HELENA – Frank Garner arrived in Helena with the same statesmanlike principles intact that characterized his campaign for a seat in the state House of Representatives – standing up for his hometown constituency, looking to his colleagues for guidance while maintaining his streak of independence and setting out to accomplish the task voters assigned him.
But the loose threads of a legislative campaign, designed to win, not earn, votes, can often unravel when a freshman legislator arrives at the Capitol and the crash course in citizen lawmaking begins in earnest.
“There are a lot of competing interests when you have four months, 1,800 bill drafts, 100 different personalities representing different constituencies, lobbyists and other influencers, and a lot of really long days,” Garner said recently, describing the legislative process in an interview at the Capitol during the waning days of the 2015 Montana Legislature. “But we are supposed to come here to vigorously debate the issues of the state.”
Garner, the former Kalispell police chief, managed to do just that while sacrificing neither the support of his constituents nor the respect of his fellow lawmakers, even as he rankled some members of his caucus by joining Democrats and a bloc of moderate Republicans to help usher one of the session’s major pieces of legislation through the House by a single vote and, ultimately, see it passed into law.
“Frank Garner is a principled man, and while I don’t always agree with him, he earned my respect this session,” said Mike Cuffe, R-Eureka, a veteran lawmaker who sat beside Garner on the House floor this session and voted against him on Senate Bill 289, or the Montana Disclose Act.
And while Garner is no rogue Republican – he voted solidly with House Republicans against all 74 amendments that Democrats tried to make to House Bill 2, the state budget – his willingness to buck party lines was never more evident than in his support for campaign finance reform, or shedding sunlight on so-called dark money.
Senate Bill 289 was sponsored by Republican Sen. Duane Ankney of Colstrip on behalf of Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock, who made campaign disclosure a top priority. It requires “dark money” groups, known for their anonymous attack mailers, to report all of their donors and expenditures in political campaigns, just as candidates and other political committees must do.
Garner learned about the effects of dark money the hard way, when, without bothering to notify him, Americans for Prosperity-Montana sent critical postcards attacking Garner’s stance on Medicaid expansion, and notifying members of his legislative district of a Feb. 5 town hall meeting in the lawmaker’s hometown of Kalispell.
He found out about the event from a Capitol reporter on the House floor, and decided to make an impromptu, eight-hour round trip drive from Helena to Kalispell to attend the meeting, despite not receiving an invitation.
AFP-Montana is part of the conservative political organization founded by billionaires David and Charles Koch of Wichita, Kansas, and at the meeting Garner asked why, if the group’s intent was to influence state policy, had they taken aim at him through a blitz of anonymous attack mailers rather than simply ask him to the table for discourse.
The reason, explained Zach Lahn, state director for the Montana chapter of Americans for Prosperity (AFP), is that Garner refused to sign the group’s blanket pledge card in opposition to Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, a stunt the group had performed on other Republican lawmakers whose views on Medicaid reform didn’t align with the hard-right faction.
Garner, who did not support full Medicaid expansion this session but ultimately supported a compromise bill that expands coverage to the working poor, wasn’t satisfied with AFP’s answer. And while he hadn’t intended to support the dark money bill – it wasn’t even on his radar as the session got underway – he decided on the late-night drive back to Helena to take a stand.
“I’d never been exposed to it before, and after being exposed to it I saw the need for more disclosure. People have the right to know who is trying to influence their vote,” Garner said.
Ankney, the bill’s sponsor, asked Garner to carry the bill in the House, and after considering the ramifications from fellow representatives in his caucus, he agreed, notifying the GOP House leaders of his intention.
“It’s not often that they take a big bill like this and give it to a freshman to carry it,” Garner said. “As a new guy, it’s not easy to make those choices when not everybody in the caucus agrees. But my motto has been putting my constituents first, and sometimes it’s possible to do that without any pushback, and sometimes it’s not.”
During the debate, Garner defected from the ranks of Republican leadership and the majority of the caucus to argue for the measure, at several points holding up a Flathead Beacon illustration of marionette strings attached to the Capitol building to demonstrate the powerful influence of outside interest groups, saying Montanans deserve to know the identity of “the hands on the puppet strings.”
Garner repeatedly stood up on the floor and resisted the dozen Republican-introduced amendments to dilute the measure, standing firm even as he described it as a difficult stance.
“This is not an easy thing to do, to stand up in front of my caucus today in disagreement with some of the people I have such great respect for. But I believe this is right. That is the legacy I want to leave, one of fairness, one of disclosure,” Garner said.
“That was a bill that got him fired up,” Bullock said of Garner. “I knew Representative Garner back when he was chief of police and I was Attorney General. He is no pushover by any means, and he is a conservative Representative, but he did a good job standing up for transparency in our election process.”
House Minority Leader Chuck Hunter similarly praised Garner’s efforts.
“In the four terms I have been here I think this rises to the level of importance the way few bills do,” Hunter said. “It’s about disclosure, pure and simple. It’s about letting folks know who is influencing our government.”
“Ultimately it’s important to our democracy because honesty and transparency are important to our democracy,” he added.
The coalition of Democrats and moderate Republicans also endured criticism from hardline conservatives because they sent the bill to the House Business and Labor Committee instead of the House State Administration Committee, where election bills are normally assigned. Then, the same coalition blasted SB289 out of committee before it acted on it and sent the measure directly to the floor.
But Garner remained stalwart, and during the debate on the House floor he concluded by saying the bill would make Montana elections fairer and more transparent and “provide a place full of light where darkness dare not tread.”
“The future of our elections are in our hands,” he said.
He then asked lawmakers to open their desk drawers and consider the legacy left by former lawmakers, who in a long-standing tradition signed their names on the wooden slate. He asked his colleagues to consider their own legacy.
“There are a lot of hard decisions that need to be made during this process,” Garner added. “It is not an easy job, and I think that’s how it should be.”