Ronning stumps for Congress at Pasma-Peck Dinner

Democrat and former Billings City Councilperson Penny Ronning, running against incumbent Republican Matt Rosendale and independent Gary Buchanan in the race for the Eastern District of Montana's seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, came to Havre this weekend to speak at this year's Pasma-Pack Dinner, organized by the Hill County Democratic Central Committee.

Committee Chair Lindsey Ratliff introduced Ronning as an admirable public servant and someone who will represent the interests of everyone in the district, as well as someone with a particularly impressive history of advocacy for Native American reservations in Montana.

Ronning said she grew up in Billings and was the proud daughter of a long-time federal employee, primarily with the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs.

She said the government isn't an entity separate from the people it governs, but something made up of many of those people, and she learned that at an early age.

She said she was a child who was truly "raised by a village" and many of the people in her family are Native Americans, so effectively representing the interests of Montana's reservations is a passion of hers.

Another passion, Ronning said, is combatting human trafficking, a cause she's been working to advance for years through legislation and the creation of task forces, including one she set up with a partner in 2016 that has since grown into the biggest in the state.

She said their partnership wrote two major pieces of legislation that made it through a Republican-dominated Montana Legislature, including one that provided another $500,000 for more state agents to combat human trafficking.

She also talked about energy, saying her home of Billings is among 120 cities in the U.S. leading the way on energy conservation, which she is very proud of.

Ronning said it's important to talk about national and state issues like this because, contrary to what it may seem like sometimes, these policies play out on the local level, and their effects, good or bad, need to be observed with that in mind.

When the subject turned to her campaign itself, she said she was motivated to run after seeing the consequences of GOP leadership in the closing years of the Donald Trump administration.

She said she was at the first impeachment trial of the then-president and saw GOP senators who either didn't show up or made a mockery of the proceeding, something that required the utmost seriousness given the gravity of the charges.

This kind of leadership, she said, has consequences, consequences that were seen in January of 2021.

"What I saw that day was moral decay in suits," Ronning said. "One year later, that moral decay returned to the White House, breaking windows, beating police officers, and hunting the very people that were in that building a year ago."

When she saw that, she said, she knew she was going to run, and that she was going to run against Rosendale.

While on the subject of her campaign, she said she does support campaign finance reform and believes that, in a state of around a million people, it shouldn't cost a million dollars to run for office.

Ronning said politics needs to get back to a place where votes are earned, not bought.

After discussing the campaign she said she wanted to speak not just for herself, but on behalf of the Montana Democratic party.

She said "dark days" have returned to the U.S. with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which is just the first step in an ongoing assault against the rights of people across the U.S., their right to love who they like, to health care, to a living wage, collective bargaining, education and even their right to vote.

"They came for our reproductive rights and they are coming for more," she said.

Ronning said the national GOP has made an active effort in the last six years to take over school boards, commissions and take every bit of local government influence they can influence policy from the ground up, and Democrats must fight back for the sake of the people who make life in this country possible.

"The people who grow our food don't have enough money to put food on their own table," she said.

As critical as it is to unseat Rosendale, she said, she and the party believe they can do so much more than get rid of a bad legislator, they can work toward a country and economy that looks out for the interests of the working class and the shareholders, one that allows diverse voices to be heard and listened to.