The "bathroom" law remains stalled in the courts. Lawmakers appear poised to pass the state budget. Sen. Daines gets a presidential endorsement. And female senators call out sexism in the chamber.
Capitol Talk is MTPR's weekly legislative news and analysis program. MTPR's Sally Mauk is joined by Montana Free Press State Editor Holly Michels and Lee Banville, Director of the University of Montana School of Journalism and Professor of Political Reporting.
Sally Mauk: Lee, a Missoula District Court Judge this week extended an order that keeps a new law barring people from public bathrooms that don't align with their sex at birth, the so-called Bathroom Bill. And it's not a permanent ban, it's only until there's a court ruling on the merits of lawsuits seeking to prevent the law from going into effect. And this is just another example, Lee, of laws being passed that end up being challenged as unconstitutional.
Lee Banville: Right. We're going to see an array of challenges against laws. It happens every session - something gets passed and it gets challenged for whether a constitutional issue federally or a state constitution. We're going see a lot of state constitutional challenges, I think, based on some of the things that have come out of the legislature. I think that the injunction sort of speaks to the complexity of the law, that the enforcement model is really kind of messy. It allows lawsuits by people against facilities. It's not as clean as a law that says the state must enforce X. It's more, you know, it gets the citizens involved suing each other or suing organizations. And so, I think punting on that until it's very clear whether the law itself is constitutional makes a lot of sense.
Sally Mauk: Well, along those lines of how tricky it might be to enforce, here's what Missoula Representative Zooey Zephyr, a trans lawmaker, had to say at a rally opposing the law.
State Rep. Zooey Zephyr: The moment the bathroom ban passed, my leadership said, 'What's the plan?' And I said, 'The plan is, they're going to have to stop me if they want me to not use the women's restroom', to which they went, 'Oh no'
Sally Mauk: And apparently Lee, no one did try to stop Zephyr from using the women's bathroom in the Capitol.
Lee Banville: Which kind of speaks to just how difficult this is to navigate. I mean, the intent, the effort to tackle specifically trans issues has been really popular with Republican lawmakers, both here in Montana and nationwide. But when you get to the nitty gritty of, 'Okay, well, what does that mean? And how does that get enforced?' Uh, you get into some very, very weird and complicated and potentially really nasty conversations and fights. And so rather than try to enforce this law that's on the books, people are like, 'Okay, we're just not going to deal with it yet and we're going to wait and see what the courts do', which is kind of a telling moment that they just decided to not draw a line in the sand and instead say, 'Okay, we'll wait to see what courts do.'
Sally Mauk: Well, Holly, the legislature is edging closer to passing the main budget bill, House Bill 2, with bipartisan support, but a lot of Republicans, like Kila Senator Carl Glimm, aren't happy about it.
State Senator Carl Glimm: This growth is exorbitant. Not to mention all the rest of the spending that we're not paying any attention to. We're passing everything under the sun.
Sally Mauk: Democrats, on the other hand, like Senate Minority Leader Pat Flowers, say it's a good budget.
State Senator Pat Flowers: I think it's a good compromise budget. I think that it meets the needs of Montanans in a fair and meaningful way.
Sally Mauk: And of course, Holly, it's not totally a done deal, but it looks like it's well on its way.
Holly Michels: Yeah, Sally. So, the state budget has cleared the Senate and is back over in the House chamber now, and over there lawmakers can either approve of the changes made in the Senate, or if they reject them, that would send the budget to a special committee where it could be tinkered with more. And like we heard from Senator Glimm there, some Republican legislators think that the budget needs a lot more tinkering to be okay. Glimm referenced the structural imbalance in the budget - point out here that Glmm also runs the Senate's Finance and Claims Committee, so he's deeply involved in finance issues. He pointed out, calculating from a status sheet that the Legislative Fiscal Division puts out at the point when the Senate was having this debate, the state is spending about half of a billion dollars more than it will collect in revenues when we get to the next fiscal year.
Democrats point out, though, that that status sheet doesn't just include the cost of the budget, it also includes spending on every other bill that's alive at the point when that sheet is produced, so that means it catches a lot of things that might be defeated soon, like dueling property tax measures that we have right now. The last status sheet still had some childcare tax credits, those have been voted down now, and a lot other proposals that will be probably culled in the coming days, but overall, this session's budget does spend about 17% more than last session's budget at this point in the process.
Republicans who are upset with that, tried on the Senate floor to make reduction after reduction, but they were repeatedly thwarted by this coalition of nine Republicans, plus the chamber's 18 Democrats, who defeated amendment after amendment trying to reduce spending. And that's why we heard from Minority Leader Pat Flowers there talk about how he feels like this budget's in good shape. It has a lot of priorities his caucus wanted to see in there, like an increase in what vocational rehabilitation providers are paid and funding for more game wardens. The Democrats were also able to actually do a little bit of cutting on the Senate floor. They took out $35 million for traveling nurses at the state hospital, which is signaling their preference to have the hospital figure out how to hire full-time staff instead and also put some money toward a pretrial diversion program.
With all that spending that's in there now, we're hearing from Republicans that they expect the governor will have to issue line-item vetoes to bring the budget back into balance with revenues. Of course, lawmakers would prefer to be the ones making those decisions and not leaving it up to the governor. So right now, we're waiting to see what the House does when they schedule their next vote on this. The budget passed from the House to the Senate on a bipartisan 58-41 vote, so it got strong support there last time, and we'll see if that coalition holds.
Sally Mauk: Lee, lawmakers face the same thing households face when they're trying to budget, and that is that costs go up, not down, and so does demand for services.
Lee Banville: Right. Compromise and negotiation is the core to any kind of budget deal. And people are going to be frustrated with it. They're either going to see it as too flabby, they're going to see programs that they really value being set aside. I mean, this is the nuts and bolts of what the session is supposed to do. And so the jump of 17% over what it was two years ago is notable, I think. And so are some lurking questions that could actually bring us all back to the Capitol in the coming months, like federal moves around education or in particular, Medicaid could really take the budget that's coming through and really throw some massive wrenches into it. So, it's interesting to see that tension between the fiscal hawks and the more compromise based, you know, let's-cut-a-deal Republicans in particular. But I think that this is an interesting budget to watch, and the final moves will set up maybe that special session if we do run into federal issues. You know, there's a lot playing out at the federal level that could completely change the picture in the coming 6 to 12 months.
Sally Mauk: That's something we're going to be watching for sure.
Holly, it's still a long ways till the 2026 election, and yet here I am about to talk about it. And that's because this week President Trump issued a ringing endorsement of Senator Steve Daines, who is up for re-election next year.
Holly Michels: He did, Sally. Trump really praised Daines heavily here. He specifically cited the work Daines did last year as head of the Republican National Senatorial Committee to win key seats in the Senate for Republicans, including defeating Jon Tester here in Montana. That, of course, flipped the Senate red for when Trump was sworn back into office and gave Republicans total control in D.C. And Trump in his post on Truth Social didn't specifically reference the 2026 election, but he did say that he would only recommend the best to represent Montana in the Senate, and that would be Daines. Daines, back when he beat former Democratic Governor Steve Bullock in the 2020 Senate race, filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission to be able to raise money for a 2026 bid. Like most members of Congress, he's been doing so. He's got about $2.4 million in the bank right now for that. So, you know, in Montana, candidate filing for the 2026 election season opens in March next year in Montana for that election cycle, so that's when we get the real roster of who is and isn't running, but you know Daines is raising money and there are Democrats who have entered the race too, so I think we'll see who declares, who else might jump in and see how that shapes up next year.
Sally Mauk: Lee, Senator Daines and Trump seem to have a true bromance thing going.
Lee Banville: I mean, they are pretty tight. You know, when you think about the trip that Daines took to China to meet with senior officials there, he wasn't there as the official delegate, but he was also kind of there as an unofficial delegate. And when you see the endorsement coming so very early in a race that I think most of us weren't really thinking about quite yet, I kind of think it does tie those two even closer together. Senator Daines was pretty early in the, 'We need to investigate the 2020 election' when President Trump said it had been stolen. He was sort of there with him then. He's been pretty tied to him. And so, you know, I think for right now, there's no problem with that. So far, that connection for Senator Daines really only helps him. But if we start to see any kind of shifting in public opinion or specifically Montana opinion about President Trump and the policies he's been rolling out, that could change, but I think for right now, what it is, is it really just strengthens and solidifies a lot of the power in the state Republican party around Steve Daines, that he is the standard bearer of - at least at the federal level - of what it is to be a Montana Republican.
Sally Mauk: And Trump, of course, also is appreciative of Daines being instrumental in Jon Tester losing his Senate seat.
Lee Banville: I mean, that was always a goal of his. Daines had to sort of navigate the whole Matt Rosendale entering the race and the potentially messy primary that then suddenly got cleaned up and ran very smoothly. And I think a lot of the credit in the mind of Donald Trump and probably a lot of people is that goes to Steve Danes.
Sally Mauk: Well, lastly, Holly, there was a spat in the Montana Senate recently that broke out not along party lines, but along gender lines. Some female senators felt disrespected, and they spoke up about it.
Holly Michels: Yeah, Sally. So, this came out of a debate over a bill related to red flag laws where Senator Ellie Boldman, who's a Democrat from Missoula, presented a strong argument against the bill and cited an example of a woman who was killed by a person who just left the state hospital and was able to buy a gun. In response to that, Senator John Fuller, a Kalispell Republican, said that Boldman's comments were 'histrionics'. And then Senator Cora Neumann, a Bozeman Democrat got up quickly after that and pressed Fuller on how he was categorizing Boldman's comments. Later in that same Senate floor session, Senator Daniel Zolnikoff, who's married to Representative Katie Zolnikoff, who's a Republican in leadership on the House side, apologized for his caucus as a whole, saying that since getting married he's seen how he and his wife have acted the same in a situation, but she's been called 'emotional' for how she responds and he's deemed 'passionate' instead. Fuller later said that if someone took his comment to be offensive, he apologized, but that he felt there was nothing wrong with being described as 'dramatic' or 'excitable'.
After that, Senator Jacinda Morigeau, a Democrat from Missoula and a freshman lawmaker - so it’s her first time up here experiencing the Capitol, got up and gave a really strong rebuke of the sexism she's seen in the building in her first term. She said she's really upset with how the Senate gets focused on making sure it's following rules, but that there's not the same attention at all to following decorum and preventing or calling out sexist comments or interactions when they happen.
I think sexism is something that legislators in this building deal with pretty frequently. And Montana Free Press's Tom Lutey talked to Neumann about this session. She's been limited to her time; how much she can speak about bills saying that she was talking too much. So she started actually timing herself and comparing it with male senators and found that they were able to talk a lot longer without being corrected.
Sally Mauk: It's notable, of course, that over the years, there have been more and more women elected to the Montana legislature, but it's still far from representative of how many women live in Montana. We're not 50-50 representation in the legislature, and maybe that's part of the problem.
Holly Michels: Yeah, Sally, it is definitely a male majority up here, and I think that's something that you hear from a lot of female legislators, that they'd like their ranks to increase.
Sally Mauk: Holly, how close are we to the end?
Holly Michels: Not as close as I think anybody up here would like to be. We need to see the budget still clear, which we talked about earlier, that needs to get through the House. Once that is done, we can see attempts to sine die, which is the motion that ends the whole thing up here. But we still have not seen a deal struck on property taxes. So we might see the budget stalled until there's some sort of property tax deal to make sure that that actually gets addressed this session. There's a looming debate over these sort of mega trust bills that representative Llew Jones, a Conrad Republican, who's kind of the main budget guru up here is trying to advance late in the session now. So there's really big things in play, but the latest they can go, at least on the last calendar I've seen, is May 5th. I don't think anybody wants to be here that long, but hopefully coming days or the next week or so, the final details will be hammered out.
Sally Mauk: All right, well, Holly and Lee, we are out of time this week. We'll talk again next week, which may or may not be the last week of the session. Thank you.
Tune in during the legislative session online Friday afternoons and on-air Saturdays at 9:44 a.m. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
