News & Updates

This week’s republican presidential debate was for all intent and purposes a donnybrook.  The gloves came off, accusations flew and the political rancor was off the charts.  Strangely however, it wasn’t so much candidates mixing it up with other candidates as it was candidates calling out the media who were moderating the debate for bias and hypocrisy.  But the candidates were just giving voice to what Americans have believed for some time.

In a 2015 USA Today poll 70% of Americans believe the news media reports with an intentional bias.  Whether or not it’s true, it’s the perception and in politics – perception is reality.  It’s not just conservative candidates who are the target of a bias liberal media.  This past week the Montana Family Foundation was the target of a vicious editorial by Darrell Ehrlick of the Billings Gazette, for our concern that comprehensive sex-education may be written into Montana’s public schools curriculum standards.

I know that you are never supposed to pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel, but given the fact that the radio stations that air our broadcast blanket Montana and extend into parts of all surrounding states and up into Canada, our listenership is larger than the Billings Gazette’s readership – so I’ll take that chance.

Ehrlick’s article was venomous, snarky, immature, unprofessional, and not well written.  It typified the bias that conservatives see in the press and more closely resembled a rant on someone’s Facebook page than a serious editorial in the state’s largest newspaper.  That said the thing that I find most interesting is that liberal writers like Ehrlick believe that they espouse the majority opinion.  They routinely trash conservative groups like the Montana Family Foundation and say that we’re out of touch. But when we promote ballot issues they pass by 60 or even 71 percent as in the case of parental notification for a minor to get an abortion.  These are mainstream values and conservatives and independents are tired of being told by the media that we are out of touch.  No wonder the circulation of the big dailies is falling; they are no longer the only show in town.

Conservatives are also tired of being told to sit back, remain silent and leave it to the experts – especially in the area of education.  You’ll notice that we never denigrate teachers but we routinely go after the teachers union and the bureaucrats at the Office of Public Instruction that the union controls.  We regularly receive letters and emails from teachers and administrators who are tired of their classrooms being used as social experiments, they just want to teach.  And to the issue of the Health Enhancement Standards that are currently being rewritten by the Office of Public Instruction and were the object of the Billings Gazette editorial, we will continue to monitor the process and report back to you.

Comprehensive sex-education was developed by a group called SEICUS which has close ties to Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America.  If it’s adopted as part of the curriculum standards, every school in the state will have to teach it – so much for local control.  Given the Planned Parenthood videos that have come out, how many parents want Planned Parenthood to have a say in what their child is being taught?  Despite the Billings Gazette’s venomous article, we’re not going away.  It’s about citizen involvement and parental control and those are both values that we are fighting for.

In high school we learned that there were three branches of government.

• The legislative:  whose job was to make the law.
• The judicial: whose job was to apply and sometimes interpret the law.
• The executive: whose job was to enforce the law.

It was a good system, the laws that the people would have to live under were made either directly by the people through ballot initiative, or by the Legislature – the branch of government closest to the people.  Now we increasingly see that laws in effect are being made by the judicial and executive branches and the result is a direct loss by the people of the ability to govern themselves.

It didn’t happen overnight, the process was slow.  At times, almost imperceptible.  But it happened and now we find ourselves strangled by bureaucratic regulations and court decisions that routinely over turn the will of the vast majority of the people.

Case in point: the federal clean water act- a great idea.  Who could be against clean water?  But in the hands of a zealous environmental protection agency, it’s interpreted to give almost dictatorial control of private property by controlling seasonal puddles that the agency defines as wetlands.  In this case, Congress passes a law that is 100 pages and a bureaucratic agency through rule making authority will expand the original law into a regulatory behemoth containing hundreds of thousands of individual regulations, each caring the weight of law.

As a citizenry we know that we are losing our freedoms, but we can’t quite put our finger on how it’s happening.  It’s not just happening at the federal level, right here in Montana we have two current cases were a law was passed and government bureaucrats either vastly expanded the scope of the law or changed the original intent.  The first is called the Dark Money Campaign Finance Reform Bill better known as the “Incumbent Protection Act” because it makes citizen involvement in the election process much more difficult.  In this case, a bare bones bill was passed, but within the bill was an incredible amount of rulemaking authority.  A mechanism that in effect gives legislative power to agency bureaucrats and as we all know, the devil is always in the details.  And the details in this bill were left to Jonathan Motl, the Montana Commissioner of Political Practices.  It’s kind of like Nancy Pelosi saying we had to pass Obama Care first to see what was in it.  In the case of the Dark Money Bill, the rules that were added to it expanded the bill so much that even democrat legislators who voted for the original bill, baulked at the scope of the administrative rules.

The second bill was Senate Bill 410, a bill to allow tax-credit scholarships for students who want to switch from a public school to a private school.  When the Department of Revenue got a hold of the bill, they changed the scope by saying that it did not apply to private faith based schools, which incidentally make up the vast majority of private schools in Montana.  Similar shenanigans were tried on a similar bill by the state of Arizona and the case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court where the state ultimately lost.  We look forward to the same outcome, right here in Montana.

The bottom line is that regulations and administrative rules that carry the weight of law are in effect laws and laws should be made by the legislative branch. 

One of the hardest things about our job at the Montana Family Foundation is to stand alone in front of a culture that’s moving with a herd mentality in the wrong direction.  We’ve done it on lots of occasions, most recently during the 2015 legislative session when the powers that be were racing to pass a so called dark money election reform bill.  Now don’t get me wrong, I think there should be transparency when it comes to election law.  But this bill went way beyond that.  It muzzled free speech, put churches at risk of having to disclose their donors, and gave dictatorial powers to the Commissioner of Political Practices.  The bill itself was bad enough but as we told Representatives and Senators, the real problems would arise when the Commissioner exercised the inordinate amount of rulemaking authority given to him in the new statute.  All of that was hidden from legislators.  Kind of a Nancy Pelosi situation where they would need to pass the bill before they could see what was in it.  In the end it was crammed through by Governor Bullock with all Democrats voting yes supported by a handful of liberal Republicans.  In the end it passed by one vote.  The Commissioner of Political Practices who himself was and convicted of violating election laws, immediately went to work fleshing out the statue with administration rules that went far beyond the scope of the original bill.

Now we get to see what’s in it and the results sent Democrats and liberal lobbying groups into a tizzy.  Legislators who once marched locked step with the Governor are now up in arms demanding changes.  One part of the bill calls for the Commissioner to determine the primary purpose of an organization before they are allowed to participate in an election.  To accomplish that, he’s given access to every internal working document that the organization has.   These include budgets, emails, staff records, minutes of meetings, all correspondence and anything else he determines is necessary.  That’s fine if the Commissioner is on your team, appointed by the Governor of your party.  But, what about the moment that’s sure to come when the Commissioner comes from the other political party.  Would you want to show your play book to the opposing team on the day before the Super Bowl?  Of course not!  And that’s what the Democrats suddenly figured out.  At a recent committee hearing groups like the Teachers Union, the AFL/CIO and the trail lawyers who remained silent during the original hearings on the bill suddenly came forward with grave concerns.  Legislators that originally voted for the original bill asked that its implementation be delayed pending further review.

We hate to say “we told you so”, but we did.  Now maybe we’ll get the fair hearings that we should’ve gotten in the first place.  Transparency is important but it must be balanced with our constitutional right to speak freely.  Only then will we have an electoral process that we can all be proud of.