Tonight on Capitol Talk: Medicaid politics; how Sen. Tester has moved to the center; and what’s Gov. Bullock doing in Iowa again? Tune in now for these stories and more from the state Capitol, with Eric Whitney, Holly Michels and Rob Saldin.
Eric Whitney: Howdy and welcome to “Capitol Talk” our weekly political analysis show. I’m Eric Whitney filling in for Sally Mauk this week. I’m joined by Lee Newspapers capitol reporter Holly Michels and University of Montana Political Science Professor and Mansfield Center Fellow Rob Saldin.
There was some pretty big news out of Washington on Tuesday; the Senate passed a major public lands package. Montana’s Republican Sen. Steve Daines says this one was different.
“It took public lands to bring divided government together. I think it’s a testament to who we are as Americans, the value we place on our public lands,” Daines said.
EW: It’s an interesting bite. I’d argue it took more than public lands to bring divided government together, since this public lands legislation was on the table last year and Congress didn’t pass it. We’ll talk a little bit more about that in a minute. But Rob, what’s in the bill?
Rob Saldin: Well Eric, it’s the biggest conservation bill we’ve seen in a decade. It combines over 100 bills from across the country and packages them into a single bill that runs 662 pages. And it creates over a million new acres of wilderness, creates new national park units, expands several existing national parks and so on.
The big items of interest in Montana are the permanent withdrawal of mining claims in the Paradise Valley just north of Yellowstone, and the permanent reauthorization of the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which takes money from offshore oil and gas drilling and directs it towards conservation. So those are the big ticket items for Montana, and they are quite significant.
EW: The Yellowstone Gateway Protection Act you mentioned and the Land and Water Conservation Fund reauthorization; that’s something that politicians have been talking about literally for years in Montana. On Tuesday when this deal was announced I asked Sen. Tester why the bill that passed by a huge margin – it passed by 92 to 8 – why they couldn’t get that done last year.
“I hope it didn’t have anything to do with the fact that I was up for re-election, but it may have,” Tester said. “I hope it didn’t have anything to do with people stopping conservation because they don’t like conservation, but it probably has something to do with it. In the end, a package was able to be put together that got momentum, and that’s a big part of it. And the momentum was a bipartisan momentum.”
EW: Rob, what do you make of Sen. Tester’s comments there?
RS: First, Tester seems to be raising the prospect that this package didn’t get through in the last Congress because, one presumes, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who controls the Senate agenda, didn’t want to give him a win going into the election. And I guess that’s possible. But on its face this actually seems to be pretty much in keeping with the way these public land bills have been passed over the last decade or so. And that is, at the very end of a Congress a whole bunch of bills from all over the country get cobbled together into one big package and that gets voted on in the lame duck session that is after the election. That’s exactly what happened last year, or appeared to be happening, but then we’re told it didn’t get voted on because the Senate ran out of time. Who knows what was going on behind the scenes. But this actually seems to me to be fairly consistent with how public land bills have been dealt with.
The other thing that strikes me, just with Tester’s comments, the whole bipartisan bit. And we saw that from him this week too when it came to his comments about that committee he was on that put together the deal to avoid another government shutdown. It just seems to me he’s really leaning into being that that moderate Democrat. You know, here we are at the very beginning of his third term. That’s become a much bigger part of his presentation of himself as the years have gone by. Right? Remember when he first ran back in 2006, he ran as a real progressive. And there were a lot of people who saw his win in the primary against John Morrison as being an upset. Morrison was the guy who was running more on the Max Baucus moderate mold. And then when Tester got to D.C. there was a discernible difference between him and Baucus in terms of the people they surrounded themselves with and the way they carried themselves. Team Tester is definitely more progressive than team Baucus, but Tester really does seem to be claiming that moderate Democrat slot in the Senate. And that’s perhaps because that lane has become more open to him as the national party has moved left. He has come to be the real moderate, or at least one of the real moderates, in the Senate. And with people like Claire McCaskill, the former Missouri senator, gone, there is a real opening there for him to become, kind of, the public face of that within the Senate. And of course that works well for him here at home too.
EW: He certainly didn’t run anything like a progressive in 2018. I mean, his first campaign ad was touting all the bills that President Trump had signed and how he can work with President Trump. So yeah, he’s not the Jon Tester of 2006.
RS: We have seen that shift over the years. I think one of the other things we see now from Tester is he’s doing a lot more media, national media. Going on the Rachel Maddow Show, and you know, he was on one of the Sunday morning shows recently.
EW: Bill Maher.
RS: And Bill Maher. And so I think there is a space out there in the media universe, for sure, for the kind of face of the moderate Democrats in the Senate, and he does a good job of filling that.
EW: Well Holly, it’s been a fairly quiet week in Helena. I think probably the most significant thing to happen was the release of this new analysis of the changes that Republicans say they want to make…
