Opinion: Will we hold Steve Daines to account? – Char-Koosta News

By Thompson Smith

In my recent tenure as Chair of the Flathead Basin Commission, I wrote several opinion pieces raising concerns about Steve Bullocks administration. Yet Im urging you to vote for the Governor and send Senator Daines packing. Heres why.

Daines has long portrayed himself as what most Montanans want: reasonable, fair, a problem solver. But his actions and words, now illuminated by the rush to confirm Amy Barrett to the Supreme Court, have shattered that illusion.

Daines did recently join Sen. Tester in supporting the Great Outdoors Act. Unfortunately, thats far outweighed by Dainess support for more than 100 policy and regulatory changes that will leave future generations with dirtier air, dirtier water, and a poorer environment, including gutting the Clear Water Act, weakening restrictions on toxic air pollutants including mercury, hamstringing the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act, allowing coal corporations to dump waste into streams, and dismantling the international effort to address the climate crisis.

Daines has been similarly supportive or silent on a many of Trumps worst actions and statements on matters of civil rights and social justice, the rule of law, and national security. That includes Trumps legitimization of white supremacism and racist hatred, the 26 public accusations of Trumps sexual misconduct, separating immigrant toddlers and infants from their parents and putting them in cages, firing Inspectors General and US attorneys who were investigating him, siding with Putin against US intelligence, and referring to soldiers whove given their lives as suckers and losers. Trump seeks power by dividing our country rather than uniting it; Daines has nothing to say.

On health care, the record is even worse. Daines blames COVID-19 solely on China, omitting the epic incompetence and deceit in the White House that has led to the greatest loss of American life since World War II. More than 215,000 of our fellow citizens have now perished, with 389,000 deaths projected by February 1. We have 4 percent of the worlds population, but 19 percent of the deaths.

Daines voted three times to repeal the Affordable Care Act, when there was no replacement healthcare plan and therefore no way to deliver affordable insurance or continue protecting those of us with preexisting conditions. Eleven years after the ACAs passage, theres still no Republican plan.

Which returns us to the matter of the Supreme Court, since a Justice Barrett might well rule against the ACA. Daines has already helped Mitch McConnell pack the courts with lifetime appointments for more than two hundred judges aligned with the Federalist Society, a special interest group funded by some $250 million in untraceable dark money thats created a pipeline of extremist judges, hostile to restrictions on corporate power, civil rights for common citizens, and environmental protection.

In February 2016, Antonin Scalia died, nearly nine months before the election. President Obama nominated Judge Merrick Garland. The Constitution obligates the Senate to consider a Presidents nominee, but Daines followed Mitch McConnells orders by refusing to even meet with the universally respected judge. Daines presented his brazen inaction as based not on the brutal fact that Republicans held power as the majority, but rather on a supposed ethical commitment to democracy, saying the Senate should not act until the American people elect a new President and have their voices heard.

We are now less than three weeks from the next election. Thousands of Montanans and millions of Americans have already cast their ballots. But Daines now says Republicans should proceed, simply because they can. Daines trumpeted principles when they served his political ends, and shamelessly abandoned them when they became inconvenient.

Perhaps the Senate should adopt a simple rule for when a nomination is too close to an election: if its before party conventions in July-August, the Senate can proceed; if its after the conventions, the Senate should hold off until the following February. Lets call it the Abraham Lincoln rule. When Chief Justice Roger Taney died on October 12, 1864, Lincoln deferred nominating a replacement until after the election so that the next President, with a new mandate, could do it.

156 years later to the day on October 12, 2020 Senate Judiciary Committee chair Lindsay Graham bulldozed ahead with the first day of hearings for a nominee from the far-right wing of the American legal spectrum. Like Daines, Graham hopes well forget his previous words: If theres a Republican president in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say Lindsey Graham said, Lets let the next president, whoever it might be, make that nomination. And you could use my words against me, and youd be absolutely right.

Well, Lindsay and Steve, we do remember your words, and we are holding them against you, and we are absolutely right to do so. Thats why were voting instead for Governor Bullock.

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Opinion: Will we hold Steve Daines to account? - Char-Koosta News