{"id":21993,"date":"2018-03-29T07:02:42","date_gmt":"2018-03-29T13:02:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=21993"},"modified":"2018-03-29T07:02:42","modified_gmt":"2018-03-29T13:02:42","slug":"gop-senate-candidates-appear-at-missoula-forum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2018\/03\/gop-senate-candidates-appear-at-missoula-forum\/","title":{"rendered":"GOP Senate candidates appear at Missoula forum"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Tschjidas\"<\/a>

Martin Kidston<\/p>

The GOP Senate candidates, appearing at a forum in Missoula, were asked if they supported semi-automatic weapons, and if \u201ckeeping firearms out of the hands of law-abiding citizens would reduce gun crime.\u201d That question was posed by moderator Brad Tschida, a Republican legislator representing west Missoula.<\/p><\/div>\n

Four Republicans vying to win Montana\u2019s seat in the U.S. Senate praised President Donald Trump during a candidate forum in Missoula on Wednesday, and they made their case for being the conservative most likely to unseat incumbent Sen. Jon Tester this November.<\/p>\n

Held in a small Missoula real estate office with seating for roughly 60 people, the second GOP candidate forum was moderated by three Republican legislators before an audience composed mostly of party faithful.<\/p>\n

Media representatives were not permitted to ask questions during the forum.<\/p>\n

The four candidates, each seated at the same table, agreed on nearly every topic, from gun rights to immigration. Their differences came from their demeanor and style of presentation, whether tactful or bellicose.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is about sending Jon Tester home,\u201d said Troy Downing, who fired the evening\u2019s first shot at the incumbent Democrat. \u201cJon Tester hasn\u2019t been good for Montana, hasn\u2019t been good for America, and we need to send him back to music class.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the issues, all four candidates agreed that more should be done to cut regulations to open forests to logging and fuel removal, a move they believe would reduce wildfires and rekindle the state\u2019s defunct timber mills.<\/p>\n

None of the candidates mentioned climate change at any point in the evening, though several zeroed in on the Endangered Species Act.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Endangered Species Act has shut down the mining, shut down the timber harvesting, and it\u2019s actually shutting down and threatening the very agricultural products we produce in this state,\u201d said Matt Rosendale. \u201cWe have to go in and rework the Endangered Species Act so it\u2019s being utilized for the purposes for which it was intended.\u201d<\/p>\n

Al Olszewski and Downing said local input should play a larger role in forest management, though they didn\u2019t go so far as to suggest that federal lands should be placed under state control.<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>Litigation must also be addressed, they said, to stop what Downing described as \u201cenvironmental activists who don\u2019t have any skin in the game from coming in here and telling us what we can and cannot do with our forests.\u201d<\/p>\n

Russ Fagg lamented the loss of mills and the jobs they once provided.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat I propose to do is bring everyone together, the conservationists, the local citizens, the sportsmen, the industry people, and talk about it,\u201d Fagg said. \u201cWhat is a sustained way we can utilize this resource for this generation and future generations?\u201d<\/p>\n

Downing said he visited a gun range as the march took place in Washington, D.C., in which students who survived the Florida school shooting led millions of others across the country in calling for gun reform.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Second Amendment is about your God-given right to protect yourself and stand up for tyranny,\u201d Downing said, downplaying the national march. \u201cThat has nothing to do with semi-automatic, or whether it\u2019s a hunting rifle or what kind of magazine it has.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fagg also stated his support for the Second Amendment and said the problem of gun violence in America can\u2019t be fixed with what he called a band-aid approach built on more regulations or banning semi-automatic weapons.\u00a0Rather, he said, it was a sociological problem and a mental-health issue.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe problem is, criminals don\u2019t pay attention to laws or regulations,\u201d Fagg said. \u201cWe need to go to the heart of the problem and not go have some sort of Band-Aid approach.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his reply, Olszewski said schools should be hardened against outside threats. He recalled the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people.<\/p>\n

\u201cWas it guns? Was it a semi-automatic weapon? No,\u201d said Olszewski, who spoke at a shout much of the night. \u201cIt was fertilizer and diesel fuel. It\u2019s not the weapon that causes the evil. It\u2019s the person that has evil inside that causes the problem.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rosendale boasted of his lifetime membership in the NRA and the bills he carried in the Montana Legislature to support the Montana Shooting Sports Association. He said he couldn\u2019t support taking one person\u2019s rights away to protect someone else.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we have to do is go where the problem is,\u201d Rosendale said. \u201cEvery one of these horrific incidents where innocent victims \u2013 where lives have been lost \u2013 always contain two elements \u2013 gun-free zones and mental illness.\u201d<\/p>\n

All four candidates said they believed Trump would serve as an asset during the November election rather than a hindrance, and they each agreed that the federal deficit must be brought under control.<\/p>\n

At the same time, however, they support spending billions to build a wall on the Mexican border, and they praised Trump\u2019s tax reform bill, which could add $2.2 trillion to the federal deficit over 10 years, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.<\/p>\n

They also said they would not have voted for the recent omnibus bill signed by the president last week. Several called for austerity measures to rein in the deficit, including Olszewski, who suggested that Montana had become a \u201cwelfare state,\u201d and that America was a \u201cwelfare nation.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cLet\u2019s just call it what it is,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re going to have to reform it and bring in those costs.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the omnibus bill, others agreed that spending must be addressed, though they labeled the challenge in different terms.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery democracy eventually goes broke because people take money out of the public treasury to continue to get reelected,\u201d said Fagg. \u201cThat\u2019s precisely what that omnibus bill is. We have a good economy and the lowest unemployment\u00a0in 17 years, and this is the time we should have balanced budgets or surplus budgets.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rosendale cited the spending bill as an example of Washington, D.C., legislation, in which various projects were added to garner votes.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey continued to buy votes,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s why I\u2019m a strong advocate of having single title legislation, so everything can be voted up or down on merit and you can\u2019t go in there and attach different ornaments to the Christmas tree until you buy enough votes to pass it.\u201d<\/p>\n

This article originally appeared on\u00a0Missoula Current<\/a>, an independent online newspaper, of which\u00a0Martin Kidston is the founding editor.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Four Republicans vying to win Montana\u2019s seat in the U.S. Senate praised President Donald Trump during a candidate forum in Missoula on Wednesday, and they made their case for being the conservative most likely to unseat incumbent Sen. Jon Tester this November.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":97,"featured_media":21994,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[6874,3084,553,2390,6873,6445],"class_list":["post-21993","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-al-olszewski","tag-jon-tester","tag-matt-rosendale","tag-russell-fagg","tag-senate-race","tag-troy-downing","prominence-category-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21993","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/97"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21993"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21993\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21997,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21993\/revisions\/21997"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21994"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}