Session in hindsight: Weary legislators look back with pride and frustration

Rep. Cleve Loney, R-Great Falls, and fellow House members ate pizza as they worked through the dinner hour on the session's final evening. The 2011 Legislature considered more than 1,100 bills over the past four months.

HELENA — Rep. Liz Bangerter has the angular build of a runner. No surprise, the Helena Republican runs and lifts weights to stay in shape. The first-termer came into the Capitol sure that she could keep her feet under her for the full 90 days. She was wrong – sort of.

Rep. Cleve Loney, R-Great Falls, and fellow House members ate pizza as they worked through the dinner hour on the session's final evening. The 2011 Legislature considered more than 1,100 bills over the past four months.

"I think I hit my breaking point somewhere before transmittal," she said. "That's when it really got hard for me." The first night of the halftime break she slept for 16 hours straight.

At session's end, Democrats and Republicans seem to agree on three things: that it was a grueling four months, that they were able to do some good things, and that they will also be haunted by the ghosts of good bills that died.

Bangerter regrets the failure of a $100 million bonding bill to repair some state buildings and build new ones at universities, a new veterans' home in Butte and a state historical museum in Helena. It would have created jobs, she said.

Fellow freshman Rep. Ellie Hill, D-Missoula, also saw that bill's failure as a major loss.

Another thing most lawmakers agreed on was that they hardly ever heard from people who were pleased with their work – only those who were upset.

Bangerter said that every time she checked her email it seemed like there were 20 more venom-filled messages, usually from people she doesn't even represent, telling her she was making a catastrophic mistake on some issue or another.

Bangerter may have drawn more heat than most majority Republicans because she sometimes voted against her party. Still, she and Hill saw the session's outcome from different perspectives.

Hill has a hard time finding successes to trumpet back home. Both agree that great strides were made to strengthen DUI laws with a program to make repeat drunken drivers give twice daily breath samples.

But other than that, Hill has an even harder time listing all of the things she sees as major failures.

The worst of those, she said, was the death of a bill that would have stricken a law that criminalizes homosexuality. Years ago Montana's Supreme Court ruled that the law is unconstitutional, but the Legislature has repeatedly killed any measure to cut it from code.

"The only reason to leave that on the books is just to be cruel," she said.

Bangerter, meanwhile, counts reforming the state's workers' compensation system as a major success. She's also proud of a bill she carried that straightened out a problem within the Department of Corrections that left the state open to hundreds, if not thousands of lawsuits.

The bill allows the department to revoke offenders' suspended sentences the moment it becomes clear they are not complying with the treatment programs that were part of their deals to get reduced sentences.

Most Republicans also count the $3.6 billion budget that reduces general fund spending by 6.5 percent as a win. Most Democrats see it as a loss, saying it doesn't give enough to higher education and programs that help Montana's poor, old and ill.

Rep. Krayton Kerns, R-Laurel, sees it as a loss because it doesn't cut enough.

"I do still maintain that there is a huge financial reckoning coming on the federal level and the state level," he said. "And this budget does not prepare us for that inevitability."

Kerns, who wears a teapot pin on the lapel of his jacket, came into the session eager to expand state's rights, cut spending and tell the feds to butt out of Montana business with measures to nullify federal law.

But though Republicans held solid majorities in both chambers, and a historic 68-32 one in the House, Kerns said the conservative Tea Party's results this session could be summed up in one word: "Poor."

Tea party Republicans argued in vain for bills to nullify federal health care reform and the federal Endangered Species Act and to assert Montana's right to overrule federal law. However, Kerns said he thinks those efforts drew more attention to conservative causes and will rally more folks to the effort.

Hill disagreed. "I hope that this 62nd session went so far off the rails that we won't see much of the tea party in the 63rd," she said.

She later added that she intends to come back to the Capitol in 2013 and bring more Democrats with her.

No single lawmaker got exactly or everything they wanted, and many left with more frustration than achievements. But as they say in football, most will return home having left everything on the field.

"At this stage of the game you just feel like, 'Man, oh man, did we just waste a winter?'" Kerns said. "But you enter the battle anyway."

(Reporter Cody Bloomsburg can be reached at (208) 816-0809 or by e-mail at [email protected].)