I will never get tired of this picture of Art Wittich. The 2015 session of the Montana legislature is his time: very conservative Republicans control the House, and they are putting forward all manner of thrilling ideas. Wittich is head of the House Human Services Committee, which last month subpoenaed state aid workers to share anecdotes about fraud and abuse, so you know he’s looking for ways to cut welfare costs. He can have this idea for free: if you want to spend less on welfare, make people pay child support. The majority of TANF recipients are single mothers, and 40% of food stamp beneficiaries in Montana are children of single mothers. Only 41% of single parents receive their legally mandated child support payments each month. That amounts to a massive shift in financial responsibility from parents to the state—not by welfare moms, but by deadbeat dads. Stronger child support enforcement should appeal to both parties: if more single moms actually got their child support, fewer would need welfare to get by. And if there were no financial advantage to abandoning their children, fathers might do it less. What we have here is a moral solution to a budget problem. It supports traditional family structures and saves the state money. Republicans in the Montana legislature should jump on this idea with both feet. You can read about it in this week’s column for the Missoula Independent. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links. In the meantime, consider who is a bigger drain on society: welfare moms or the dudes who left them?

Last week, Republicans in the Montana Senate called an out-of-session meeting of the State Administration and Veterans’ Affairs Committee to figure out what they could do about Jonathan Motl. The Commissioner of Political Practices had just submitted to a district court judge the results of his investigation of Art Wittich, the Senate Majority Leader from Bozeman, who Motl says illegally coordinated with Western Tradition Partnership. You may remember WTP—now called American Tradition Partnership—from this story about a box of incriminating documents found in a Colorado meth house, or this one about how they stopped existing right before a judge fined them $250,000. Or you may be a WTP classicist and remember them from their legal effort to overturn Montana campaign finance laws after Citizens United.

It appears that Wittich remembers them from the time they printed up 13,000 letters with his signature at the bottom. He claims he never coordinated with the super PAC, though, and that Motl is “a partisan hack.” Although the commissioner lacks the power to judge election violations or even bring charges, state senator Dee Brown (R–Hungry Horse) has complained that he is “the jury, the executor, the all-knowing.” Senator Brown was probably thinking of “executioner,” although an executor does implement people’s wills. Maybe the people of Montana should not get rid of their election commissioner immediately after he revealed campaign finance violations committed by the senate majority leader. That’s the gist of my column in the Missoula Independent, which I encourage you to read today instead of a blog post or the Bible. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links.