If Montana's timber interests can team with wilderness advocates on a forest compromise, shouldn't Montana's Republican Congressman Denny Rehberg be able to work with Democrat Sen. Jon Tester on advancing the federal legisla tion that flowed from that partnership?
One would hope so.
The stage has been set: Tester has invited Rehberg to meet on the Forest Jobs and Recreation Act and Rehberg said he's willing. The test will be whether he's willing to listen.
Rehberg told The Standard's editorial hoard earlier this week that he thinks the meeting should be a public event with the media invited. People are tired of closed door negotiations, he said. They want everything to be out in the open.
We'd say people are even more tired of stalemates and endless partisan rhetoric. A public meeting that served only as an election-year platform for grandstanding from Rehberg would accomplish nothing. If Tester and Rehberg could more effectively hash out the issues by meeting alone for a few hours, we'd say more power to them.
What's so wrong with two people trying to work something out face to face by themselves? Afterward, there'd be plenty of time for joint public meetings to announce whatever might come from the discussion.
What a breath of fresh air it would be if Rehberg ultimately decides to lend his support to this bill. The nation could look to Montana for a working example of Democrat and Republican lawmakers finding consensus on a difficult issue like wilderness and natural resource manage ment.
So far, Rehberg has said he cannot support the bill unless the wilderness designations are phased in over the years as the forest stewardship projects are complete. Initial reaction to that idea from timber company officials and Tester's office is that a phased-in approach would not pass Congress.
Rehberg said he heard a lot of support for the phase-in during his recent listening sessions on the bill. People told him that approach would only be fair since wilderness designations are now the only sure things that would happen upon bill passage; there's no guarantee against lawsuits to stop the logging half of the deal.
If further discussions show this phased-in wilderness approach truly would kill the legislation, we hope
Rehberg continues to keep an open mind. If the timber companies are willing to trust that an act of Congress mandating logging and stewardship projects will help them prevail in the courtroom, Rehberg should be willing, too.
It's true that Tester and the coalitions who spent years on the groundwork that culminated in this bill are trying some thing new. The outcome is uncertain, and there are critics in every corner. But in the middle, support is solid, among Democrats and Republicans alike.
THIS LEGISLATION IS a work in progress, and Tester's been gathering feedback on possible amendments to the initial draft ever since he in troduced it last summer. Now that Rehberg has taken an interest, too, let's hope that together they can come up with a final version both can support. Then they can get to work with Sen. Max Baucus on selling it to their colleagues in Washington, D.C., as a Montana-made, bi-partisan solution to an intractable problem that's been deadlocked for nearly 30 years.
As Rehberg told the editorial board on Monday, "I think we're all trying to accomplish the same thing" and "doing nothing is not a solution."