GOP Senator Trebas swipes at Sheehy and Gianforte, plots to "nuke" Medicaid expansion
The Great Falls Republican also discusses the affair rumors surrounding US Rep. Rosendale, and his pipe dream to eliminate the property tax system.
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Despite the drama that has engulfed US Representative Matt Rosendale and his political future in recent weeks—his much-anticipated and short-lived run for US Senate, unsubstantiated rumors of an affair with a much-younger staffer, his subsequent announcement that he will seek re-election in the House—several candid comments regarding Rosendale and the Montana GOP from a fellow Republican lawmaker still managed to catch me by surprise.
Speaking to Montana Free Press, Great Falls State Senator Jeremy Trebas recalled booing at a recent event when Governor Gianforte hyped up Tim Sheehy—the Republican businessman and political novice who has jockeyed past Rosendale to take on Senate incumbent Jon Tester this November. In the article, Trebas also called out US Senator Steve Daines—who serves as Chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) and has played a direct role in Sheehy’s rapid political ascent—for being largely absent from the Montana GOP. Trebas told MTFP that Sheehy’s supporters, like the NRSC, have a “base problem.”
Trebas’ comments underscore a tension between two camps in the state GOP. On one side, those who have rallied behind the political newbie Mr. Sheehy, and see him as a viable candidate to beat Tester this fall. On the other, those who agree with Trebas that the firebrand Representative Rosendale better represents the values of “grassroots” conservatives in the state. As Trebas put it to me, the NRSC has “forced” Sheehy on Montana Republicans.
Read on as Trebas explains his beefs with Mr. Sheehy and the NSRC, as well as his take on the rumors surrounding Rep. Rosendale. The 39-year-old state senator also discusses his priorities for the 2025 Legislature: namely, axing Montana’s 2015 HELP Act, which expanded the scope of Medicaid coverage in the state, and his pipe dream of “nuking” the entire property tax system.
Max: Here’s a good place to start — what does being conservative mean to you?
Senator Jeremy Trebas: I’d start from some sort of objective place. It's not perfect, but [I’d point to] our GOP party platform.
What would you consider a couple of anchoring principles of that platform?
I think property rights and taxation and individual liberty are big ones; fair taxation is low and broad.
You’ve alluded to a distinction between the Republican “establishment” and grassroots conservatives. How do you explain that dynamic?
I think there's a disconnect between what I've been calling a “uniparty”—which I think is synonymous with an “establishment” and is also described as a “top-down” approach to choosing candidates and issues that we care about— and the base. I think there's a lot more of that [disconnect] starting to happen. And when I think of the grassroots base, I think of the regular meetings of Pachyderm Clubs and central committees and those regular year-round party people closer to the ground.
To some degree, if you’re running a national party, you have to decide on some messaging—the “red meat” messaging that stirs people up. But I think a lot of people are largely disengaged, or at least the red meat messaging doesn't resonate with them. I tell this to candidates all the time: knock a hundred doors, see what [voters] want to talk about. It's not going to be the border most of the time. You might get one or two Republicans, but everybody else, [they will say that] inflation is hard. Groceries are hard. Rent is hard. Housing and rent are terrible.
I'm from a swing district. I can't focus on just the red meat issues because I would not get the people that are more independent or libertarian in my district, where I can win or lose by 3%. That's 120 votes sometimes.
I think Bill Clinton’s advisor [James Carville] probably had it right when he said, it's the economy, stupid.
I'm not trying to get you in hot water, so please feel free to pass on this —
— no, that's okay. I'm good enough at doing that myself.
You told Montana Free Press that when Governor Gianforte mentioned sending Tim Sheehy to the US Senate at a recent event, you booed. What’s your reasoning there?
It goes back to the NRSC and the top-down method of forcing this candidate on us. I think it was [last] March the first time I ever heard Tim Sheehy's name. And I've been doing the political thing since 2012 or 2013, and I'd never heard of him before. He’s never run for anything before. And now he's gonna be in the top-tier race in Montana in 2024. What the heck is going on here? How did this happen?
To me, Rosendale was a natural progression for that seat.
You mentioned the need to appeal to independent voters in your own district. I often hear the argument that Sheehy is more likely to connect with moderate or independent voters than Rosendale. Do you think there’s merit to that?
Yeah, I do. Yes, Rosendale lost [the Senate race to Tester] in 2018. He is kind of a firebrand, but he is taking positions. That's what makes him attractive to the base. But then you have a push-pull: what makes him attractive to the base might be what makes him unattractive to the independent. I think he is still probably weak with independents and he definitely was in 2018, but we've changed as a state, especially after COVID.
But the problem with Sheehy is, nobody knows who he is except from TV commercials. Nobody knows what he's gonna do. He doesn't have a voting record. And I don't even think he has a whole lot of depth to the issues he's talking about, nor does he have a long knowledge of Montana issues like water rights and public lands.
Will you still vote for Sheehy?
I want Tester to lose.
Regarding the Rosedale affair rumors, do you think the damage has been done, regardless of whether there’s any truth to them?
I can offer a both sides perspective on this. There's definitely people who want to cling to it and use it to knock Rosendale down, on the Republican and Democrat sides. But I think there's voices of reason; even [progressive former state lawmaker] Tom Winter. He said, Hey, let's slow the roll on this; true or not, it affects the family, what's out there.
People recognize there hasn't been any evidence brought forward. There's no evidence at this point. For me, it's a bad rumor. If it's true, obviously it's ugly. Either way, it's ugly.
There's a [text-based] poll asking, “Would you still vote for Rosendale if you knew this?” That's ugly and I think it's probably coming from our side, but I don't know who.
Who's paying for that survey? Rosendale is back in the House race and there's like, how many people in the race? Ten, now. Who benefits the most from doing this? Probably someone on our side.
Let’s talk about a bit about the 2025 Legislature. What sorts of bills do you hope to bring next session?
There's certainly things I want to do, but I am actually a little more focused on repealing laws or stopping bad laws. I hate to say this out loud, but my number one mission is to make sure Medicaid expansion doesn't [continue]. I tried to sunset it in 2022, but that was more of a test vote to see where we were at. After the [candidate] filings close in March, I'm going to look at the candidates and how they vote ideologically and see where the vote count is on that. I could probably tell you how it would turn out on March 12th, before we even hit the session, at least on the Senate side.
Why does targeting Medicaid expansion feel like a priority for you?
I think it was a bait and switch. Originally we passed it [in 2015] under the premise that 40,000 people sign up—you can go check the fiscal note. I think that caused a few people to vote for it.
In 2019, the vote to reauthorize the bill, it was a squeaker. [The new version contained] a community engagement piece as an enticement. It was promised, knowing full well the federal government would reverse that.
And all of a sudden we have 90,000 people on it, and then all of a sudden we have 120,000 people on it and COVID hits and we can't do any redeterminations. And now we have this big mess of redeterminations because so many people that probably shouldn't be on it, were locked into it.
If the HELP Act was repealed, wouldn’t a lot of people be left in limbo and struggle to find care for pressing health concerns?
That's usually the message from the people who want it to pass. But the Affordable Care Act still exists, the healthcare.gov website. You still get heavy, heavy federal subsidies for that.
I kind of called the state the middleman, the bookkeeper that doesn't need to be in the middle. If the federal government wants these policies, fine, that should be on them, but I don't think we should be complicit and play along.
You said online that you thought Governor Gianforte was not inclined to ax Medicaid expansion, and that maintaining the policy was “a weird hill to die on.” Do you suspect that what you view as the governor's wariness is primarily a question of optics?
Yeah, I do. I think he's done a lot of tiptoeing and I think he's made some missteps—him or his department head, anyway. I appreciate that they have a big job to do. But with weird battles like [opting-out of] a free lunch program [for school kids], that was weird.
I think he often sticks his finger up in the air and makes policy decisions more that way than by intentionally looking at what's in our platform, or asking what's a Republican value, or what's a conservative value, or what does his base say? I think he's really shy to make a move without polling results.
Switching gears: where do you like to find news and information about politics, writ large?
X has become a big place for that. Tiktok, too. Tiktok’s a pretty good place for news, actually. I was against the TikTok ban, one of the few in the Republican Party. Even though it might be corporate-sponsored spyware, whatever; I make the choice to put it on my phone.
But they were the only ones that didn't censor opinions like Twitter did and Facebook did and Google did during COVID. You could have an alternative opinion; you could have so-called misinformation, but TikTok was not censoring that.
Before we wrap up, you’re on the Revenue and Local Government interim committees. Anything you want to highlight there?
We talk a lot about property taxes. Obviously we have a task force for that now, which I disagreed with the governor about. The housing task force kind of made sense. This one, maybe not so much: we have interim legislative committees that have been looking at this issue for two decades or more (laughs).
I might be more radical and I would get rid of the property tax system altogether and just be like, we'll figure something else out.
Last session we had at least three options for changing property taxes. We had multiple options we didn't choose from, so we chose the status quo, which seems to be par for the course with property taxes. Like, it's a problem, but we also don't have any idea what to do about it.
I use the word “nuke,” because then we get to discover what our true priorities are. Like with the health-care system, let’s nuke it and see what’s important to us. Some systems are at a point where you have to break it to find out how we want to actually rebuild it from the ground up. It maybe worked for past generations for a while, but now we need to try something new and different.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Thanks so much for being here. Have questions or comments? You can always reach me via email, the comment section below, or on the Elon Machine, @SavageLevenson.
Good article Max