As Montana legislators enter their final scheduled week of the 2007 session, let us make something clear on behalf of our 940,000-plus neighbors:
This isn't a game of Texas Hold 'Em. It's not chess or another board game. Legislators glibly talk about their “end game,” but it's people's lives and livelihoods they're talking about.
This legislative session already has set the standard for extreme partisanship. Never in our memory have so many pieces of legislation passed or failed on strict party-line votes. Interestingly, we also can't remember when a session of the Legislature stimulated fewer letters to the editor in the Missoulian. That may not be an absolute measure of anything, but it seems an interesting indicator. However invigorating politicians find it, all that political maneuvering in Helena this winter and spring has been somewhat less than galvanizing to the folks back home.
The 2007 Legislature inherited great opportunity. Legislators rolled into Helena in January to find a billion-dollar projected surplus in the state treasury. Ample money doesn't solve every problem, but it never hurts. It's significant that the surplus comes amid significant national and regional economic prosperity following an era of significant tax cuts in Montana and nationally. While it's possible to debate the extent to which recent economic growth is attributable to tax cuts, we can at least agree that Montana's historic surplus has nothing to do with raising anybody's taxes. This is a prosperity dividend.
Because of that, the public knows that lawmakers have every ability to meet most of their needs and reasonable expectations - including meaningful improvements in vital services as well as tax relief and investments in the future. The public has every reason to expect this Legislature to make decisions that will spread the benefits of the current prosperity equitably and do so in a sustainable way.
And Montanans have every reason to demand that public interests will trump political party interests every time they conflict.
At the end of the day, at the end of the 2007 legislative session, what's going to matter isn't which party emerges with the most complete set of talking points for the next election campaign. What's going to matter is whether legislators seized or squandered the historic opportunity before them.
Republicans and Democrats might see the legislative session as a contest and bills and budgets as game pieces, but it's our lives they're playing with. It'll be a losing game if Montanans don't wind up feeling like winners.
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