Radio Updates

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Last week someone asked me how the legislative session was going and I said, to be honest it’s strange. Compared to previous sessions it’s been quiet. There seem to be fewer bills and a lot less contention.

I’ve been attributing that to the fact that the voters gave us a divided government. A House and Senate controlled by conservatives and a governor who’s a liberal. Lobbyists on both sides of the political spectrum have told me that they shelve their legislative agendas on election night because the handwriting was on the wall. Conservatives knew that the governor would veto their bills and liberals knew that their bills would die in committee, so why spend the money? Not a bad thing if you think about it. Fewer bills mean fewer laws and laws usually take away freedom. I was happy until this morning when I check my computer and found that we have eight bills scheduled for next week.

On Monday we begin the week with two important life bills. House Business and Labor begins with a bill to disallow lawsuits for wrongful life. While the concept of wrongful death has been around for centuries, the concept of wrongful life is brand-new. In Montana, it rose out of a case in Livingston where a couple sued several healthcare providers for failing to inform them of a blood test that could’ve told them that their unborn child had cystic fibrosis. They said that if they had known they would’ve had an abortion. This case is sad on so many levels. But, the bill up Monday would not allow people to sue for wrongful life. It’s a good bill and we will be there to support it. An hour later, Senate judiciary will hear a bill to legalize assisted suicide. This is a bad idea and we’ll do our best to see that that bill dies. In the afternoon we’ll testify in favor of two more bills that will set of education savings accounts and specialist scholarships for children with disabilities.

Tuesday we regroup and then Wednesday we hear a bill to allow healthcare sharing ministries. These are allowed under Obama care and they’re legal in every state except Montana. This same bill passed the legislature last session but was vetoed by Gov. Schweitzer when he added it to the list of bills that he called crazy. Hopefully this time it will pass.

On Thursday we hear two bills, one to abolish the death penalty and the other to force church run youth treatment programs to adopt state standards even though they don’t accept public dollars. The death penalty bill is one of those perennial bills that’s been around for at least 15 years that I know of, and its chances of making it out of the House Judiciary Committee are fairly slim. The regulation of church treatment programs is a bad idea that’s unconstitutional on at least three levels and we will do our best to kill it quickly. The final bill is one of my favorites and comes up Friday in House Judiciary. It’s a bill to change the parental notification for a minor seeking an abortion law, that the people just passed by 71%, into a parental consent law where at least one parent needs to give consent before an abortion can be performed on a child. We require this for every other medical procedure, so why is abortion any different? In the last session the notification law was also one of those that Gov. Schweitzer vetoed and thankfully his veto was overwritten by 71% of the people. Once again, we’re hoping Gov. Bullock shows more commonsense.

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When you work at the capitol the first thing you learn is to be extremely flexible and roll with the punches. Everything is fluid, meetings change on a moment’s notice, and things rarely go according to plan. As a result, you savor those moments when plans do come together and victory is the order of the day. Today is one of those days.

It all began yesterday on the floor of the house when House Bill 239 came up for debate. If you recall that’s the bill to require parental permission prior to teaching sex education. We asked you to call the legislature and you did…IN DROVES. As a result, the bill passed 57 to 43, mainly along party lines with all democrats voting no along with Republicans Doc Moore of Missoula, Steve Gibson of Helena, Roger Hagan, and Brian Hoven of Great Falls; which is ironic because the Great Fall school district is one of those that’s been targeted for comprehensive sex education. The bill comes up for third reading today and we expect the margins to hold, then it’s off to the Senate.

While that victory was sweet, it was just the beginning. After the floor session, the House and Senate education committee convened and took executive action on four of our school choice bills. Those bills are modeled after programs that are working in other states and they’re designed to give struggling students options so that they stay in school. The first bill was up in Senate Ed and was our tax credit scholarship bill which allows corporations and individuals to deduct donations made to organizations that grant scholarships to allow kids to transfer from public to private schools. As a bonus, it also allows a deduction for donations targeted at public schools. We first introduced this bill four years ago and it’s been gaining momentum ever since. The next stop is the Senate floor where passage is anything but sure. But, what is for sure is that this and all school choice bills will be opposed by the teachers union every step of the way.

After the tax scholarship bill passed, I went down to the House education committee just in time to watch executive action on three more bills. The first was a simple $500 tax credit to offset private school tuition. It passed easily on a party line vote but not before every Democrat berated the bill.

The second bill was more interesting. It was a bill to allow a child with a disability who might not be receiving the help that they need in the public schools to take the money that normally would’ve been spent on them and going to the marketplace to find an option that works. The opponents argue that we have very good special ed programs in place in the public schools, so why would kids with disabilities need to go anywhere else? This seems logical but completely misses the point. It’s time to stop looking at the systems and the programs and begin looking at individual kids. If the system works perfectly for 9 out of 10 kids then that 10th child needs an alternative option.

The final bill of the day was perhaps the most controversial, the creation of public charter schools. Montana is one of only eight remaining states with no charter schools. They’ve been around for about 20 years, are among the top performing schools in the US, and best of all, if they don’t perform, they get shut down. The education lobby was in the room buttonholing legislators and urging them to vote no, but in the end, the bill passed 10 to 8 with all Republicans voting yes except for Ted Washburn of Bozeman who joined the Democrats in opposition. Now the focus shifts to the house and senate floors, and once again, we will need your help.