Fifteen minutes into the state Senate’s first meeting, nine Republicans joined all Democrats in voting to change committee assignments.

The GOP faction sided with Democrats despite urging from Senate President Matt Regier that the Republican caucus stay united.

Senate Minority Leader Pat Flowers offered the change, saying a new committee to review the governor’s proposed bills and agency appointments was unnecessary. Flowers proposed bumping the committee to on-call status and offered new assignments to its members.

“This proposal, this motion, makes the best use of all the expertise and experience in this body and puts them back on committees where they can use that expertise,” Flowers said.

In recent days, Regier and other Senate Republican leaders have tried and failed to gain back control.

During a caucus meeting Thursday some Republican senators called the faction of nine selfish. Regier said he understands they all have differing views, but said they need to operate as a unit.

“Montanans did not send the Democrats to run the show. They sent us. And I will not move from that,” Regier said.

But the nine senators didn’t budge. That included Sen. Wendy McKamey. She said creating the new committee was an affront to Gov. Greg Gianforte as it would have singled out his favored legislation for heightened review.

“I do not want to see us fighting the governor. I want to see us making good legislation. I want to see us getting to work. I want to see us getting stuff done,” McKamey said.

The dispute delayed the start of Senate committee work, which will begin next week, days after the House.

Regier told reporters he was surprised by the division in his party. He said he worries how the faction might impact policymaking down the line.

HELENA — On Friday morning, the House Judiciary Committee heard more than three hours of testimony on a bill that would require transgender people to use the bathroom that aligns with their sex at birth. Supporters said it was intended to protect single-sex spaces, particularly for women, while opponents called it discriminatory.

House Bill 121 is sponsored by Rep. Kerri Seekins-Crowe, R-Billings. It would require public schools, correctional facilities, other public buildings and domestic violence shelters to designate bathrooms, changing rooms and sleeping areas for either men or women, based on their biological sex at birth, and to “take reasonable steps” to keep the opposite sex out. Someone could then sue those facilities if they failed to take those steps and someone of the opposite sex used the space.

The bill wouldn’t apply to rooms that only one person can use at a time.

Seekins-Crowe denied that HB 121 was discriminating against anyone. She said women in these spaces are particularly vulnerable, and that the bill was intended to protect them from violence and harassment. She said it was a major issue for voters she spoke to during the last campaign.

“This is not targeting a certain population, this is protecting a certain population,” she said.

Lt. Gov. Kristen Juras also testified in support. She tied HB 121 to several other pieces of legislation that the Gianforte administration has supported in previous sessions: 2023’s Senate Bill 99, which prohibited gender-affirming health care for transgender youth, and Senate Bill 458, which codified a definition of biological sex into state law, as well as 2021’s House Bill 112, which restricted transgender female athletes from competing in girls’ sports.

“Acknowledging biological realities should not be complicated or controversial, and neither should this bill,” Juras said. “Working with the Legislature, the governor’s office has been proud of our shared record of defending Montanans from the far left’s ideological crusade that has swept the nation.”

Opponents argued the bill’s supporters were overstating the danger to women from transgender people, and that laws already exist to address the kind of behavior they’re concerned about. They said there was no way to enforce this requirement without intruding on Montanans’ privacy.

“How is the state expected to prevent me from using the men’s bathroom?” said Shawn Reagor, a transgender man representing the Montana Gender Alliance. “How is the state expected to know that I should be using the women’s bathroom and require me to do so? It doesn’t make any sense.”

Other opponents raised concerns that implementing the bill would be too burdensome, particularly on local governments and shelters. They questioned what these facilities would be required to do and what kind of legal liability they could face.

Kim Patterson, development director for the Friendship Center in Helena, said their organization receives hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal funding, including through the Family Violence Prevention and Services Program. She said they’re concerned complying with HB 121 might put that at risk.

“All of this funding prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity,” she said. “We are already under-resourced, and the loss of this funding would be detrimental to the people who rely on our lifesaving services.”

Rep. SJ Howell, D-Missoula, asked Seekins-Crowe about how the bill would be implemented, citing a hypothetical example of an encounter in a bathroom at a public library.

“They don’t have a name, they don’t have an address, they certainly haven’t seen a birth certificate – I’m hoping they haven’t seen anything else private about that person – they file a suit,” Howell said. “How are you envisioning that the librarian in this instance would clarify their liability? Are you thinking cameras in the bathroom, guards at all times, checks at the door?”

Seekins-Crowe said she believed public facilities are already making accommodations and that the impact will not be as large as opponents believe.

“This bill is not for us to invade privacy – and that does include women’s privacy at this point,” she said. “The purpose of this bill is to protect women in private spaces. And it’s not about checking. I think it really is going to also go to the comfort level of that person.”

The House Judiciary Committee took no immediate action on HB 121 Friday.

In his recent inaugural speech, Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte spoke about how we have what the rest of the nation wants, saying: “The American dream lives in Montana and it’s here where we are proving what is possible when the government gets out of the way and empowers the people.”

If anything, his words reflect a relative newcomer’s poor understanding of Montana history — and what can happen when you “get government out of the way.”  But long-time Montanans remember.  We lived through and still suffer from the era when government was indeed “out of the way” and the rapacious appetites of the railroad, cattle, timber and mining barons ran rampant, leaving a trail of destruction in their wake. 

The record is clear, and while many scars yet remain, the benefits of regulating formerly unrestricted greed and destruction are evident all across this vast state.  

Anyone who knew those who lived in Montana 100 years ago can easily recall their stories of hunters basically wiping out the wildlife populations.  The most distinct example of human-caused destruction of wildlife was the decimation of the buffalo that once wandered our plains in the millions.  

But the slaughter was stopped — not by individuals, but by the government.  While buffalo continue to recover, Montana now boasts healthy populations of deer, elk, antelope and moose — all of which would have been hunted to extirpation were it not for the institution of regulations to prevent their demise.  

Hunting seasons were established to protect the time when existing wildlife carried the next generation to replenish the herds.  Regulatory limits on how many animals one individual could kill were instituted not to crush freedom, as the governor insinuated government has done, but to provide continuing opportunities for Montanans and generations yet to come. 

While our clean rivers and abundant fisheries are the envy of the nation, that’s not by accident.  Plenty of Montanans still remember when the Clark Fork was a dead river that ran red with mining and smelting wastes, which we will continue to wrestle with for decades to come.  

The timber barons ran huge rafts of logs down the Blackfoot, destroying the banks and scouring the riverbed on their way to the mills and leaving behind clearcuts leaching sediment into once-healthy tributaries.  Half a century later, the Blackfoot was again decimated when the Mike Horse mine tailings pond failed, flooding the river with toxic metals that wiped out the fishery.

And of course not all that long ago there was no such thing as the catch-and-release fishing ethic pioneered and promoted by iconic conservationists like Bud Lilly, who would willingly tell friends that in his youth it was “catch and release in bacon grease.”

While the governor lauds “unleashing freedom,” the undeniable reality of Montana’s past is that there must be sidebars on that “freedom” because there are those who will pillage the state’s wealth to get it while they can with no concern for the consequences.

The legislature’s GOP leaders, echoing the governor, have the regulatory laws that restored past damages and now protect Montanans and their environment in their crosshairs.  But laws such as the Montana Environmental Policy Act protect all Montanans — and rest assured Republicans need clean air, water, and soil, too, as well as healthy populations of fish and wildlife.

Montanans continue to suffer from past deregulatory mistakes, which took our electricity rates from the lowest in the region to the highest.  The lesson?  Beware “unleashing freedom” if the result is actually unleashing rapacious corporations to once again plunder and pollute this great state.