* It’s striking how quickly Republicans have moved from blaming the last four years on Joe Biden to blaming them on Kamala Harris. It’s as though they have forgotten how limited the powers of the vice president are.
John Nance Garner famously characterized the vice presidency as not worth “a bucket of warm spit,” even though the actual term he used was more scatological. Disparagement of the vice president’s powers go back to our earliest days as a country. When our first vice president, John Adams, wondered how he should be addressed as president of the Senate, Benjamin Franklin suggested, “His superfluous Excellency.” A senator suggested the portly Adams be referred to as “His rotundity.”
* Critics of Harris discount the weakness of her post by calling her the border czar or even the Border Czar. America has no czars. Not even Russia has czars anymore. This antiquated term has pointlessly emerged in popular usage, and it can’t sink too soon into the obscurity it deserves.
* Troy Downing, the Republican candidate for Eastern Montana’s U.S. House seat, seems like an OK guy who, as far as I can tell, has done a good job as state auditor and commissioner of securities and insurance. His opponent, John Driscoll, also seems like a decent guy — perhaps too decent to be in politics — but he is running an underfunded campaign that seems designed to fail.
Here’s what I don’t get. By nearly all accounts, including that of many Republicans, the House under GOP control has been an inept failure, spared from catastrophe only by its inability to get anything done. Only votes from Democrats have kept the government from shutting down altogether.
So how is the solution to that problem electing more Republicans?
* Gov. Greg Gianforte has finally consented to debate his Democratic challenger, Ryan Busse, on Oct. 16 after turning down two earlier proposals. Gianforte’s stated reasons for rejecting the first two were that Busse was not a serious opponent and that Busse had not released his tax returns, which he has now done.
An unstated reason for Gianforte’s reluctance may have been fear. Busse, for many years a successful gun salesman, is quick on his feet. Gianforte is best known nationally for being quick with his fists.
* PolitiFact, a nonpartisan fact-finding website, has rated Facebook ads posted by Sen. Jon Tester, D-Montana, as Mostly False. The ads say that Tester’s Republican opponent, Tim Sheehy, supports banning abortions with no exceptions.
Fair enough. Sheehy has said in public debates that he would allow abortions in cases of rape, incest and the life of the mother. But as usual, Sheehy is vague about details.
Sheehy surely would not allow a teenager to simply walk into an abortion clinic and say, “My stepfather raped me, and I will die if I don’t get an abortion.” He would demand evidence, and that evidence presumably would have to be provided to the government, not to the clinic.
That’s why the Montana Republican Party’s platform plank that calls for a complete ban on all abortions, while cruel, makes sense. Once government is allowed to dig that deeply into medical decisions and people’s private lives, there’s no stop on that slippery slope.
It’s also unclear how willing Sheehy would be buck a re-elected President Trump, whose positions on abortion have covered all conceivable possibilities. He has been staunchly pro-choice, has endorsed criminal punishment for women who get abortions, has taken credit for overturning Roe vs. Wade, has promised to be “great for women and their reproductive rights” and has both endorsed and opposed a measure in Florida to overturn a ban on abortion after six weeks.
In his debate with Harris, he dodged a question on whether he would veto a nationwide ban on abortion, saying that such a measure will never come up. But Dana Milbank points out in his new book that more than half of the House GOP caucus has cosponsored the Life at Conception Act, which would ban abortions from the moment of fertilization.
If Republicans win big in November, would Sheehy stand up against such an act? Would Trump?
For both candidates, vagueness isn’t what they have instead of a position. It is their position.
Between the lines is a weekly column published in the Yellowstone County News by David Crisp. David writes as he sees it from an independent and Democratic perspective.
