Over at Montana Headlines, there was the pleasure of hosting our candidate for governor — Roy Brown — in a guest editorial about the governor’s testimony in support of the “Clean Water Restoration Act.”
We of course immediately had a member of the loyal opposition show up (all of those kids working for Sen. Baucus have to have something to do) to give highlights of the governor’s testimony before Congress.
The governor’s remarks, if these excerpts are representative, seems truly to have been a tour de force of style over substance — not that this should be particularly surprising.
At root, the governor’s folksy rhetoric is irrelevant. What is relevant is what the bill actually will do to erode the ability of individual states to control their own water, and that the governor supported this erosion of Montana’s sovereignty.
Check out what Sen. Brown wrote, follow whatever discussion ensues, and decide for yourself who is more likely to put Montana’s interests first.
Posted in Uncategorized | | Write a Letter to the Editor
Nice try Big Oil Roy Brown. Maybe you should take the time to read the actual testimony the Governor delivered in person on this issue. For your enlightenment, here are some direct quotes from that testimony:
“I would just caution that in writing this legislation, make sure that you give adequate authority to local folks on the ground to interpret these rules; for example, the conservation districts…that are locally elected, that have the charge of protection the water in each of these conservation districts in nearly every agricultural county in America.”
“We make a living in Montana running cows on the range, and sometimes those cows drink water out of a pond or river. We don’t want the long arm of the federal government telling us we can’t do that.”
“We don’t want to put the federal government in the position of managing our waterways all the way to the Rocky Mountains…We want you to help us protect the water supply for the rest of the County, but we don’t want to put our farmers out of business, our loggers out of business, our cattlemen out of business.”
Farmers and ranchers “wouldn’t like to be in a position where the federal government says, ‘oh boy, you know that stock pond that you have got there on your ranch where you built it or your granddaddy built that thing 75 years ago? Well, you no longer water your cattle out of that because now we in Washington DC think we own that water.’ This is something that we don’t want to see happen.”
