Daines not representing Montana values

In 2014, a large majority of Montana voters cast their votes for Steve Daines to be our U.S. Senator. That was done primarily with the belief that he embodied and promised to protect the things that we in Montana held dear. This was mart of his message to the people of Montana as he marched around our great state asking for our vote. It worked and Sen. Daines won easily in all but a few of our large cities.

In the two years he has served as our junior senator, he has served his conservative base in a fashion that one could expect, and we sanctioned with our vote for him. In the last month, he has failed to live up to his promise to protect Montanans’ values.

The vast majority of Montana is rural and those rural areas voted for him in outsized numbers. The heart of most of those rural areas are the small, rural public schools that are the lifeblood and cultural centers of these rural areas.

When President Trump selected Betsy DeVos to be the secretary of education, he put Montana and its rural way of life at risk. As information about DeVos became available and she testified in her confirmation hearing, it became clear she was totally unprepared and uniquely unqualified for serve as secretary of education. Yes, she supports local control and that is something most of us can get behind, but she also wants to pull large amounts of funding from our public schools and create vouchers for school choice. in 90 percent of Montana, school choice is not an option and never will be. If that money is removed from public schools, it will force increased mill levies at the local area, increasing taxes for most Montanans or force a continuation of school consolidation that will forever alter the culture of many of our rural conservative communities.

Sen. Daines supports this voucher system, maybe because of his interest in the Petra Academy in the Bozeman area that he and his friend Greg Gianforte so strongly support and would most undoubtedly receive voucher money. He, however, pledged to represent Montana values above all else, and thousands of Montanans called and asked him to vote no on the DeVos nomination and only a few asked him to support her. He voted for DeVos any against the best interests of rural Montanans, the very people who sent him to Washington with the promise to represent their views. His and President Trump’s needs were more important to him than his promise to Montana.

The same day that Daines voted for DeVos, he helped to diminish the Constitution by serving as lap boy for the Republican majority leader by curtailing freedom of speech in the U.S. Senate by refusing to let another senator offer debate on the senate floor. This does not represent the values of Montana.

In a letter to me sent Jan. 30, 2017, Daines thanked me for contacting him ad reminding be that his “number one priority in the Senate is to represent the values and interests of the people of Montana.” I question the fidelity of that statement.

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Dennis Kuntz is a Havre resident.