fbpx
Continental Divides

Mr. Sheehy Goes to Washington

Housing options for our junior senator include buying, renting, or, better yet, living free of charge in his spacious new quarters in the Dirksen Senate Office Building

By John McCaslin

Now that newly elected Montana Sen. Tim Sheehy has been sworn in to Congress he can begin searching for a fitting home to rest his head, if he’s not already found one.

I won’t ask the freshman senator that question because frankly it’s nobody’s business where he chooses to reside in Washington.

Which is why the 2024 campaign ad making a big fuss over then-Sen. Jon Tester’s million-dollar house on Capitol Hill (not the safest of neighborhoods, by the way) was nothing short of outrageous.

Consider, after all, the steep cost of real estate in the Flathead Valley. Our median home price is beyond $650,000, well above Washington, D.C.’s average of $599,900 (and trending down as of November 2024).

That said, this county’s tremendous cost of living coupled with the lack of affordable housing for its large workforce didn’t stop our county commissioners (sans Brad Abell) from declining that $9 million homebuyer assistance gift from the Republican-led Legislature in Helena in recent days.

Rep. Tanner Smith of Lakeside labeled the much-needed funding earmarked for Flathead County’s low- and middle-income residents “Karl Marx to a T.” What really shouts Karl Marx, Mr. Smith, is this county’s class conflict and struggle.

As for Sheehy, an owner of luxury properties in Bozeman, Big Sky, Martinsdale (the ranch) and Polson, he’ll have no problem finding affordable housing in the nation’s capital. In fact, the very moment he took the oath of office (administered if you didn’t see it by Vice President Kamala Harris) he became one of the wealthiest members of Congress.

Housing options for our junior senator include buying, renting, or better yet — given he campaigned against Washington’s swamp mentality — living free of charge in his spacious new quarters in the Dirksen Senate Office Building. I highly recommend the latter.

Consider the recent advice of Buddy Carter, like Sheehy a Republican who represents Georgia’s 1st Congressional District in the House of Representatives.

“I sleep in my office. The rest of Congress should, too,” the congressman encouraged a few weeks ago in a Washington Post op-ed. Carter’s first overnight in the Cannon House Office Building, in fact, was 10 years ago this month in January 2015.

When he was first elected to Congress, Mark Sanford of South Carolina similarly promised, like Sheehy, not to be drawn into the Capitol Hill lifestyle, which is “part of the problem in Washington.”

So instead of moving into a townhouse or apartment, the former real estate investor, who pledged to serve no more than three terms in Congress, blew up an air mattress and slept on the floor of his congressional office.

Six years later he was still waking up there.

“Last night was a little tough,” he told me at the time. “We were voting until about 1 a.m. and the cleaning lady came in around 2. It can be an exercise in sleep deprivation, exacerbated with a vacuum cleaner about five feet from your head.”

Sanford not only survived, he went on to become his state’s governor.

John McCaslin is a longtime journalist and author who resides in Bigfork.