Republicans in the Montana legislature proposed six bills related to school choice during the 2015 session, and five of them died in committee or were vetoed. The sixth, SB 410, became law by default ten days after it reached Governor Bullock’s desk, where it languished unsigned for the maximum period prescribed by the state constitution. And what did this bill, so radioactive that the governor could not acknowledge its existence, actually do? It provided an income tax credit of $150 for donations to private-school scholarship funds. That’s it. But it constituted school choice, and school choice is bad. In this week’s column for the Missoula Independent, we consider whether what such bills symbolize has become more important than what they do. If you still don’t have enough of my voice in your head after that, you can top it off with my review of a standout release from Missoula’s Howardian. And even after all that productivity, we’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links. Not bad for a middle-aged man with multiple undiagnosed illnesses, right?

 

The University of Montana will hold it’s commencement this weekend, sending the class of 2015 out into the world and away from my parking space. For the next three months, Missoula will be that most magical of places: a college town in summer. It’s paradise for me, but for the class of 2015 it is the grim nightmare of adulthood. Fortunately, I have bestowed the benefits of my advanced age upon them in this week’s column for the Missoula Independent. The time for learning things has ended; now is the time for knowing things. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links.

The Montana legislature adjourned its 2015 session last week, three days ahead of schedule. The last joyous spectacle out of Helena was the repeated failure of HB 416, an infrastructure bill that enjoyed bipartisan support but needed 67 votes to pass because it involved bonding. House conservatives shut that one down with a quickness, not so much because they hate sewer and road repairs but because they wanted to finally stop something. As Art Wittich put it to the Billings Gazette:

“Frankly, from a conservative standpoint, it may be the only thing we did in this session. We have virtually lost everything that we came here to accomplish, including truly compromised legislation.”

He was right, finally. Conservatives in Helena started the session with immense power, and they squandered it by systematically opposing compromise within their own faction and from without—much as I predicted. They forced moderate Republicans into a working majority with Democrats, inadvertently creating a legislature more productive and liberal than the one they despised in 2013, when they were weaker.

It’s almost as if ideology were not a substitute for governance. You can read that and other crazy theories in this week’s column for the Missoula Independent, which reaches Combat! blog late today because I spent the morning letting strangers inspect my testicles. We’re still very sick, but it’s not as bad as the first doctor thought. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links and test results.

Fun fact: I’ve been taking 2400mg of ibuprofen a day since January for complications from my vasectomy. On Friday I was supposed to switch to a prescription NSAID, but my doctor forgot to call it in before she left town for the weekend, so I got to experience withdrawal. I don’t know if you’ve ever gone through withdrawal from prescription painkillers, but I have, and I can say that ibuprofen is worse. Hard to know for sure, though, because I also caught the flu. Or maybe it’s strep; I have a sharp pain in my throat that radiates into one ear, and I can’t really talk. My capacity to complain remains undimmed, however, thanks to this blog. Today, that is all it’s good for. We’ll be back tomorrow with something real. Or I will curse God and die. Fifty-fifty, is how it looks at this point.