The Session Subscribe: Apple Podcast | Spotify  Week 1 | Sausage Making and an Early GOP Divide EPISODE DESCRIPTIONThe 69th Montana Legislature is officially under way. This week, host Shaylee Ragar and reporters Tom Lutey and Mara Silvers dig in to how the — literal and metaphorical — sausage gets made and what an early GOP divide could mean for the rest of the session.EPISODE TRANSCRIPTShaylee Ragar:  We are one week into the 69th Legislative Session. Lawmakers are working on bill drafts, organizing their committees, and sparring over rules. This is The Session, a look at the policy and politics inside Montana’s state house. I’m Shaylee Ragar, I cover the state house for Montana Public Radio.Tom Lutey:  And I’m Tom Lutey with Montana Free Press.Mara Silvers: And  I’m Mara Silvers with Montana Free Press. Shaylee Ragar:  Hello from the Capitol basement. How does it feel to be back in the Capitol? Mara Silvers:  Hey, Shaylee. Yeah, it feels pretty good, I would say. I just moved in my snack supply that I hope will last me maybe like three weeks is what I’m banking on, and then I’ll have to restock just to carry me through the next 60 days or however long.Shaylee Ragar:  Essential, essential. It’s been a while for you, Tom, but you’re back now. How does it feel? Tom Lutey:  You know, it’s kind of funny. The last time I was here the office that we’re in right now was just being created and it reeked of paint and carpet glue. It was awful–so bad that we had to get relocated.Shaylee Ragar:  But the smell is slightly better?Tom Lutey:  Slightly different. Like an old shoe. Shaylee Ragar:   Let’s dive into our episode for today. I am going to start by telling you guys about an event I went to. I’d love to get your take on it. So it was a sausage making party, I’ll say for new, incoming lawmakers for the session.Mara Silvers: Okay, I’ve heard about this for a long time and I’ve never been, but I’m excited to hear the audio version of it because I think that really will convey some character.Shaylee Ragar: Yeah, I hadn’t been either. So Jon Bennion, who’s a former Deputy Attorney General, he’s an attorney in Clancy. He has been putting this on now, this is his fourth session. Mara Silvers:  And he’s a current lobbyist, right? Shaylee Ragar:  Yes, he is a current lobbyist and he likes to get lawmakers together and he wants the message to be a unifying message.Jon Bennion: “T he thing about sausage is that it is a team effort.” Shaylee Ragar:  Let’s get together, let’s do something together. And then there’s a bit of a pun. So you know how people say, ‘you don’t want to know how the sausage is made’  and people say that about lawmaking, right? Jon Bennion: “ You all are about to undertake one of the biggest team efforts And that is how to run a state.”Shaylee Ragar:  The message that Bennion wants to send is, you guys are gonna have to work together for the next 90 days. So let’s start before day one and learn how to do that. So, I mean, they put rubber gloves on, they start–Mara Silvers: Oh, it’s literal. This is really literal. Oh man.Shaylee Ragar: Two meat grinders and probably 20 lawmakers  gather around and work together to mush up the meat, put it in the meat grinder, and they invite legislators who have done it before, like Republican, Senator Denley Loge was there and he, he’s done it several times, so he was kind of helping the others through the process. Denley Loge: “The idea is to meet everybody, work together, get a good, friendly relationship. So that you can work on that cooperation for the legislative session.”Shaylee Ragar:  And then they invite new people to like I talked with Representative Melody Cunningham from Missoula…Mara Silvers: And a Democrat. Shaylee Ragar: A Democrat, yes, about how it felt to be there. Melody Cunningham: “ I think it’s going really well. I think people are mingling really well and doing something that most of us have never done before, which is true for us as freshmen legislators as well.  And so I think it’s a good metaphor for what we’re walking into.”Shaylee Ragar:  And they love it. They have so much fun. Mara Silvers:  Yeah, it’s interesting to kind of think about the people who are there, because they might come back for several sessions. This might be their first session, and this might be the first place where they’re forging some of those friendships or relationships that do last them a long time. But at this point, they’re all bright eyed and bushy tailed and they’re not as battle worn as some of the other people who have been in the building for many, many cycles.Shaylee Ragar:  Totally. This event was the Sunday before the Monday of day one of the session. So they did get in there early. They want to start off on the right foot. Another big part of the first week of session is there is so much ceremony.Shaylee Ragar:  I think that’s another way they try to get lawmakers excited about the session, to get them excited about their roles and policymaking. They have these ceremonies to swear in. They do a ceremony to let the other chamber know that they’re organized and ready for business.  There’s a lot of speeches about how great the session is going to be and how much good they’re going to do.  Tom, how long would you say that feeling lasted in the Capitol? Tom Lutey:  Fifteen minutes. Right? 15 minutes. We were on the Senate floor on Monday when the members of the Executive Branch Review Committee successfully made an amendment to rules that demoted the committee to an on-call basis.It had previously been something that was going to meet regularly and, while they were at it, also assigned themselves to other committees, and it passed. Executive branch review, I think, in sort of the rough outline that they provided, was supposed to deal with red tape bills. So, the administration bills that they want to cut regulations.Mara Silvers:  Which have previously been heard by other committees. Tom Lutey:  Oh, always, always. And then confirmations.Mara Silvers:  There was this committee, a new committee, that didn’t have a very clearly defined purpose called the ‘executive review committee’ that its members voted to kind of sideline it.Tom Lutey:  It shut things down for the week. Once Senate leadership was confronted with reassigning members from that committee to other committees they basically cleared the agendas of their Senate committees. We didn’t have Senate calendars from Tuesday forward.Shaylee Ragar:  Okay. So Republicans have a majority in the Senate. Tom Lutey: Yes, they do. Shaylee Ragar: Like you were saying, a few Republicans joined Democrats on that vote.Tom Lutey:  Right. Shaylee Ragar: So what does that tell you? Tom Lutey:  Well, what it tells me really is in spite of the fact that they only really have 18 members in the Senate, Democrats, when the piece is aligned correctly, have opportunities to kind of steer the ship.And then, the other part about it is too, we do see a little bit of inter party fighting among the Republicans that really sort of boiled over in part because Democrats became sucked into it. Shaylee Ragar:  There’s definitely a lot of chatter around the Capitol that a faction like this in the Senate could make or break a policy like Medicaid expansion, which will be a huge debate this session. Mara, you know about this. Give us a refresher about what is coming.Mara Silvers:  So as a lot of listeners might know, Medicaid expansion is  the phrase that refers to part of the larger Medicaid program, but specifically the part that covers low income adults between the ages of 18 and 65. That part of the Medicaid program is up for renewal this year in Montana and lawmakers have really sharply diverging opinions about whether the state should keep it going and I think the general logic in the building is that the margins for Republican support for Medicaid expansion are greater in the House than they are in the Senate, that the Senate is a pretty tight vote.So to your point, this potential faction or the way that Democrats can start to work with Republican lawmakers is a bit of a show of force early on in the session. And I do think people are thinking about Medicaid expansion as well as other issues. But I think it’s also safe to say that this vote breakdown trickles down to the committee level.So everything that Tom’s been talking about here, these policies, and there are going to be many different proposals on Medicaid expansion, all have to go through committee first. And if there is a committee that reshuffles slightly and a couple votes change, that could be the difference between a policy getting really hung up or sidelined or killed completely.Shaylee Ragar:  Yeah, that’s where these rules really come into play if they’re impacting if a policy can get out of committee or how tough a committee might be on a certain policy. Mara, I want to touch on, you mentioned many versions of Medicaid expansion. I heard Senate President Regier say that there were five Medicaid expansion bills floating around right now.I think it’s interesting to think about, we don’t know how a Republican faction might support one or the other. There’s all these different bills floating around. What’s your take on these various bills? Mara Silvers:  I would say that if we only see five Medicaid expansion bills come through the session, I will be shocked that’s at a minimum, but to your point Medicaid expansion has had historically bipartisan support in Montana.That’s how it has passed the last two times. Governor Greg Gianforte, a Republican, has said that he supports some version of the program, maybe with some new infrastructure and guidelines around work requirements and things like that, but this is something that has passed and exists because of Republican support in Montana.But that doesn’t mean that it’s going to be a cut and dry issue. I think it’s safe to say that the Republican caucus is deeply divided on Medicaid expansion both in the House and in the Senate.Shaylee Ragar:  And they could take different approaches, right? What could those approaches look like to Medicaid expansion?Mara Silvers:  I’ve generally been thinking about these bill categories in two categories, three different forms. There are the bills that would keep the program generally the same, but just renew it for another round. There are the bills that would tweak it slightly, you know, get in there and start to actually make some real changes, either about how somebody qualifies to be on the program or work requirements or things like that. And then there are the bills that would end it completely. They would either phase it out slowly, starting later this year or over a longer amount of time. So, we’re seeing bill drafts that go in each of those buckets.Again, we don’t know very much about all of those proposals. Many of them haven’t been drafted yet. And with the delays that we’ve seen on the Senate side because of all this rule fighting, we might not start to see policies come through the Senate until late this week or maybe next week. So everything is a little up in the air right now.Shaylee Ragar:  That’s a good point, Mara. We’re kind of going to be waiting on pins and needles to see some of these bills come out, and we will be watching for them. I think that’s where we’ll end it for today. Before we go, I want to ask you guys, what was a moment that stood out to you in this last week? Tom Lutey:  I was outside on the sidewalk for the inauguration ceremonies and I happened to see an attendee walking down a very slick sidewalk rather gingerly and he commented that the legislature needed to appropriate more money for salt.Mara Silvers: Well, as we’re kind of talking about lawmakers getting up and running, I think that we just have to be humble and say that we are also getting up and running, and we’re learning new infrastructure about how the session is going to operate this year, including some changes to the legislature’s website that all the reporters are painstakingly trying to figure out.So the learning curve has been steep, but Shaylee, you and I, and another colleague, Holly Michels sat down one of these nights this past week and really just tried to figure out how to understand which bills are going to be heard when. And that was some homework that we weren’t expecting, but hopefully it sets us up for success and we were better able to keep our listeners up to speed.Shaylee Ragar:   That’s my favorite part of the start of the session. So I normally work from home and I don’t see people unless there’s a press conference to go to and it’s like coming back to the first day of school and all the reporters are in the basement and we get together and we commiserate and it’s lovely. Mara Silvers:  Yeah, we all had to go buy fancy new clothes, we’re figuring out what fits. Shaylee Ragar: And snacks!  This has been The Session, a preview of the policy and politics inside the Montana State House. Thanks for joining, guys. The post The Session:  Week 1 | Sausage Making and an Early GOP Divide appeared first on Montana Free Press.