Senate leader: GOP undermined by rift in its own ranks

Montana Senate Majority Leader Art Wittich thinks Republicans were undermined by a rift among their own ranks in this year’s legislative session, and he predicts the divide will emerge into a wider debate in months to come.

“I think Republicans need to have a discussion about what it means to be a Republican,” said Wittich, a Bozeman attorney who is in Kalispell to address the Flathead County Republican Central Committee today.

Wittich was clearly rankled by a group of GOP senators who referred to themselves as “Responsible Republicans,” a group that includes Sen. Bruce Tutvedt, R-Kalispell.

Wittich refers to them as “status quo spenders” and “adjective Republicans” who sided with Democrats on multiple issues of importance. 

As a result, Wittich said, the Republican-controlled Legislature ended up passing a budget that will increase spending by 13 percent over the next two years, or about three times more than the state’s annual economic growth.

With the budget and other legislation, Wittich said the dissenting senators attempted to appease Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock.

“We were never in a position to negotiate with the governor because he didn’t need to,” Wittich said, referring to the Senate Republican leadership and most of the chamber’s GOP caucus. “He was negotiating with the cross-overs and the Democrats.”

Known as a conservative voice in the Legislature, Wittich said he introduced two income tax reduction bills, one of which died in the Senate Taxation Committee, chaired by Tutvedt. The other was vetoed by Bullock.

He said conservatives tried to champion five “school choice” bills that died in the Senate Education Committee, a panel that includes “responsible Republican” Sens. Jim Peterson, Llew Jones and Taylor Brown.

One bill that would have allowed for the creation of charter schools was “extremely weakened” with the justification that it might be more acceptable to Bullock, Wittich said, but the governor still vetoed it.

There was an income tax simplification bill, sponsored by Tutvedt, that was amended in the House to include income tax rate reductions.  When the bill came back to the Senate, those amendments were stripped from it, again with the rationale that it would be more palatable to Bullock.

“You know what? He didn’t sign it anyway,” Wittich said. “He vetoed it.”

Wittich claims that “the big winners” from the session were public sector unions, which got raises and pension fund “bailouts” without any reforms, such as requiring new public employees to go to a defined contribution system similar to 401(k) plans. The losers, he said, were taxpayers and people who believe in limited government.

The divides over issues in the Senate will emerge as a topic at next week’s state Republican convention in Bozeman, and in next year’s primary election, Wittich predicts.

If he chooses to seek re-election in 2014, he is expecting a primary challenger supported by a moderate Republican political action committee called MTBase.

The main success for fiscal conservatives was that Medicaid expansion was rejected, said Wittich, who regards adding 70,000 people to Montana Medicaid amounts to a dangerous expansion of the welfare state because it would provide health care to able-bodied but unemployed adults who otherwise might seek work to obtain health-care coverage.

He contends that federal support for the expansion would gradually contract, leaving state taxpayers on the hook. He said the state’s current share for Medicaid is about 35 percent, but if it was eventually obligated to pay that share for people enrolled under the expansion, it would amount to about $350 million annually. And that would require an income tax increase of about 40 percent.

“That’s what this means,” said Wittich, who believes the issue of Medicaid expansion is far from over. 

“There will be an awful lot of pressure to expand Medicaid either through a special session or by an initiative,” he said.