Please follow us on X and Telegram

By now, Montana’s conservative majority ought to be getting pretty upset.  Every two years, we elect a legislature that is overwhelmingly Republican, and every Republican claims to be conservative.  They wouldn’t be elected any other way.  And yet, every two years, the government continues to grow, becoming more bureaucratic, more autocratic, and intervening more in our lives. 

In the last session, Republicans outnumbered Democrats, 90 to 60.  We thought we had elected a conservative legislature.  Instead, we got a controlling majority of spendthrift busybodies who showed no faith in freedom and no more imagination than to create one more government program. More licensing.  More regulating.  More subsidies.  More penalties.  More favors.  More tax shifting.  More spending.  More government.  The conservative philosophy of limited government turned upside down and inside out.

Sixty Democrats cannot accomplish this on their own.  Yes, Democrats will fight every conservative proposal tooth and nail.  They are big-government thinkers with big-government solutions for everything.  They cannot think outside of a statist box, and will reflexively oppose anything that restricts the power, influence, and reach of the government god. 

But 60 of 150 does not a majority make. Their collectivist cake can only be baked with healthy measures of fakes, fools, and counterfeit conservatives who regularly cross over to the Democrat side.  There is no similar migration in the opposite direction – ever.  Republicans break.  Democrats don’t.

The well-worn explanation is that Republicans are by nature individualistic “independent thinkers” who won’t be led sheep-like by their leadership.  These Republicans-on-roller-skates assert that they are just as conservative, but are more “effective” and practical-minded about getting things done.  This is nonsense.  If they aligned with their party’s conservative majority, they’d be getting just as much done, but the end product would be liberty-minded legislation and smaller government. 

The simple truth is that a shocking number of Republican legislators have probably never read the Constitution and have never thought deeply about conservative philosophy and the role of government in a free society.  They may say, for example, that they disdain welfare, yet have no problem propping up farmers or failing businesses with our tax dollars. They know they don’t want men in women’s locker rooms, but they’re not sure where they want government in our daily lives.  Most have never fully understood how freedom works, can’t explain it, and can’t defend it.  Too abstract.  It’s much easier to just vote for another “government solution,” rather than trusting in free people to blaze their own trail.

Republican primary voters have a repair job to do, and it won’t be easy.  Who are the reliable conservatives and who are the pretenders?  Two factors obscure our vision:

 (1) Montana’s news media repeatedly label conservative Republicans as “ultras” and “hardliners” and liberal Republicans as “moderates.”  (No similar descriptors are used for Democrats.)  Principled conservatives are always characterized as unreasonable.

  (2) There is a massive, leftist-funded deception campaign going on within the Republican Party, flipping the term conservative on its head, and telling us the anti-conservatives are in fact the conservatives.  Self-dealing big government Republican Llew Jones and the billionaire-created Conservatives4MT PAC are behind most of this, exemplified by the slick “Montana Conservative Index,” which is intentionally designed to give all the conservative GOP legislators C and D grades, and all the liberal-leaning Republicans A’s and B’s.

Several accurate legislative scorecards are available that blow Llew’s trickery out of the water – Young Americans For Liberty’s, for example.  (MCA’s is still pending.)  And yet, Rep Jones and his government solutions caucus have actually done us a huge favor.  My first recommendation is to use his so-called Conservative Index by simply turning it right side up.  Support all the Republicans with the Cs and Ds as the proven conservatives and vote against all of the A’s and most of the B’s.  With non-incumbent candidates, check out the endorsement lists of groups like Montanans for Limited Government and Montana Conservative Alliance.  

Other good sources of information include the Montana Sentinel and the state party itself, which have exposed the massive amounts of money flowing from far-left, Democrat PACs to certain GOP candidates.  Bottom line: GOP primary voters need to be extremely discerning, or we will keep making the same old mistakes with the same old results.  How many more “practical conservatism” legislative sessions can we tolerate?  Will we finally say we’ve had enough?

‘NO AD’ subscription for CDM!  Sign up here and support real investigative journalism and help save the republic!