Former House District 75 rep. Greg DeVries, who lost the 2020 Republican primary to current state Commerce Secretary Marta Bertoglio, is seeking the legislative seat again as a Libertarian.
The 56-year-old Jefferson City-based painting contractor filed to run on Feb. 20, returning to Jefferson County politics with a bold main objective: to “almost completely eliminate state taxes, while still fully funding programs,” he said in an interview.
That goal reflects a slight shift from his previous stint. Running in 2018 on devout Christian values and limited government, DeVries beat Gregg Trude by 10 points in the primary before besting Basin lawyer Bryher Herak by a slightly larger margin in the November election.
Contributing a semi-regular column to The Monitor, rep. DeVries emerged as a lightning rod, upsetting some constituents with overtly religious views and inspiring more than 50 letters to the editor. At a Monitor forum, he asserted that many mental health issues stem from spiritual problems, which a Montana City reader said “shows his ignorance.”
In the 2019 legislative session, he introduced bills to end compulsory school attendance and amend the state constitution to define personhood as beginning at conception. Neither made it far. On public schools, former Montana poet laureate Melissa Kwasny argued that DeVries held “dangerous views”.
Concern about those views inspired Bertoglio, a U.S. Air Force veteran, business owner, and school board chair, to run for HD 75 after reading DeVries’ Monitor columns. She beat him handily in the primary, gaining 70% of the vote – and giving DeVries a useful insight.
“It became clear to me,” he said, “the Republicans in this district don’t want my kind of Republicanism.” As a Libertarian, he advocates liberty, property rights, and small government, but stipulates that people should “always be under the authority of God’s Word in their freedom.”
Bertoglio went on to win the 2020 general election and served as HD 75 rep. until last June, when Gov. Greg Gianforte named her Commerce Secretary. As her replacement, the County Commission selected Whitehall craftsman and former school board trustee Mark Reinschmidt, who has filed to run as a Republican. Patrick Sullivan of Clancy has filed to run as a Democrat.
Spearheading DeVries’ campaign against these two foes is his tax cutting plan, which involves GoFundMe-style crowdsourcing: citizens would visit a state donations website to choose which government functions to help finance.
“If you move it to that system voluntarily, giving where you want your money to go, and move it away from coercively extracting it from people, you’ll see a pure reflection of what the people want from the government,” DeVries explained.
Asked about the risk that such a system might fail to generate adequate government funding, he asserted that such thinking “besmirched” Montanans’ character.
He argues that voters with no children in public school – the childless, the elderly, those with homeschooled or private-schooled kids – should be able to opt out of property taxes allocated to state education. “The people who want and use public education should be the ones who are paying for it,” said DeVries.
Montana’s public schools, which face a $100 million maintenance and infrastructure deficit, receive roughly 30% of their funding from property taxes. DeVries remained unconvinced that reduced property tax payments would hurt public education. “It’s not undermining something to not pay for it,” he said.
DeVries proposed a similar tax exemption for voters without kids enrolled in public schools in 2019, but it failed in process. In all, he sponsored four bills during his lone legislative session. Only one, outlining a change to insurance filing procedures, became law. He voted no on several popular bills, including one that directed coal tax payments toward rural revitalization.
During the 2019 legislative session he described abortion as “a plague on Indian culture and the genocide against your own children.” Facing public pressure for the comment, he ended up apologizing to the state’s Native American officials.
He later told The Monitor that he regretted not standing his ground and that the genocide comparison was fair. Though strident in his Christian ideals, DeVries shies away from the label Christian Nationalist.
“I don’t want a Christian prince,” he said, adding that his faith remains central to his governing philosophy. “I don’t follow and agree with the idea that church and state, the way people think of it today, need to be separate.”
Every law, DeVries explained, is “a reflection of somebody’s religion, somebody’s moral system.” His view is that Christianity offers the best path. “A society will have either Christ or chaos,” he said.
DeVries plans to refuse campaign donations and, if he wins, his state salary. “It’s a large amount of money that all comes from the pockets of Montanans, people in the district,” he said.
If he’s able to defeat his opponents in November, DeVries would consider it a mandate for the ideals of God. “It must mean enough people want me to exercise that discretion,” he said.
