EPISODE DESCRIPTION

The 69th Legislature is starting week 17, it’s likely the last week of the session. Political tension are roiling as lawmakers narrow in on the final pieces of the state budget and property tax relief.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Shaylee Ragar:  The 69th legislature is starting Week 17. It’s likely the last week of the session. Political tensions are roiling as lawmakers narrow in on the final pieces of the state budget and property tax relief. We also wanna let you know about a live panel event that the session podcast is hosting on May 7th at 7:00 p.m. Put that on your calendars now.

This is The Session, a look at the policy and politics inside the Montana State House. I’m Shaylee Ragar with Montana Public Radio 

Eric Dietrich: And I’m Eric Dietrich with Montana Free Press.

Shaylee Ragar: Okay, so let’s set the scene of where we’re at right now. Lawmakers are on track to hit Day 90, their constitutional deadline, a week from today on May 5th. They usually adjourn before that, and lots of legislators have been telling us that they want to be done this week. That means they must pass a state budget, and most lawmakers seem to be determined to pass a permanent property tax rate restructure before leaving Helena too.

So, Eric, before we dive into the policy. How would you describe the political vibes right now of the Capitol? 

Eric Dietrich: I think the best way to put it is that it’s crunch time for the hard stuff. The stuff for the political coalitions just has not come together. You know, people are running outta patience, tensions are high.

Stuff is boiling over in dramatic ways on the House and Senate floor sometimes. 

Shaylee Ragar: But there are some clear coalitions that have emerged on how the state should spend its money. Talk us through that. 

Eric Dietrich: So folks who have been listening all session have heard us talk a lot about kind of the messy politics, particularly on the Senate side of the legislature this year.

There’s been a faction of Senate Republicans that have been basically feuding with Senate President Matt Regier and have been voting with Democrats to form a kind of effective majority coalition over there. That group, which folks call The Nine, that’s the coalition that’s passing most of the big tax and spending bills we’ve seen advance through the Senate side of the legislature the last few weeks.

Shaylee Ragar: The state budget is one important example.

Eric Dietrich: Yeah, like a very important example. House Bill 2, the state budget bill, funds agency budgets for two years. Big, huge spending bill, billions and billions of dollars, like probably the most important single bill the legislature passes each session, passed the House with kind of split caucuses, some Republicans for, some Republicans against.

Same with Democrats on the Senate side though, we saw a series of votes on amendments that all broke down on basically the same lines. 

“Mr. Chairman, 23 Senators vote aye and 27 Senators, vote nay.” 

We have nine Republicans, the 18 minority Democrats, and then other Republicans opposed. 

“Mr. Chairman, 23 Senators vote aye and 27 Senators vote nay.” 

“Mr. Chairman, 23 Senators vote aye and 27 Senators vote nay.” 

“Mr. Chairman, 27 Senators vote aye and 23 Senators vote nay.” 

It was kind of very perfunctory, almost like you know, the same vote, same vote, same vote. Crossed several amendments and by the end of the debate people who are on the losing side are getting up and, and saying, ‘Hey, the cake has been baked already. We don’t like this.’ 

Shaylee Ragar: You know, there’s the budget and then there’s the kind of companion bills to the budget that also includes spending that don’t show up in the line item of HB 2, but are in these policy bills that have appropriations attached to them. Senator Carl Glimm, who is chair of the Senate Finance and Claims Committee, got up on one of those spending bills and talked about how he felt like the legislature is passing too much spending. He’s one of the 23 Republicans who has been on the losing side of of these debates. 

“And we all spent, like drunken sailors, we’re giving drunken sailors a bad name.”

And I do think it might be a little bit of political theater, what he said.

Eric Dietrich: But it’s entertaining political theater. 

Shaylee Ragar: It’s for sure.

So Glimm is one of these 23 Republicans who are kind of in the minority now on these debates in the Senate. The tables seem to have turned this session a little bit, which has been super interesting. For example, last session, it was Democrats who were pushing back against a so-called ‘six pack of tax cut bills’ that were all tied together with coordinating language.

Democrats said it was too much spending in one package of bills moving too quickly. We are hearing very similar language from Republicans in the Senate this session about some of these big spending bills. They say there are too many proposals and too many concepts in one bill that they should be parsed and examined individually.

So it’s really interesting to watch that kind of role reversal happening. 

Eric Dietrich:It is, yes. I think, to take one example, we heard a vigorous debate on the Senate floor this last week about what’s fairly described as a supplemental spending bill, so not the big state agency spending bill, but kind of a bill that is a container for other provisions.

And it came to the Senate, very simple bill, just about I think $100,000 for a trade commission between Montana and Ireland, but it had a kind of broad bill title, which means that they can add other things into it. And so that became kind of a place to stash other things that were spending proposals that some people at least thought were a good idea, but didn’t really have another place too late in the session to bring a standalone bill.

And so ended up with things like money for mental health evaluations and some language of changing how the board of investment operates and gosh, all sorts of other things too. And the rhetoric we often see play out in these debates is the folks that have the working majority, they say, ‘and it’s just by the means. It’s sausage-making, but you gotta get stuff done.’ Folks on the losing side said, ‘Hey, your, your sausage smells bad. I don’t like it. Let’s not do this, it isn’t the right way to do business.’ You know, that debate played out. Very much like that this year. 

Shaylee Ragar: Right? And it’s not just about whether it is ethical or responsible to pass big spending bills with lots of amendments.

Lawmakers also have to consider whether they’re staying within the confines of the constitutional framework to pass bills. 

Eric, talk us through those rules. 

Eric Dietrich: The Montana Constitution has a single-subject requirement for bills and basically that’s, you know, each bill should express, do one thing that should be clearly expressed to the title, and don’t change that title and what the bill does halfway through the process.

The argument is that that makes it easier for lawmakers to have good standalone debates, makes it easier for the public to follow bills, that sort of thing. There are some exceptions to the Montana rule though, and legislators being legislators, they will take those exceptions and work them as hard as they can when that’s what they need to do to pass the things they want to pass.

And occasionally the things go to the point where somebody will bring a court case to challenge a bill and says, ‘Hey, this violates a single subject rule’ and occasionally bills do get thrown out as a result of that. 

Shaylee Ragar: Yeah, Republican Senator Greg Hertz of Polson actually talked about how a couple of sessions ago, he had an election bill that was amended with some other language towards the end of the session, and that bill was struck down solely on the procedure of how that bill was put together and whether it fit the requirements for a bill.

And he pointed out that his bill had been struck down to say that, ‘Hey, Democrats and the nine Republicans who support some of these proposals, you could get your stuff struck down in court too.’ 

Eric Dietrich: Yeah, it’s gonna be fascinating to see whether some of the rhetoric we’re hearing on the Senate floor translates into actual court cases on notable bills that come out of the session this year.

Shaylee Ragar: Spending is causing a lot of tension. But property tax relief is also feeling pretty chaotic these last couple weeks of the session. There are some big bills that have been voted down and then resurrected. It’s also been hard to keep up with which bills are alive and dead. So, what do we still have on the table, Eric?

Eric Dietrich: Gosh, if I was following this from home, I think I’d be giving up on tracking individual bills and maybe tracking ideas instead. The big idea on the table still is the tax relief proposal that’s advanced by Governor Greg Gianforte. I’ve been calling it the second home tax ’cause what it would do is it would reduce taxes on primary residences, in part by raising them on second homes.

The idea being that if you just scale back taxes on residences and don’t do much else, that tax burden, a lot of it will flow elsewhere, so onto businesses. And so the governor’s proposal, what it does is it scales up taxes on second homes and Airbnbs in order to minimize how much extra tax burden goes on to businesses.

As of this recording, that idea is alive in two bills that are kind of redundant with each other. Those two bills are both moving forward. That idea seems like the one that’s likely to pass, but I may well eat my words on that. 

Shaylee Ragar: We’ve been seeing lawmakers take this approach of having two bills with similar concepts in each moving at the same time.

The goal being to have one pass to keep the momentum moving in one of these vehicles. So we’ll see which one ends up making it across the finish line, if any. Eric, why is it so complicated for lawmakers to figure out property taxes? 

Eric Dietrich: The real challenge with property taxes is that if you want somebody to pay less, somebody else has to pay more, or you have to cut local services.

Most people in the building aren’t pushing for major cuts to local services, and as a result, the money’s gotta come from somewhere. And so the challenge is where is it another part of the property tax system that’s not homes? Is it the state general fund, which is mostly income tax dollars? So that would be another approach, but the governor doesn’t like that and has threatened to veto bills that would do that.

Where’s the money gonna come from and if the money’s gonna come from somewhere, does that mean raising taxes on a class of people? Which is a tough thing politically for lawmakers to do. 

Shaylee Ragar: I wanna talk about one other thing that was a top priority for Governor Greg Gianforte, which was cutting income taxes. A proposal to do that is headed to his desk. 

Eric, talk us through that bill. 

Eric Dietrich: Yeah, so the governor who proposed a cut to the state’s top bracket tax rate this year, he didn’t get it, at least not as much as he wanted. Instead, what lawmakers have passed is a smaller cut to the top bracket tax rate, and then also another provision that basically takes the state’s lower bracket tax rate and provides that to more taxpayers at more incomes. 

Lawmakers who argued for that say that would target more relief towards middle income taxpayers. That bill will cost the state about a quarter of a billion dollars a year in revenue once it’s fully implemented.

And since we’re talking about divisions of the Republican Party, we should note that that one was essentially a party lines passage supported by Republicans, opposed by Democrats. 

Shaylee Ragar: Thanks for breaking that down for us, Eric. I think we’ll cut ourselves off there for today, but please tell me what was your favorite moment last week?

Eric Dietrich: A lot of the tax and budget bills going through the legislature have been written by House Appropriations Chair Llew Jones of Conrad. He’s basically the legislature’s budget guru. Also kind of the guy who’s making deals behind the scenes and at this point in the session, he seems to be getting his way with a lot of stuff.

There’s some friction there in places. There’s a non-budget resolution that was going over the House floor this week coming from some folks who want to go back to the days when state legislators picked US Senators instead of having senators elected by a popular vote like we’ve been doing for the past century.

During that debate, John Fitzpatrick from Anaconda, got up and asked the supporters of the bill if they wanted Representative Jones to pick Montana’s next Senator. 

“If the intent of this resolution was law today, our next US Senator would be picked by the representative from Conrad in Seat 91.”

He got a lot of laughs and perhaps killed that bill right there.

Shaylee Ragar: Yes, someone needs to write a biography of Representative Llew Jones. There would be lots and lots of material. He is very well known in this building. 

Eric Dietrich: And perhaps not as well known as they should be by the broader public. 

Shaylee Ragar: That’s so true. 

We’ll leave it there for now, but I again wanna highlight, we are going to have a live panel discussion with all the reporters you’ve been hearing from on The Session on May 7th at 7:00 p.m. We want your questions, we want your comments.

You can find an online form to submit those at mtpr.org/session. Thank you so much for tuning in, and please join us on the 7th. This has been The Session, a look at the policy and politics inside the Montana State House. Thanks, Eric. 

Eric Dietrich: Thanks.