House Republicans, led by Speaker Scott Sales, R-Bozeman, assigned themselves a three-vote margin on the House Appropriations Committee, the panel that gets first crack at crafting Montana's two-year, multibillion-dollar state budget.
In the full House, Republicans have a mere one-vote majority, 50-49 over Democrats. Constitution Party Rep. Rick Jore of Ronan, who served as a Republican in the 1995 and 1997 legislative sessions, has said he'll vote with Republicans to elect their top leaders and adopt House rules.
House Minority Leader John Parker, D-Great Falls, said he was disappointed with the three-vote Republican majority on House Appropriations Committee.
“Our legislation is designed to help working families,” he said. “These committees don't reflect the composition of the Legislature, but I'm still hopeful that moderate Republicans will work with us to get things done.”
Democrats have a similar, razor-thin majority in the Senate, with 26 Democrats and 24 Republicans. The Senate had been tied until Sen. Sam Kitzenberg, a moderate Republican who often voted with Democrats, switched parties after the election in November.
Senate Democrats gave themselves a three-vote margin on the Senate Finance and Claims Committee, the Senate panel that deals with the state budget.
Republicans complained that the three-vote margin on the Senate committee gave Democrats too much power and didn't reflect the tight margins of power in the full Senate.
Senate committees are decided by a special Committee on Committees, comprised entirely of members of the majority party.
Both the House speaker and the Senate committee have sole discretion to put as many Democrats or Republicans on each committee as they choose. Traditionally, however, both have built committees that roughly reflect the proportion of party power in the House and Senate.
Sen. Jim Elliott, D-Trout Creek, chairman of the committee, said majority parties awarding themselves a few extras “goes with the territory.”
“It's the right of the majority party to serve the people of Montana in accordance with their principles,” he said.
The Committee on Committees also gave Democrats a two-vote majority on the Senate Judiciary Committee, the panel that considers all new criminal laws.
Elliott said he didn't think those majorities - and the resulting Republican complaints - would make it any more difficult to work with GOP lawmakers.
“If we had any reason to believe that accommodating the Republicans would make it easier for us to work together we would have done that,” he said.
House Democrats earlier this week asked Sales to consider limiting the Republican majority of each committee to one to reflect the close balance of the parties in the whole House. Sales and other Republicans dismissed that idea, saying speakers have always had the power to design committees to their liking and the GOP saw no reason that the 2007 Legislature should be any different.
Sales said Wednesday his choices in the House were influenced, in part, by what Senate Democrats awarded themselves in the Senate.
“I had to do that to match what the Senate (Democrats) did,” Sales said.
“I'm a fiscal conservative and the majority of the Republican side is, too,” he added. “We're certainly going to be taking a hard line at a lot of (Gov. Brian Schweitzer's proposed budget) growth. It's just not realistic.”
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