Zooey Zephyr’s case is the latest in a string of incidents involving Republican-controlled legislatures muzzling elected Democratic colleagues, abestreep writes.
On the eve of Montana’s sixth legislative session, in 1899, a freshly elected state senator named Frank Whiteside arrived in Helena to find a capital awash in money. Whiteside had heard rumors that William Andrews Clark, Sr., a mining baron who lived in a thirty-four-room mansion with frescoed ceilings, was offering lavish bribes to legislators in a bid for the U.S. Senate.
The day before the debate, Montana’s governor, Greg Gianforte, had presented a letter to the legislature proposing to amend the bill such that it more clearly articulated “the necessarily binary definitions of ‘male’ and ‘female.
Montana’s legislature has been controlled by Republicans for the past two decades, but, in recent years, its debates have become increasingly governed by evangelical sensibilities—thanks in large part to the efforts of Matt Regier’s father, Keith. In 2011, Keith Regier, then a state representative, delivered a speech to the House Judiciary Committee that implicitly compared pregnant women to cattle.
Gianforte’s election, to the governor’s office, in 2020, prefigured a dramatic shift in the state’s political identity. A technology entrepreneur and evangelical Christian, Gianforte moved to Montana as an adult and founded a company, RightNow Technologies, that he later sold to Oracle for one and a half billion dollars.
Zephyr filed suit against Speaker Regier, seeking emergency reinstatement to the House floor, but a judge denied her request for a temporary restraining order. House Speaker Regier, meanwhile, hurried the legislature to its conclusion. Zephyr expressed hope that the conflict will resonate beyond her own story and district. “While the initial conversation was around the attacks on trans people, the continued silencing was an attack on democracy itself,” she told me.
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