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JULY 2, 2014 | 19 tisan support. I would challenge these
three senators to find the North Fork on a map, and here they are holding this bill up,” Tester said.
Walsh and Tester also criticized Daines for taking a victory lap after passing the bill through the House, and then criticizing the senators for failing to whip votes in the Senate.
But Robert Saldin, an associate pro- fessor of political science at the Univer- sity of Montana, said Daines deserves credit for passing the bill through the Republican-led House, which he charac- terized as a “heavy lift.” He said Tester and Walsh should be pressuring the Sen- ate leadership to bring the measure for a Senate vote.
“My take is that Daines did his part. He got it passed in the House of Repre- sentatives where he currently serves, passed through the Republican leader- ship, and they did it. Now it’s up to the Senate to act,” Saldin said. “If that thing came to a vote in the Senate it would sail through. It just needs to be brought up in a normal vote.”
Tester countered that Daines’ prov- en relationship and clout with Toomey, Cruz and Coburn indicates that he could influence their votes.
“If you’re having a fundraiser with the people that are stopping your legisla- tion and you really want to get that legis- lation passed, it will move forward if you talk to them. You do not have a fundrais- er for Pat Toomey unless you’re getting something out of it,” Tester said.
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On June 25, Walsh again took aim at Daines when he hosted a fundraising breakfast for Toomey, while Daines, who enjoyed a positive PR blitz after moving the bill through the House, criticized Walsh for his inability to do the same in the Senate.
Meanwhile, both campaigns have accused the other of turning a nonpar- tisan lands bill into a politically charged chess piece.
“Congressman Daines was eager to accept credit for supporting the North Fork in the House but our work can’t stop there,” Walsh said. “If Congress- man Daines truly believes this is the right thing to do, he can join us in call- ing on his friends to stop blocking this vote.”
Alee Lockman with the Daines cam- paign said Walsh is trying to turn the bill into a political chip, and urged Mon- tana’s senators to lobby Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to put the bill for- ward for a vote on the Senate floor, just as House leadership did.
“It is frustrating that we now have so much political rhetoric surrounding the North Fork, because it’s becoming uncertain whether we can get it done,” Lockman said. “We are not trying to make political hay and we are working behind the scenes to make sure this im- portant legislation is passed. The only people who are trying to make a political issue out of this is the Walsh campaign, and that is very frustrating for us.”
But Tester said there’s more going on behind the scenes, and said Daines could
clear the way for the bill’s passage if he had the inclination.
“For him to say that is patently dis- honest,” Tester said. “He got it through the House and now he’s killed it in the Senate. It’s his folks who have stopped the bill.”
The bill, or variations of it, has a long and textured history, but only recently has its political polarization become so palpable.
Prior to his departure from Congress to become the United States’ ambas- sador to China, Baucus had worked for more than 30 years to protect the North Fork, which tracks along the western edge of Glacier National Park, sits ad- jacent to a major coal-mining region along British Columbia’s Elk River, and is home to a suite of wildlife.
He had introduced several ver- sions of the North Fork bill prior to the last Legislative session, but they never gained enough traction in the Senate. But last summer, with Baucus champi- oning the measure as his swan song, it won rare bipartisan support in the di- vided Senate Energy and Natural Re- sources Committee, and the outgoing senator commenced a full-court press to pass the bill in his final months.
“In this particular Congress, it’s al- ways a big deal when a bill gets reported out unanimously,” National Parks Con- servation Association legislative ana- lyst Elise Ligouri said optimistically af- ter the committee hearing. “We think it should be considered for a floor vote in the very near future.”
The political nuances begin to get dense, but a colloquial, geographically narrow bill like the North Fork Act is unlikely to gain enough ground for a vote on the Senate floor, a time-consum- ing process reserved for sprawling legis- lation, omnibus bills and highly contro- versial measures that require lengthy debate.
Instead, Tester and Baucus intro- duced it for a voice vote, which requires unanimous consent – a routine mecha- nism meant to fast-track measures that are unlikely to meet opposition. Because a voice vote requires unanimous con- sent via a live Senate hotline, however, the three conservative holdouts were able to block the bill – Toomey objected on behalf of Cruz and Coburn, neither of who were present in the chamber.
Meanwhile, Coburn wrote a letter to Senate Minority Leader Mitch Mc- Connell outlining what has become a familiar conservative stance on federal land bills – that the federal government should divest control of some public lands and turn them over to the states – while Walsh introduced legislation that would impose new rules prevent- ing Congress from attempting to sell off public lands.
Both Tester and Walsh expressed frustration over the political maneuver- ing of the conservative senators, who re- main entrenched in their opposition to the bill.
“Once again politics is trumping good policy. The North Fork bill is a Montana-made bill. It has wide bipar-
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