Serving the Flathead Valley & Montana since 2006. A reality based independent journal of observation & analysis. © James Conner.
There was a schoolboy aspect to the caper. Slips of paper with a meeting date and time furtively passed to Republicans newly elected to the Montana House of Representatives. A motel basement away from the Capitol as a meeting hall. And an expectation that only the invited would appear, thus ensuring frank discussions that Republican majority leader Keith Regier (HD-4) and his lieutenants did not want reporters and the voters to hear.
But someone talked out of school, sending the meeting’s time and coordinates to reporters John Adams and Shane Castle, who arrived at approximately 2000. Regier immediately adjourned the meeting. Adams reported:
Regier said the sole purpose of the meeting was to hand out the survey, not to discuss legislation. Regier insisted that the Republican lawmakers did not plan to discuss issues, only survey members of the caucus.
He who believes that will believe anything.
Some think the meeting violated Montana’s open meeting laws. There are arguments both ways, but that discussion misses the larger point. In Tallyrand’s legendary words, “It was worse than a crime. It was a mistake.” (There are many phrasing reported, as well as some reports that the bon mot was not Tallyrand’s.)
And not just a mistake, but an immensely entertaining and embarrassing mistake. Almost a Gilbert and Sullivan worthy mistake. The Republican caucus is fractured along ideological lines. It takes a special kind of innocence to believe that a clandestine meeting of that caucus would — could — stay clandestine.
Regier did accomplish two things. He held himself and his caucus up to public ridicule. And he did distribute his questionnaire — not just to his caucus, as intended, but to the whole wide world he didn’t want to know about it. That red in his cheeks is not from a brisk winter wind.
