Don't fuck with Montana, Mr. Koch.
The Kochs, through their astroturf organization Americans for Prosperity, have been
killing Medicaid expansion efforts in red states around the country. One state where they're
having less success is Montana, and tensions between AFP and Montana
Republicans are
growing, as explained by Eric Stern, Deputy Secretary of State in Montana.
Part of this campaign involved organizing a disastrous series of "town meetings" in the legislators' districts, at which AFP staffers lectured the locals about the dangers of "Obamacare expansion." Please take a moment to savor the image of a young man from D.C., showing up in a small Montana town, wearing a tailored suit and dress shirt but no tie, and pointy shoes, looking like he's expecting bottle service at a nightclub, to address an audience of burly men wearing flannel shirts and overalls and likely carrying concealed weapons. […]
Next, it was revealed that the Kochs own a 200,000 acre cattle ranch in Montana that has received more than $12 million of state and federal subsidies since it was founded. Two-thirds of the cattle operation is on public land, which means the Kochs pay grazing fees that are far below market rates while taxpayers make up the difference. (In 2011, the state of Montana proposed raising these fees to get them closer to market, and a guy from the Kochs' ranch showed up to the hearing to protest this increase.)
This grotesque set of facts—two billionaires taking subsidies while trying to block our poorest citizens from getting assistance for medical care—was not well received by the press or public when it was brought to light.
There were enough tea party members in committee to kill Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock's expansion plan, which recently came up for debate. According to Stern, there were hundreds of "poor uninsured people, some of them with life-ending conditions, [who] drove in from across state (driving nine hours in some cases)" to testify in support of the plan, and "only 12 people showed up to testify against it, and these were mostly AFP staffers or friends of AFP staffers, ranting about Obamacare." The fact that those tea party legislators summarily killed the expansion did not go over well, either with the gathered crowd or with the state's media.
It might have just also been the beginning of a civil war among Montana Republicans, and increased the odds that Medicaid expansion does happen in the state. That's because it has infuriated moderate Republicans who refuse to be intimidated by the Kochs. In fact, one of them has introduced his own expansion language, backed by the governor and by Democrats. No one from the Kochs showed up to testify this time.