Greg Gianforte, Attorney General Austin Knudsen and the state Republican Party did not reply to inquires asking whether they believe ‘socialist rag’ is an appropriate description of the Montana Constitution and whether they believe the document should be replaced.”Montana’s constitution has been in place since 1972, when it was drafted by a truly bipartisan convention and ratified by the voters. It has long been something that Montanans across the political spectrum have been proud of, a document widely taught in public school curriculums across the state. As reported by Dietrich, Montanans must vote on whether they want to replace the 1972 Constitution at least once every 20 years. Votes to call a new convention failed by an 18-82 margin in 1990 and a 41-59 margin in 2010. Provisions exist for amending the constitution as well, and if the Republicans pick up two more legislative seats in the next election they will have sufficient votes in the legislature that would enable them to put amendments on the ballot. Current trends in Montana would make this a good bet to happen. Notably, the 67th Legislature passed a referendum measure to ask Montana voters to change how Montana selects Supreme Court justices, as dictated by the Constitution, from statewide to district elections. This is motivated by the fact that Republicans are unhappy with the current makeup of the court and believe that shifting to districts would allow them, in the words of critics that oppose this change, to gerrymander judicial appointments. As will be detailed below, the policy outcomes in the budget, tax, Medicaid, energy, and mental health illustrate the hard right turn. This hard right turn is also in clear view in a number of “hot button” issue areas that elicited fiery debates in committee and on the floor and attracted substantial media attention during the session. Perhaps the most controversial was the Conceal and Carry Bill. HB 102 significantly expanded the ability to carry concealed weapons in public places. The bill singled out universities explicitly,cannabis grow supplier forbidding them to prevent the carrying of concealed weapons on campus, including classrooms.

The bill passed and was signed into law quite early in the session. However, the Board of Regents challenged the bill in courts as a violation of the Montana State Constitution to be the sole authority governing campuses across the Montana State System. The challenge is still making its way through the courts. As was true in many Republican controlled legislatures across the country, Montana’s Republican caucus also proposed and passed a number of bills signed into law by the governor that imposed new requirements on voters. HB 176 puts an end to Montana’s long-standing tradition of same day registration. SB 169 requires voters without a government issued photo ID or a state concealed carry permit to present two forms of identification to vote at the polls. Students lobbied to allow a school photo ID to serve as a single source equal to the concealed carry permit, but this was rejected by the Republican majority, adding an added tone of political polarization to the bill. HB 530 prohibits people from distributing or collecting mail-in ballots from voters if paid to do so. HB 651 makes it harder to run ballot initiatives in Montana. SB 319, a broad bill revising campaign finance law, “was amended during the final week of the Legislature to include language specifically barring the well-known and liberal leaning MontPIRG from conducting voter registration or signature gathering efforts in campus dorms, dining halls and athletic facilities. It also requires that an optional $5 student fee supporting MontPIRG be presented to students at the University of Montana, where MontPIRG is based, as an opt-in rather than opt-out option.”All of these bills are-as of this writing-being challenged in court. Rs also put forward a number of anti-transgender bills, generating some of the most heated debates of the session. HB 112, which bars transgender women from participating on collegiate women’s sports teams, is being challenged on grounds similar to HB 102 , that it trespasses on the Regent’s mandate.

The Montana legislature, coordinating with the governor’s office, also passed a number of restrictive immigration bills in a state with one of the lowest immigrant populations in the country, leading some critics of the legislation to charge that passing immigration enforcement laws in Montana is a solution in search of a problem. As reported enthusiastically by Brietbart, Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte signed HB 200 into law on March 31, 2021, banning sanctuary cities, which effectively act as safe havens for illegal immigrants across the state, promising “immigration laws will be enforced in Montana.” Montana has no sanctuary cities. There was widespread going into the session amongst unionists the legislature would pass anti-union legislation, including so-called right to work bills. SB 89 would have barred public employers from collecting dues for unions via paycheck withholding. HB 168 would have required annual worker consent for union membership. HB 251 would have required written consent for union due paycheck deductions. Montana unions, including many blue-collar trades workers affiliated with the AFL-CIO, organized and mobilized visibly in the capital. The most compelling speculation for why anti-union Rs in the legislature backed down is that the legislation lacked the backing of the governor, who decided not to pay the political costs anticipated with opposing organized labor in such a frontal attack this session. Observers and participants on both sides of the aisle received clear indications of how the governor and the Republican majorities in both houses had set their policy compasses. Gone was the purple tinge to Montana politics, signaled most significantly by back to back two-term moderate Democratic governors balancing a Republican controlled legislature. While Republican legislative leadership, in the period leading up to the legislative session, rhetorically signaled that they would bring a bi-partisan attitude to the legislative process, no observer I spoke with going into the session took this seriously. However, what did happen during the session to moderate anticipated budget cuts was the infusion of substantial COVID relief funds from the federal government. This allowed the Republican majority to both cut taxes and maintain spending levels.

Bullock was quoted as saying that his budget “does not necessitate any cuts to government programs and services” and that “if the next administration and legislature choose to cut government services, it’ll be based upon ideology, not necessity.”Brooke Stroyke chaired the Gianforte transition team. In an email to journalist Eric Dietrich, she wrote “With state spending increasing by 60% over the last 10 years, Governor-elect Gianforte thinks it’s critical to hold the line on new state spending.” Meanwhile, according to a Montana Free Press analysis of data compiled by the National Association of State Budget Officers, percapita spending by state government, unadjusted for inflation, rose by 42%, to about $6,600 per state resident, between 2008 and 2018. However, it is important to note that about half that increase was driven by portions of the state budget funded by federal dollars, a category that includes the vast majority of the spending resulting from Montana’s expanded Medicaid program. The source of increased state spending was rarely mentioned in Republican stump speeches that often focused on increased state spending as being “runaway” and needing of Republicans to reign it in. Hence, the first order of business by the Republican controlled legislature was to scrap Bullock’s budget proposal.5 Importantly, Governor Bullock’s budget anticipated a drop in general fund revenues of $94 million in fiscal year 2021 but also anticipated a comeback in 2023 collections. Bullock’s budget anticipated ending the biennium with a $251 million-dollar positive balance,cannabis drainage system well above that required by state law. It included modest increases in education and health along with a $499 million-dollar infrastructure package, largely funded with federal dollars. During the 2019 legislative session, Bullock had championed a modest $30 million-dollar investment in early childhood education only to see it go down in flames over disagreements between Republican legislators and the powerful union representing public school teachers, the Montana Federation of Public Employees . This time around, he had reduced his ask to 10 million. In contrast to the Bullock budget proposal, candidate Gianforte released a 16-page glossy pamphlet entitled The Montana Comeback Plan. Nothing in it came as a surprise to those who had followed Gianforte’s career trajectory as a businessman turned politician.6 “Bringing back good jobs” was highlighted in Gianforte’s vision, which is consistent with longstanding Republican hopes to return to Montana’s resource extraction led economy. This is presumably possible by reforming state agencies and in order to “move projects forward.” The campaign took place during the pandemic, which altered the atmospherics considerably. Governor Bullock had instituted a mask order, anathema to most Republican voters and politicians. “We need to get our economy going again and we need to get Montana open for business” was a key line in candidate Gianforte’s stump speech. Gianforte came into office promising to cut 100 million from Bullock’s budget, fulfilling his promise to “hold the line” on spending. This was tempered most importantly by the infusion of COVID funds.

Gianforte’s proposed general fund budget included a 1.66% increase over the next two years — a 2.32% decrease in the upcoming fiscal year and a 3.98% increase in the second. Making good on a widely broadcasted campaign promise, the budget also proposed 50 million in tax cuts . This included lowering the top marginal individual income tax rate from 6.9% to 6.75%. In a press conference announcing the plan, candidate Gianforte also promised to continue this tax cutting exercise in the future. “This is just a first step. As we find greater efficiencies in government and our economy continues to grow, we will continue to cut taxes.” Democrats responded that they wanted any tax cuts directed towards middle- and lower-income Montanans: their bills to make progressive tax reform were all tabled in committee. Gianforte’s budget also proposed eliminating the business equipment tax for roughly 4,000 businesses in the state by raising the exemption from $100,000 to $200,000. As reported by Holly Michels, “Heather O’Loughlin, the co-director of the left-leaning Montana Budget and Policy Center, said Thursday the income tax cut would equate to a reduction of about $1,314 in the tax bill for the top 1% of those in the state, or people that earn $509,000 or more annually. An analysis of the proposal by the center and Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that people earning from $40,000-$63,000 would see a reduction of about $14.”One of the more controversial of the new governor’s proposed tax cuts was exempting businesses “that create long-term jobs in Montana” from capital gains taxes from the sale of employee-owned stock. This was particularly controversial given the rather widespread view that this proposal is directly inspired by Gianforte’s displeasure at having to pay this tax himself when he sold Right Now Technologies, located in Bozeman, to Oracle for 1.8 billion. Not surprisingly, progressives to moderates to no small number of principled conservatives cast this as a sweetheart deal for Gianforte and his well-heeled friends. Equally unsurprising is that his defenders argued that this tax cut would attract new investment and thus new and good paying jobs to Montana. Some of the proposals in the governor’s budget did attract bipartisan support. Prominent amongst these was a proposed 25% increase in funding for the program that helps seniors and disabled veterans offset increasing property taxes and a proposed $2.5 million to augment starting pay for public school teachers. Democrats would have favored larger budgetary commitments to both, offset by progressive taxation, but ended up voting for what they could get. Reminiscent of Governor Bullock’s passion for early childhood education, Gianforte has displayed passionate promotion of his Healing and Ending Addiction Through Recovery and Treatment Act. His budget included $23.5 million toward this initiative to be paid for by a combination of leveraging federal dollars and redirecting $6 million from the revenue expected to be generated from taxing the sale of recreational cannabis beginning in January 2023, along with funds from a major tobacco settlement. I say redirected because the recreational marijuana citizen referendum that passed in November 2020 directed all proceeds from taxes to be spent on the protection and expansion of public lands.