Denny Rehberg for Senate

BILLINGS - U.S. Representative Denny Rehberg (R-Mont.) is co-sponsoring a bill that would take away the President's authority to decide on the Keystone XL pipeline.

His fellow Republican, Congressman Lee Terry of Nebraska, introduced the bill in the House Wednesday, which would transfer authority over the 1,700-mile long pipeline to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. The State Department says the bill raises serious legal issues.

Rehberg says he, "stands with the majority of Montanans who just want the federal government to get out of the way and let the private sector create badly needed jobs."

Senator Jon Tester's office reacted Wednesday by saying in a statement that the Democrat "doesn't think bringing in yet another federal agency will solve the problem."

In case you missed it, Senator Jon Tester again sided with President Barack Obama today and voted against blocking yet another increase in our nation's debt ceiling.  Today's vote is yet another reminder of the stark contrast between Tester's campaign rhetoric as a candidate in 2006, and his hypocritical tax-and-spend record over the last several years in Washington, where he has supported President Obama's liberal agenda 97 percent of the time.

As he campaigned for Senate in 2006, Tester routinely lectured Montanans on the importance of fiscal responsibility, saying "I am not into tax and spend," and he attacked his opponent for "borrow and spend" policies and "passing on huge debts to our children."  

But instead, over the last several years, Tester has helped President Obama implement policies – including their failed $800 billion stimulus and $1.2 trillion health care law – under which our national debt has exploded by $49,000 per second and now stands at a record $15.2 trillion, an amount equal in size to the entire value of all goods and services produced by the nation’s economy in an entire year.

Montanans also know that while driving our national debt through the roof, Obama and Tester's reckless deficit spending binge hasn't delivered the jobs they promised.  After helping President Obama pass his $800 billion “stimulus” spending bill into law, Tester told Montanans “I think you're going to see job creation out of this bill within 90 days,” while his allies in the Obama Administration predicted their deficit-spending binge would hold unemployment below 8 percent.  

But instead, America has lost 1.7 million jobs since Obama took office and Tester began rubber-stamping his big-spending agenda, and America is in its 35th consecutive month of above-8-percent unemployment.

It's clear that Senator Tester and President Obama's shared record of over-spending, over-taxing, over-regulating, and failure to create the jobs they promised will continue to be a major theme of this U.S. Senate campaign.

As Senator Jon Tester continues to pay lip service to the Keystone XL pipeline without lifting a finger to stop his friends in the Obama Administration and the radical environmental movement from blocking it, a new report out of Washington reveals that the radical environmental organization leading the opposition to Keystone XL has funneled more money to Tester's re-election campaign than to any other candidate in the country.  As Politico's Morning Score reported  today:

• SNEAK PEEK – LEAGUE OF CONSERVATION RAISES RECORD AMOUNT FOR CANDIDATES: The League of Conservation Voters Action Fund will announce later today that at the end of 2011 the organization had raised $258,334 for pro-environment congressional candidates this cycle through its GiveGreen program. This is about four times higher than the 2009 number. Two of the top recipients of LCV fundraising are Montana Sen. Jon Tester ($88,571.38) and New Mexico Rep. and Senate hopeful Martin Heinrich ($76,295.23).

Flash back to this League of Conservation Voters press release headline from exactly one week ago:

• “LCV Applauds The Obama Administration’s Rejection Of The Keystone XL Pipeline”

"This is yet another reminder that despite claiming to support Keystone XL, Senator Tester is hypocritically bankrolling his re-election campaign with money from the same anti-job environmental activists standing in the way of these good Montana jobs," said Rehberg spokesman Chris Bond.

Rep. Dennis Rehberg has written to Air Force Secretary Michael Donley and National Guard Chief General Craig McKinley reiterating his support for maintaining the Montana Air National Guard F-15 mission in Great Falls.

Many leaders may be re-thinking the decision to move this mission to Fresno, Calif., as a result of environmental and cost hurdles, Rehberg said in a news release.

"As the effort to move our F-15s to California gets more and more difficult, I'm going to continue to make the case that Great Falls is still an affordable, convenient and — most importantly — time-tested alternative," Rehberg said. "It just doesn't make sense to take a square peg out of a square hole to try and force it into a round hole."

In addition to the significant cost of relocating the current mission from Great Falls to Fresno, officials have recently hinted at concerns related to Fresno's failure to complete its Environmental Impact Statement, he said.

All it takes to draw a reaction from all parts of the political spectrum is a major announcement on a hot-button policy issue. Take this week’s announcement by the White House that it was denying the current application to build the Keystone XL Pipeline to carry crude oil from Alberta to the Gulf Coast. TransCanada is welcome to submit another application with an alternate route, but this week’s announcement may delay an ultimate up-or-down decision on the pipeline until after this fall’s elections.

Reaction to the decision was swift from all corners. All three of Montana’s representatives in Congress support the project and told us they disagreed with the decision, as did Attorney General Steve Bullock and Steve Daines, the Bozeman Republican running for Congress.

Plenty of special interest groups weighed in as well, with varying degrees of hyperbole.

The Young Republican National Federation told us that “President Obama has pandered to the worst instincts of his liberal supporters against American jobs and national security... President Obama has guaranteed that the Chinese will invest in energy resources in Canada.”

The Center for Rural Affairs took the other side and approved of this week’s decision: “We applaud President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton for making a common sense decision that protects both Nebraska and the entire nation,” said Johnathon Hladik, Energy Policy Advocate. “Approving the Keystone XL pipeline without an established route through Nebraska would amount to a failure on the part of our federal government to consider the best interests of the American people.”

The Sierra Club noted that the fight is not over: “Big Oil companies have launched an all-out assault on the president for not doing their bidding on Keystone XL. We will undoubtedly see a barrage of misinformation on Keystone XL from Big Oil in the form of flashy ads attacking the president.”

Friends of the Earth also supported the decision, and praised lots of folks for their role: “Victory belongs to the indigenous communities who first sounded the alarm on the dangers of tar sands extraction. To the Nebraska farmers and Texan ranchers who withstood TransCanada’s bullying to protect their land and water. To the 1,253 people, from college students to grandmothers (including a number of Friends of the Earth members, staff and activists), who were arrested on President Obama’s doorstep urging him to say no.”

The Montana Chamber of Commerce is holding its business days at the capitol Thursday and Friday at the Great Northern Hotel and the State Capitol.

The event, which began early this morning, is an annual meeting that hosts members from across the state.

They discuss a broad range of issues relating to workers comp, health insurance and fiscal condition. Webb Brown, President and CEO of the Montana Chamber, says bringing in a panel to help facilitate discussions and answer questions is very beneficial. Brown also says having the congressional delegation present helps bring a different viewpoint as well.

"You know it really is our opportunity or their opportunity for us to give them a chance to tell us what they like to have us hear. We do have all of our congressional delegation Max Baucus, John Tester, Denny Rehberg. So we're very fortunate to have that," says Brown.

Brown says while registration is up from last year, all of the snowfall may play a part in the actual attendance numbers.