Matt Rosendale shares his thoughts on a variety of issues with the Blackfoot Valley Dispatch during recent visit to Lincoln

Following a May 1 tour of the Hi Country Snack Food facility to kick off Small Business Week, Rep. Matt Rosendale stopped by the Blackfoot Valley Dispatch office for a short interview that touched on some of the legislation and national issues topics that affect Montana.

Rosendale, a firebrand conservative who until last fall was Montana's sole member of the House of Representatives, now represents Montana's second congressional district. Lincoln, lying just a few miles from the Powell County line, is on the western edge of the district that encompasses most of eastern Montana.

Rosendale said it was a good time for him to visit Hi Country, Lincoln's largest private employer.

"This has actually been a good time for us to come in. It's post COVID. They've bought some new equipment. They've got some new things they're trying to roll out and it ended up being a good visit," he said

Rosendale called it a great operation and said it's always it's exciting to see such value-added processing in the state, whether it's making jerky from Montana beef, operating a sawmill or making flour from Montana wheat.

"I've got to believe that for Lincoln it's good because they're increasing the wages, they're offering good jobs out there. They're full time now instead of seasonal, so it's a winner all the way around."

Rosendale's visit to Lincoln, a community encircled by federal land, was an opportunity to ask him about his familiarity with the Lincoln Prosperity Proposal. The community-led legislative proposal is designed to bring some certainty to the management of National Forest lands in the region between the Scapegoat Wilderness and the southern end of the Nevada Mountain Inventoried Roadless Area and Rosendale's support will be crucial to seeing it introduced to the House.

Rosendale said he wasn't familiar with the proposal but said if it supports proper forest management, he appreciates why locals would be behind it. An opponent of further land transfers to the federal government and a past proponent of transferring federal land to state or private control, Rosendale said management of the Forest Service and Montana's timber resources has been a priority of his.

"I've introduced several pieces of legislation in Congress. One is the fix for the Cottonwood decision," he said. "I've got another one to address the forest management litigation process so we can clarify that, so we can get these trees out of the forest on trucks instead of going up in smoke."

Rosendale's next stop after leaving Lincoln was a roundtable discussion in Choteau that dealt with another topic that could impact the area: his introduction of H.R. 1419, the Comprehensive Grizzly Bear Management Act of 2023 that would take the Northern Continental Divide Grizzly bear population off the endangered species list.

The bill passed out committee April 29 and is expected to go to the floor of the House for a vote this month.

"Hopefully we can start pushing US Fish and Wildlife Service to turn the management of the Northern Continental Divide population over to Montana because it is far beyond the target population," he said, noting the bears are expanding out onto the plains and are causing concern in communities on the Front Range and depredation issues for ranchers.

Rosendale also explained his belief that natural resources, particularly in the form of domestic energy production, are key to curbing inflation.

"The very first bill we passed in this Congress was H.R. 1," he said, referring to the Lower Energy Costs Act, which he said was the most important bill for this Congress.

"Number one, increase our domestic energy production. It's down almost two million barrels (of oil) a day from when Biden took office to where we are right now. You take supply and push it down and the demand stays the same or increases - and it is increasing globally - the price goes up," he said. "We've seen the cost of energy go up across the nation and the cost of energy is one of the major contributing factors to inflation, and certainly to a community that is 60 miles away from anybody or anything

In addition to increasing production, he said the legislation includes a billI introduced last year to conduct quarterly sale leases for the production of energy on public lands that are capable of producing it. "The other thing it does is it clarifies and streamlines the permitting process on pipelines so when we produce the energy, we can get it to the places it needs to be (and) clarifies the permitting process for export facilities for liquified natural gas."

Finally, he said the legislation clarifies the National Environmental Policy Act process for mining of critical minerals.

Among those critical minerals are the rare earth elements that used in the production batteries for electric vehicles, several of which can be found in Montana. He said the clarification of NEPA laws will help with the permitting and production of those minerals in the US. In addition to economic and national security benefits of domestic production he feels it's also a sound environmental move.

"When we met in the Natural Resource Committee, they always talk about, the democrats do, about using renewable resources. They talk about wind, they talk about solar, they talk about electric vehicles. But they never want to discuss where the elements are going to come from that provide the components we need in order to build those things," he said. "Right now China controls about 60 percent of the worlds critical minerals. All the top ten critical minerals, and we have those right here in our state."

Rosendale believes environmentalists should be demanding that those resources be mined domestically. "Nobody has better labors standards, nobody has better environmental standards and nobody has better reclamation standards than we do."

Nonetheless, that wouldn't mean Rosendale thinks widespread use of electric vehicles being called for is feasible. "I couldn't cover my district in an EV I'd have to spend too much time at the charging station. Wouldn't work out."

He sees the recent call by Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm to make all military vehicles electric by 2030 as "fantasyland" and underscores the lack of understanding of our own infrastructure.

"It's absolutely dangerous because we don't have the ability to produce the vehicles. Right here in our country, which is the most prosperous country in the world, we don't have the power grid to provide electricity if everyone was to switch to EVs right now," Rosendale said. "The electric coops can't accommodate it. I've talked to electric coops from one side of the state to the other. They can't accommodate the energy production and the infrastructure that's necessary to take care of electric vehicles. And you're going to tell me that we're going to go into a war zone that doesn't have any infrastructure and we're gonna have our military vehicles there? "

He called it yet another example of the Biden Administration using the military for social experiments, whether its "New Green Deal" provisions or senstivitiy training. "Anything that is not focused on making our military the most effective fighting force on earth is a distraction. Period."

Rosendale said the H.R. 1 package is part of the 2023 Limit, Save and Grow Act, the debt ceiling legislation the House passed in April. "There are several other components of that debt ceiling legislation that we passed as well. The whole package should help us bring down the inflation numbers."

The legislation is in the hands of the Senate, and a showdown between the House and the president over it is currently at an impasse just weeks from the deadline to raise the debt ceiling.

"It's very interesting,"Rosendale said."Two months ago the Senate and the White House, quite frankly, did not think the House was going to be able to produce a solution to the debt ceiling. So what they were doing was ramping up to pass another omnibus bill. $1.7 to 2 trillion with a debt ceiling increase, with no cuts whatsoever in the current level of funding government."

Rosendale believes there's too much money going through government. "Pre-COVID - 2019 - we were spending $5.14 trillion dollars a year to fund the federal government. We were collecting $4 trillion dollars a year."

He touted the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 for changing that equation."The democrats all said you're giving tax breaks to the very wealthy and that the revenue was going to fall. And they were wrong. Again."

He said revenues went up and the government is on track to collect about $5 trillion in revenue. "If you took our spending levels back to 2019...we would almost have a balanced budget right now. But unfortunately the Biden administration has increased their spending by about 30 percent in that same time period. This next budget (Biden's) proposing is not $5.14, its $6.8 trillion. So we're going to collect $5 trillion - more than has ever been collected in the nation's history - but he is going to propose to spend more than we have ever spent before. Therein lies the problem."

Rosendale said they've brought forward a package that freezes spending at 2022 levels and claws back funds that haven't yet been spent, such as the funding for additional IRS agents, student loans forgiveness and "new green deal" incentives for green energy infrastructure.

"We're going to take that revenue and put it back in the bucket. Then we've got the provisions for growing the economy. Its basically responsibly funding government," he said. "Will it pass? We'll find out. It's in the democrats hands now. If the democrats want to fund government responsibly, it'll pass."

Rosendale admitted he doesn't know if there are enough votes to overturn a possible veto if it does pass, saying President Biden will have to answer to the voters if he goes through with a veto.

A related issue that concerns Rosendale is Biden's executive orders and the use of vetos to overturn some of the legislation that has been passed to counter them. He said it's something he's discussed with other members of the Republican House Freedom Caucus such as Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs and Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz.

"I say, 'how can we reclaim our authority in Congress instead of having the executive make these decisions?' Because the Executive is supposed to sign off, or vet, one or the other," he said. "Congress is supposed to legislate and what you're seeing is Congress right now start to reclaim some of that authority. We're identifying the places these problems are and we're trying to amend the statute, so it's in statute instead of in rule."

Part of that, Rosendale said, is to make sure the laws they write don't allow the agencies to have so much rule making authority. "If you write clean and you write precise legislation, they can't deviate from it."

As far as seeing such legislation vetoed without the votes needed to override the vetoes, he said elections are the way to overcome that.

"The only two avenues we have in Congress is to defund. If the president tries to implement something that didn't have congressional authority, through a rule or through an agency, then you just defund it. It still has to get through Congress to go along with it. That becomes tricky," he said. "You can defund it or groups have to come in and file lawsuit. Unfortunately we have come to that spot in this world."

As the 2024 election cycle approaches, Rosendale's name has been floated as a possible contender to run against Sen. Jon Tester, Montana's sole Democrat member of the state's congressional delegation. Rosendale remained noncommittal about the possibility, but he was clear on his view of the senior senator.

"What I will say is that Jon Tester does not represent the people of Montana," he said. "He's been very crafty at coming home and acting like he's a moderate, but if you look at his votes in the Senate, he does not represent the people across this state and so he does need to be replaced. He will get replaced and I am just making sure we support the best candidate to take Jon on, whoever that may be."