Montana Legislature: Where things stand at the session's halfway mark and what comes next

The Montana Legislature is off for most of this week as a sort of intermission to rejuvenate and allow staff to catch up on work and prepare for the final 42 possible days of the 2025 session.

The transmittal break follows a flurry of a few days in which lawmakers debated and then passed or killed hundreds of bills to meet a deadline that requires a proposal without money attached to pass its first chamber lest it be left on the playing field, in most cases.

This year’s recess also allows most lawmakers to take a needed breath after what has been a first half filled with more bills than have been run historically, a few policy surprises, high drama and moments of both inter- and intraparty tension.

“It’s been wild; let’s be candid,” said Senate President Matt Regier, a Kalispell Republican who has been in the center of the storm.

The intrigue started on the first day of this year’s legislative session.

Nine more-moderate Republicans in the 32-member caucus caught GOP leadership off guard when they joined the 18 Democrats in the chamber to scuttle Regier’s preferred rules package.

They formed a coalition of sorts that has at times exercised its power to kill certain leadership-supported bills or to push through bipartisan, moderate legislation that otherwise might have fallen victim to conservatives’ votes on the Senate floor or in the chamber’s more conservative committees.

That coalition also late last week instigated an investigation into Regier, referring a complaint against the Senate president over a contract he signed with an attorney in 2023 to the legislative auditor. The referral means both the current and prior Senate presidents are under ethics investigations heading into the second half of the 69th Montana Legislature.

Ellsworth's ethics probe

The last meeting the Legislature held before the break was a Senate Ethics Committee hearing, in which the senators and special counsel heard from witnesses who were involved in Sen. Jason Ellsworth’s controversial $170,100 contract that he attempted to enter with a business associate using state dollars.

The scrutiny surrounding Ellsworth’s contract has been a key feature of the first half of the session. Multiple ethics committee meetings have been held and the Senate referred a portion of the matter to the Department of Justice.

The debates on the Senate floor about how to handle Ellsworth’s case have produced some of the most fraught accusations of corruption and chicanery the Legislature has seen in years.

Ellsworth is among “The Nine” Republicans who have partnered with Democrats to, at times, flex control of the chamber and throttle down the GOP’s momentum of the ethics probe into the contract dealings of one of their own. That’s left simmering resentment in the upper chamber.

But it’s also hardened that alliance of minority Democrats and the Republicans who, by many accounts, arrived in Helena in January with specific goals in mind, like addressing property taxes and extending Medicaid expansion.

Medicaid expansion sails

With bipartisan backing, lawmakers signed off on the renewal of Montana’s Medicaid expansion program at a breakneck pace compared to its contentious legislative paths in 2015 and 2019.

House Bill 245, introduced by Republican Rep. Ed Buttrey from Great Falls, cleared both chambers and currently awaits a signature from the governor, whose proposed budget funds expansion with work requirements.

Momentum quickly built behind HB 245, which renews the state’s health care program for low income able-bodied adults and removes the policy sunset. It outflanked a competing Democratic proposal that would have made the program easier to access, as well as multiple Republican efforts to phase out or shrink expansion.

Not everyone was happy about it. Some Senate Republicans expressed frustration that the program sailed through the Legislature without a chance to make it work better, they said.

Though HB 245 is passed, it has yet to be signed into law, and significant questions remain about the program’s future in light of the new presidential administration and its ostensible plans to cut federal spending. A change in the federal government’s reimbursement rates or a decision to approve the state’s waiver request to implement work requirements — which it has never approved for Montana — would likely impact how expansion works.

Republican House Majority Leader Steve Fitzpatrick called the quick passage of a bill to renew Medicaid expansion the biggest surprise of the session’s first half.

“I thought that would be ugly. I thought that would be rough, and I figured that would be the last bill to pass the session,” he said. “I’m just blown away that it’s moved as fast as it has and without as much rancor as it has.”

Now that renewal of Medicaid expansion is nearly a done deal, Democratic lawmakers hope to move through a number of bills that would change the way it works — like 12-month continuous eligibility, increased provider rates and improved access to public benefits.

An array of property tax bills

Montana’s legislators often say that they were sent to Helena for the 2025 legislative session to provide property tax relief. Montanans’ property tax bills have risen rapidly over the past few years, putting a financial strain on many residents. The Legislature controls the rates, but there are a number of other factors that contribute to how much homeowners have to pay.

Lawmakers have so far largely agreed to advance all major property tax proposals, which includes one backed by Gov. Greg Gianforte, another from Sen. Carl Glimm, R-Kila, two others from Democrats and some more targeted ones that address agricultural land. There is some skepticism among lawmakers that a lone property tax proposal will not provide enough relief, so there has been energy in the first half of the session to pass multiple relief bills.

The governor said he wanted to see the property tax bill he’s backing, House Bill 231, an exemption for primary home and business owners, on his desk to sign into law by mid-February. It has yet to have its first hearing in the Senate. The property tax proposals that make big changes to the system, like HB 231, need time to be implemented by the Department of Revenue for residents to feel the relief in 2025.

Because the major bills have not been signed into law yet, conversations about a round of rebates to provide some more immediate relief have begun.

In recent weeks, talks around implementing a statewide or county optional sales tax have sprung up in connection with the property tax conversation. Some believe that having another tax will help to offset high property tax rates and capture spending by tourists, but the governor has for years opposed a sales tax.

Attacks on transgender Montanans

Though the unexpected working coalition in the Senate has helped to secure some key bipartisan policy wins, party lines have prevailed on a laundry list of proposals that would curtail transgender rights.

Every Republican in the Legislature voted for House Bill 121, dubbed the “bathroom bill,” and it is now awaiting Gianforte's signature.

At least 20 bills have been introduced and heard by lawmakers that critics say would curb the rights of LGBTQ people in Montana. They would influence practices in doctor’s offices, classrooms, sports fields and more. One would redefine sex as binary in Montana law, and others would affect Montana’s child welfare system.

Most have passed through their respective chambers heading into the transmittal break. But there have been a few notable failures, such as a resolution to urge the United States Supreme Court to overturn its decision legalizing same-sex marriage and an effort to give people the right to sue for damages caused by drag shows.

GOP seeks major changes to judiciary

Another of Republicans’ most closely held priorities this session was enacting a sort of shock-therapy for the judicial branch, where much of their most controversial policy ambitions have been struck down on legal challenges the past few years. The GOP formed a formal working group last year to prepare legislation to that effect; legislative leaders arrived in Helena warning the courts to “buckle up,” while Gianforte largely encouraged lawmakers’ work.

That committee produced 27 bills ahead of the 2025 session and, as of the transmittal break, 10 of them are already dead, while most of the others are still working through the process.

Just one bill has fully passed the Legislature. Gianforte signed House Bill 39, carried by freshman Rep. Tom Millett, R-Marion, on March 4. The bill repealed a law that banned political parties from donating to judicial candidates.

Introducing explicit partisanship into the nonpartisan branch has, without question, been the most enthusiastic policy proposal for Republicans eyeing the judiciary this session, but multiple proposals have failed to actually gain traction. Only one of three bills that would make judicial elections partisan affairs is still in play.

On Thursday, the House voted down House Bill 751, sponsored by Rep. Lukas Schubert, a GOP freshman from Kalispell. This proposal was something of a compromise, limiting the partisan label on judicial elections to the Supreme Court, while others that failed would have cast those labels on judicial candidates at any level of government. And while others sought to tag judges who declined party labels as “undisclosed” on the ballot, a designation some felt had a suspicious connotation, Schubert even offered to support a change to the less implicative “nonpartisan,” even if he didn’t really believe in the amendment.

“If the holdup really is being called ‘undisclosed,’ we can call it nonpartisan if that really is what people are upset about,” Schubert told the House floor on Thursday. “But fundamentally, we’ve got to pass this bill because what we’re seeing is that, regardless of whether you like it or not, the judicial candidates are partisan, you know, everyone at the federal Supreme Court, on the other side of the aisle would agree we have a conservative Supreme Court.”

Still, the chamber rejected it.

“I don’t think that most people want more politics, most people don’t want more partisanship in more institutions,” Rep. Jonathan Karlen, D-Missoula, said during the debate. “In fact when I think of a lot of our partisan institutions, I think most Americans don’t think they’re working all that well.

“I definitely don’t agree with every decision coming out of the U.S. Supreme Court,” Karlen continued. “But you know what I don’t want to do? I don’t want to change the court. I don’t want to fundamentally alter the court. I believe in the institution and I think our job is to protect institutions.”

Climate change and groundwater

Coming into the session, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle said addressing the Montana Supreme Court’s decision last year in the Held v. Montana case would be paramount. The decision found the state, through a “limitation” of the Montana Environmental Policy Act that prohibited the state from analyzing greenhouse gas emissions when considering energy permits, was violating Montanans’ rights to a clean and healthful environment and stable climate system.

Four main bills emerged at the beginning of the session — three from Republicans and one Democratic proposal — that aim to address the decision in various ways, ranging from simply striking the language the court found unconstitutional to making broad changes to MEPA and stripping out some enforcement mechanisms.

The Democratic proposal was quickly tabled in committee, and after the House and Senate gave preliminary approval to the three GOP bills, Department of Environmental Quality Director Sonja Nowakowski endorsed all three.

"We are creating an environment where businesses and industries are drawn to our state, where energy and transmission developers can come to Montana and know what to expect so that we can increase the supply of affordable, reliable energy, with the goal of reducing energy costs for consumers," she said at a Feb. 14 news conference alongside the bills’ sponsors.

House Majority Leader Steve Fitzpatrick, R-Great Falls, said Friday that the House MEPA package, which includes another bill on air quality, is one of the things he’s most proud of from his caucus in the first half of the session.

Fitzpatrick also said one of the more interesting discussions in the session’s second half will be the ongoing work on exempt wells and groundwater, as a handful of complicated but crucial bills seek to outline where new wells will be able to be drilled, how much water can be used in new developments, and attempt to encourage the water rights adjudication process to wrap up.

Sen. Wylie Galt’s Senate Bill 358 is one of the bills that has been a primary vehicle for the discussion. After a committee hearing in February in which more than 100 people testified in opposition, the bill is undergoing amendments.

Galt, whose family was at the center of a Montana Supreme Court decision that has, in part, led to the need for action on exempt wells and their relationship with development, is working with developers, environmental groups, water rights holders and more to find a happy medium.

The House killed another GOP groundwater bill last week but passed a bill from House Speaker Brandon Ler, R-Savage, which seeks to end the water court in just a few years and also contains broad groundwater and well changes. The Senate also last week passed a broadly titled exempt well bill from Kila Republican Sen. Carl Glimm which could turn into another vehicle for the large group of stakeholders involved in the discussions.

Legislative leadership last week was largely noncommittal in terms of supporting any certain proposal, making it clear that the work on the topic is far from done. But they all hinted it is likely to be one of the most important subjects lawmakers need to address in the next 42 days.

Both Ler and Gianforte utilized an adage to describe the work ahead: “Whiskey is for drinking and water’s for fighting.”

What comes next?

The hashing out of the budget and other major spending bills will feature heavily in the coming weeks of the session, as lawmakers consider how to fund schools, increase starting teacher pay, build out more prison beds, improve the state’s behavioral health system, and decide what to do with a surplus of more than $1.5 billion.

Along with figuring out the property tax proposals that will make the finish line, income tax cut debates will be thrust into the spotlight. Ler is carrying a key income tax cut proposal which successfully cleared a committee vote and will next be considered by the appropriations committee.

Cutting income taxes again is one of Gianforte’s top priorities for this session. His office’s approach to that is being carried by Sen. Josh Kassmier, R-Fort Benton, which is awaiting a hearing in the Senate Taxation Committee. If that bill is successful, it will mark the third income tax cut under Gianforte.

The STARS Act, a $100 million proposal to incentivize districts to pay starting teachers more, cleared the House handily and is awaiting consideration in the Senate. There are also multiple bills under consideration that seek to reduce how much parents are paying for child care which lawmakers from both parties say need to pass as part of the body’s hopes to try to cut down on Montanans’ increasing cost of living.

While the spending debate will ramp up in the coming weeks, pitting a host of different financial philosophies against one another, the drama that has dominated the Senate in the first half seems unlikely to go away with two ethics investigations ongoing.

In fact, the Legislature will resume its work when the ethics committee holds another hearing on Ellsworth’s matter on Friday before the entire Senate gavels in for a few minutes later that evening. It will work on Saturday as well, and the House will return on March 17 for the full body to resume its work in earnest.

Gianforte last week praised the Legislature’s progress so far and was asked if he had any words of advice to lawmakers for the session’s second half.

“I would say just keep your eyes on the horizon and keep doing the good work,” he said.