(C) Daily Montanan
This story was originally published by Daily Montanan and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Have you seen him? Montana's missing Congressmen still ducking us • Daily Montanan [1]
['Peter D. Fox', 'Anne Hedges', 'George Ochenski', 'More From Author', 'July', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow', 'Class', 'Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus', 'Display Inline', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar']
Date: 2025-07-28
August could be interesting if Montanans concerned about the course of our federal government will reach out soon to our four-member congressional delegation.
The Senate and the House calendars call for them to be in recess between Aug. 4 and Sept. 1 – adequate time for at least one or two town hall meetings. Each member of our delegation – Sens. Steve Daines and Tim Sheehy and Reps. Troy Downing and Ryan Zinke – has a section of their official websites for scheduling requests. And each has local offices around the state one can visit or call for information.
Good places to start.
With House Speaker Mike Johnson shutting down that chamber a week early, we might expect Downing and Zinke to have even more time back home.
But there are obstacles. Congressmen are under orders from Republican leadership not to hold in-person town hall meetings with their constituents. Our team has been avoiding them like the plague.
Call-in imitations of town hall meetings are now the standard where questions are screened and controlled in advance with no opportunity for follow-up. But not that they are plentiful. Downing, for example, has been able to spare three entire hours since taking his seat in January to speak at his constituents en masse.
Daines and Sheehy boast they are proud to meet with constituents one-on-one — thousands of them, they say. But how do ordinary Montanans figure out how to meet up with them? A chance encounter at a fund-raiser?
All four of them are frequent guests of Fox television talk-show hosts, especially Laura Ingraham and Larry Kudlow on Fox Business. We might ask, what do those people have that the people who put our quartet into office don’t have?
There is much to discuss, beyond question.
I can understand the fear apparently being felt by the delegation, even by the three men who are so proud of their warrior status as SEALS and in combat search-and-rescue, and the fourth member who honed his skills with 28 years of private-sector business experience.
But guys – give us a chance, would you?
No member of our delegation provides their schedules publicly. Montana congressmen used to, you know, both Republicans and Democrats. Restricting schedule information began when Greg Gianforte and Daines sequentially held the single House seat, according to a long-time state political observer.
It is reasonable that during the recess each member will want to spend private family time, and have some commitments and fund-raisers already scheduled – the latter particularly for Daines and Downing who have started their 2026 reelection campaigns.
However, it is also reasonable to assume each one would have time available to accept an invitation to speak with a citizen group, even perhaps outside of their own perceived comfort zone.
If our congressmen deem their constituents as deserving of interacting directly with them, it is important we commit ourselves to respectful and orderly events.
For the sake of our collective civic health in Montana, we cannot go on with the intolerable situation of our congressional representatives stiff-arming our requests to meet face-to-face with them. Somebody must blink – if our four representatives will not change their practices, then it is up to we citizens to make the effort to try to forge a better way forward for all of us.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://dailymontanan.com/2025/07/28/have-you-seen-him-montanas-missing-congressmen-still-ducking-us/
Published and (C) by Daily Montanan
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/montanan/
