Tester Didn’t Listen Before He Cast Obamacare’s Deciding Vote

By Tim Fox


Four days before Christmas, shortly after 1 AM Washington D.C. time, Montana’s Junior Senator Jon Tester had the power, if not the courage, to stand up for the majority of his constituents against President Obama’s designs for health care.  Instead, he cast the deciding vote to end debate and move forward with the bill.


Had Tester voted differently in the wee hours of that morning, Obamacare wouldn’t have passed.  So he has a lot to answer for.

Talking about his vote, he recently said to a reporter, “When Montanans speak, we listen.  We listen and that’s no ifs, ands or buts.”  But he didn’t listen.  Not by a long shot.

Senator Tester is desperate to revise history – to establish a record of listening where there is none.  Let’s go back to before the vote that I believe will end Senator Tester’s political career.

In September, President Obama decided it was time to talk health care and in August, the American people obliged him.  Only, the response wasn’t open arms so much as clenched fists.  While town halls erupted with frustrated taxpayers around the country, and Montana’s only Congressman Denny Rehberg hosted sixteen listening sessions, Senator Tester hid from voters.  His public calendar for August 2009 included thirteen days with “No Public Events” and a whopping twenty-four “Press Interviews.”   But it contained only one public meeting – an invitation-only town hall where President Obama took seven questions and Senator Tester took none.

In the intervening months, while Congressman Rehberg held 36 listening sessions around the state (including Hamilton, Billings, Helena, Bozeman, Butte), Senator Tester failed to hold a single public meeting where he took questions.  He hosted a few town halls about his Wilderness Bill, but he would only take questions afterward - once all the press was gone.

Let’s play devil’s advocate - maybe Senator Tester didn’t need to meet with Montanans, eye-to-eye.  After all, we were calling him and emailing him in such numbers that the Senate phone lines and email systems couldn’t keep up.  Surely, someone who listens without any “ifs, ands or buts” was weighing our frantic input on an issue as important as health care.

When a reporter asked Senator Tester about those calls and letters a month after he had already cast the deciding vote for Obamacare, we learned something shocking.

I was one of those Montanans who called Senator Tester.  I have a lot of friends who called him too.  While I never got to talk to him personally, his staff always promised they would forward my concerns on to the Senator, and I trusted them to do so.

So imagine my disgust when Senator Tester told a reporter that he had no idea what any of the 40,200 people who had contacted his office about health care had said.  No one bothered to r ecord if constituents were for or against Obamacare.  In other words, as far as Senator Tester was concerned, my call to ask for a “no” vote was no different from someone else’s call urging him to vote “yes.”  That’s not listening.

In sharp contrast, Congressman Rehberg kept track of what Montanans who contacted him said about the bill.  He told the same reporter that 77 percent of the people contacting his office opposed Obamacare.  That figure lines up pretty well with what the MSU-Billings Poll reported – three quarters of Montanans believe Obamacare will make the quality of their health care worse.


So maybe it’s not a surprise that Senator Tester cast the deciding vote for Obamacare.  He refused to meeting with Montanans face-to-face, ignored their phone calls and letters and, apparently, didn’t read a poll for almost six months before his vote.

And now, after he’s already voted and the ink is dry on the new health care law, Senator Tester is hitting the trail to show what a good listener he is.  But just try finding a public listing for one of his “public” meetings.

And the most insulting part is that now, he’s started to discount the opinions of those of us who opposed his vote.  He now claims that the opposition to the bill came from computers outside of Montana funded by special interest groups.  While w e know that these kinds of calls were generated in mass by left-leaning organizations like SEIU, MoveOn.org and Organizing for America, the opposition was truly grassroots, something Senator Tester would have known had he ever come out of hiding.

When Senator Tester cast the deciding vote for Obamacare in 2009, he was not voting for Montana.  When Montanans get a chance to elect a new Senator in 2012, I don’t think they’ll be voting for Senator Tester. 

Tim Fox is life-long resident of Montana and is an attorney practicing law in Helena.  He lives with his wife, Karen, in MontanaCity.  They have four children and a grandchild.