Daines' position on Blackfoot Clearwater Stewarship Act raises questions
After the votes Sen. Steve Daines has taken this summer, you have to wonder if he actually considers the wants and needs of the people he represents, or if he’s simply using his position to score political points, even if those points shortchange the majorities of people he supposedly represents.
Last month, the Blackfoot Clearwater Stewardship Act received its first-ever vote in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Daines, a member of the committee, could have provided the vote that would have sent the bill to the Senate floor. There’s nothing in the bill he objected to, he said. He even said he liked the bill – as he should, since the bill protects the water quality and fish populations of the Blackfoot River, which is so crucial for the wellbeing of communities up and down the river.
But Daines, nonetheless, cast the deciding vote against it, essentially raising a middle finger to the 83% of Montanans (according to a recent University of Montana poll) who want the bill to become law and to the dozens of people who have worked almost two decades to get this bill passed.
A week later Daines was at it again. This time he joined his Republican colleagues and voted down the PACT Act, which would have expanded medical coverage for millions of veterans exposed to toxic burn pits during their service. He and Sen. Ted Cruz celebrated with a fist bump, demonstrating that he may indeed be as ruthlessly callous as his vote on the bill suggested.
As he admitted, he voted against the PACT Act and risked the lives of countless veterans because he and other Republicans were incensed that Sens. Manchin and Schumer had struck a deal that could raise taxes on him and his ultra-wealthy buddies so we can finally take some much-needed action on climate change. (Under pressure, Sen. Daines changed his vote a week later and the PACT Act passed the Senate.)
His self-centered reasoning on voting against the Blackfoot Clearwater Stewardship Act was similarly shameless. He admitted that he was using the BCSA to ram through Congress his own incredibly unpopular legislation stripping protection from three wilderness study areas. In 2018 and 2019, Daines attempted to do the very same thing with the Yellowstone Gateway Protection Act. Yes, he was willing to risk the health of the Yellowstone River and its businesses for his own pet project of rolling back protections on beloved public lands across the state.
And now he’s doing the same to the Blackfoot River. The pet bill he’s trying to ram through by holding the BCSA hostage would strip protection from three wilderness study areas in western Montana that constitute over 100,000 acres of public lands. If this sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve been here before. In 2017, Daines introduced a bill attacking a number of places around the state also designated as wilderness study areas.
Montanans roundly rejected his anti-public land bill then and reject it now, made painfully clear in the same University of Montana poll, which found a pitiful 6% support for Daines’ efforts to slash protections from wilderness study areas.
If Daines actually respected the voters he was elected to represent, he would start living up to his self-described status as a public lands champion and support popular public lands initiatives like the Blackfoot Clearwater Stewardship Act. Not only is he disrespecting his constituents, he’s also disrespecting the Montana State Legislature.
In the wake of Daines’ failed 2017 bill, the legislature’s Environmental Quality Council spent over a year exploring the best path forward for Montana’s WSAs. During the process, the EQC invited significant public testimony from recreationists, timber industry representatives, conservationists and other stakeholders, the vast majority of whom supported collaboration.
During the process, council members repeatedly expressed a desire for Montana’s congressional delegation to support a collaborative approach to determining the future of WSAs. Indeed, at the end of the process, Daines submitted a letter to the EQC promising to “respect the state legislature’s findings.”
Well, he simply has not done that. He’s done the opposite. Montana and its residents are worse off as a result.
Edward Callaghan is a physician whose family lives in Missoula. They are current stewards of a ranch in the upper Blackfoot Valley.