May 21, 2025
Hey Indivisibles,
Welcome to our hundreds of new members since our inaugural Hands Off rally 6 weeks ago. Have we got news for you this week!
Mark Your Calendars!
General Membership Meeting
Indivisible Helena will hold a General Membership Meeting on May 28 from 6:30 to 8:00 pm in the Large Meeting Room of the Lewis and Clark Library, 120 South Last Chance Gulch. The Leadership Team that volunteered on April 7 has been busy building the plane as we fly it, and we’ll update you on our progress.
The main portion of the meeting will cover our plans to host the NO KINGS Rally on June 14th. We’ll focus on four major areas, each of which has a team preparing for the rally:
- Program (speakers, entertainment, co-hosts, etc.);
- Logistics (event setup and cleanup, sound system, security, tables, all the little but essential details);
- Communications (legacy media relations and social media networking); and
- Community Outreach (organizing in our community to be at the rally by posting flyers, conducting phone/text banks, leafletting the Governor’s Cup participants, etc.)
We’ll be recruiting volunteers to help in each area. If you can’t make the meeting on the 28th, and want to volunteer, contact us at indivisiblehelena@gmail.com.
No Kings—Saving Democracy from the Billionaires
On June 14—Flag Day—Donald Trump wants tanks in the street and a made-for-TV display of dominance for his birthday. A spectacle meant to look like strength. But real power isn’t staged in Washington. It rises up everywhere else.
No Kings is a nationwide day of defiance. From city blocks to small towns, from courthouse steps to community parks, we’re taking action to reject authoritarianism—and show the world what democracy really looks like. We’re not gathering to feed his ego. We’re building a movement that leaves him behind. The flag doesn’t belong to Donald Trump. It belongs to us. We’re not watching history happen. We’re making it.
On June 14th, we’re showing up everywhere he isn’t—to say no thrones, no crowns, no kings.
Join us on June 14 from noon to 1:30 at Flag Plaza on the north side of the State Capitol Building, 1301 East 6th Avenue in Helena. We have secured the permit to hold this rally. Register for the rally at https://www.mobilize.us/nokings/event/784934/ and we’ll send you reminders as well as ways you can mobilize your friends and family to attend the rally with you to tell Trump, “NO KINGS!”
Trump’s One Big Billionaire Bill is Targeting Public Lands
Everyone should have contacted our congressional delegation last week about protecting programs that many Montanans rely on, including Medicaid, SNAP, and others, that have been targeted for deep cuts just so that billionaires can get more tax cuts. The billionaires would rather have gobs more money than help working families pay for the increasing costs of living, increases caused by billionaires making more money. That’s how it’s worked since the nihilists took over the Republican Party during the Reagan administration. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith had a nice way of putting it: “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”
Sunday night, the main bill passed out of committee with yet more cuts put up by the debt extremists, and the whole bill is supposed to be passed out of the House by this weekend. But before it can pass, we should put pressure on our delegation to strip out the provisions in the bill that relate directly to the protection of public lands and natural resources.
Last week, the House Committee on Natural Resources (HNRC) approved its portion of the emerging 2025 Reconciliation Bill. By statute, budget reconciliation bills are restricted from including policy provisions unless they substantially change the level of spending or revenues. Under the auspices of generating $18.5B in savings and revenue, if passed, the HNRC portion of the budget reconciliation package will:
- sell hundreds of thousands of acres of public lands;
- cut funding for National Parks;
- mandate increased oil, gas, coal and other leases on public lands;
- reduce environmental regulations; and
- prohibit public input in planning.
Sale of Public Lands: The proposed bill authorizes the sale of roughly 460,000 acres of federal public land in Nevada and Utah, some of which is adjacent to National Parks. In addition to forcing land sales, this portion of the bill skirts the usual process of public input into any proposed public land sales and fails to direct revenues from Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land sales toward the purchase of public access or habitat. This legislation opens the door for further privatization of public lands.
Funding Cuts for National Parks: The proposed bill cuts approximately $267 million in funding for our National Parks, mostly for park staffing. And, while it removes vital staffing funds, it proposes adding $150 million for events and celebrations related to America’s 250th anniversary and $40 million to establish a statutory park dubbed by the administration a Garden of American Heroes.
Leases on Public Lands: Multiple provisions would mandate lease sales for oil, gas, mineral, and coal extraction on public lands including in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Wyoming, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Nevada, Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico. Additionally, the legislation would mandate that the Department of the Interior make available at least 4,000,000 acres of federal public lands for leases on known coal reserves. It also lowers the royalty rates paid to the government by developers for oil and gas extraction.
Reduced Environmental Regulations: Certain permitting changes are included. The bill would add an opt-in fee for project sponsors seeking federal National Environmental Policy Act review, including for oil, gas, coal, and mineral projects pursuing permits on federal lands. The fee would allow sponsors to pay 125% of anticipated costs of the environmental review, limit environmental assessments to six months and environmental impact statements to one year. The fee would also make review assessments and statements exempt from administrative or judicial review, preventing advocates from challenging key elements of permitting decisions in court. This pay-to-play scheme would limiting the ability of the public to challenge projects that may have outsized, but under-reviewed environmental impacts.
Prohibit Public Input in Planning: Policy language in the bill would prohibit the BLM from implementing, administering, or enforcing Records of Decision and Approved Resource Management Plans in Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota and Colorado. These plans are the product of extensive public engagement, and state and locally driven negotiations among the variety of interests that are supported by multiple-use BLM lands.
Representatives Zinke and Downing bear some responsibility. While they may be founding members of the Public Lands Caucus in Congress, they have done nothing to demand that any of the above provisions that protect public lands be stricken from this big billionaire bill.
A Call to Action:
This week, we’re going to call Representative Downing again on this bill, but we are going to change our message. Remember, this bill is not yet law and we have to make sure Representative Downing understands how mad his constituents are that he’s willing to sell off our precious public land heritage to his billionaire buddies.
CALL NOW: Tell Representative Downing Hands Off Our Public Lands. Demand that Representative Downing stop enabling these brazen MAGA power plays and pass a responsible budget. (The site refers to cuts to Medicaid, SNAP, and other essential programs, but you can use the same site to send a message to protect public lands.)
This Week’s Must Read Article
Woodie Guthrie, 1943, about the time when he wrote “This Land Is Your Land”
While history may not repeat itself, it sometimes rhymes in disturbing ways. The current billionaire attack on our public environment follows precedent set in the 1940s and 1950s, including in Montana. This land is their land: Trump is selling out the US’s beloved wilderness by Nate Schaefer (a son of Missoula now living in NYC, author of This America of Ours) is the story of a forest service employee who was targeted during the McCarthy era for his political beliefs and actions on behalf of the environment and labor:
“Peterson was fired from the Forest Service in early 1953. He lost his family’s ranch in Montana’s Bitterroot valley (not far from where the show Yellowstone is filmed). Peterson’s wife left him and was committed by her family to an asylum. A judge awarded custody of his three children to the state, placing them in foster care.”
The family’s tragedies did not stop there. Nor did the assault by the rich on our public lands. Read the account, and then respond to our Call To Action above. We won’t allow history to repeat itself, or even rhyme!
Spread the Good News!
Do you have friends, co-workers, and family who want to join Indivisible’s resistance in Helena? Feel free to forward this email to them. Or better yet ask them to sign up: all they need to do is send an email to indivisiblehelena@gmail.com. Then we’ll remain in touch with them through this newsletter.
Solidarity 🌹
Indivisible Helena