales often sounds as though he has watched too many war movies on late night television.
A speaker with Sales’ tendencies should be paired with a majority leader known for his calm, thoughtful manner. But Lange, a Billings pipefitter, has the temperament of a barroom brawler. Were he a Democrat, he would be likened to a union goon (and in fact, he reportedly holds a union card). It was a hypergolic pairing that would produce incendiary results.
Worse was to come. Sales awarded the chairmanship of the education committee to Rick Jore (Republicans decide to teach educators a lesson), the home schooling Constitution Party representative from Ronan. When eyebrows were raised, Lange said, “I don’t recall the education community supporting the speaker, or myself either. They didn’t win. That’s the bottom line. If they want to control the committee, my recommendation to them is to be better at campaigning than they were. We owe them no explanation whatsoever.”
Those were the choices, those were the words, not of a political party seeking to govern, but of a political party looking for trouble; of a political party with chips on its shoulder.
Those chips were taxes, which they were hell bent on cutting, and Governor Brian Schweitzer, whom they were hell bent on humiliating.
And they had a strategy, one they had gamed out, but, as they would learn at the end of the session, not one they had thought through completely. “Hang together,” they told themselves. “Vote as a bloc. Legislation must be approved by both houses. If we hang together, if we vote as a bloc, if we demonstrate more resolve than the Democrats — and we can and will because they are weak and our cause is righteous — we will prevail. Our tax cuts will be adopted. And Brian Schweitzer will be put in his place.”
That was the Republican mindset in the house from the opening day of the session. There was a religious fervor about it, a hyper-zealous intensity. It was, as the Helena Independent Record noted, the mindset of “…a party that apparently thinks all-out warfare is the way to do the people’s business.”
That all-out warfare inverted the traditional values of the legislative process. For the Republicans, the traditional virtue of compromise became the vice of betrayal. Civility became weakness, not strength. Lange’s profane, televised, diatribe on 25 April, said the IR:
…seemed to be another example of legislators determined from the beginning to obstruct the legislative process. Time after time this session, House leaders have stuck wrenches into the legislative gears, seemingly just because they can. Messing with normal legislative procedures, playing hooky from work, holding bills hostage to extort concessions… Editorial, 28 April 2007.
As the session neared the end of its constitutionally alloted 90 days, Sales and Lange — backed by their 48 fellow Republicans, and Jore — hardened their positions on the budget, intending, I believe, to provoke a crisis, convinced that their moral superiority would carry the day on tax policy because the Democrats — in the house, in the Senate, and the governor himself — would blink. But they didn’t blink, and Sales, et al, like Bush on Iraq, didn’t have a Plan B on which they could fall back. And their militaristic, all for one, one for all, and to hell with everyone else, mindset left them without the wit and flexibility to adapt constructively to changing circumstances.
As the Billings Gazette astutely observed:
…a dissection of this failed session shows that the last clear chance to avoid the train wreck belonged to the House GOP leadership. Speaker Scott Sales, R-Bozeman, refused for 10 days to take any action on any of the major spending bills approved by the Senate. The usual process (in our now-outdated textbooks) would have been for the House to accept or reject the Senate’s amendments, and if the House rejected these major amendments, to form a House-Senate conference committee to hammer out a compromise. That’s the way the system is supposed to work.
Instead, the crucial budget bills didn’t move. Majority Leader Michael Lange, R-Billings, met with Schweitzer on Wednesday morning [25 April] to discuss a compromise on tax cuts and school funding, then hours later denounced the governor with perhaps the foulest streak of language ever uttered in a public meeting in the Capitol. The days and hours ticked away with no gas in a legislative get-out-of-town vehicle. Editorial, 29 April 2007.
Some commentators attribute the legislature’s inability to pass a budget to failed leadership, assigning equal blame to Democrats, Republicans, and the governor. Others contend that the tax issue was just too hard to resolve in so short a session.
I disagree.
We’ve had flawed leaders and hard tax issues in every legislative session in Montana’s history, but neither leadership defects nor tough tax issues have prevented those legislatures from adopting a budget in the alloted 90 days. That’s because in those sessions, there were enough legislators who understood that compromise and civility are virtues, not vices, that deals could be made so that the legislature could discharge its constitutional obligations. In those sessions, however difficult, governing was the objective of both parties.
Not so this time. The Republicans in the house went into the session hell bent on forcing Democrats to capitulate. They worked themselves up into an ideological frenzy worthy of Hamas, selecting strutting leaders who reinforced each others worst qualities. They sought conflict, not compromise. And then, when they discovered they couldn’t bully the opposition, they committed what amounts to a legislative murder-suicide.