Scott Sales

Scott Sales (born July 26, 1960) is an American politician of the Republican Party.

He is a state senator in the Montana Senate and also serves as the president of that body.

He previously served in the Montana House of Representatives, including a term as minority leader and as speaker of the House.

Sales is the first person, to be elected by his peers, to serve as the presiding officer of both bodies of the Montana Legislature.

Sales is from Douglas, Wyoming.

Sales was born in Douglas, Wyoming, in 1960, and grew up near Boise, Idaho.

He graduated from Boise State University in 1982, with a bachelor's degree in industrial business.

He then worked for Hewlett-Packard and then a technology start-up, Extended Systems.

Sales moved to Bozeman, Montana, in 1992, when Extended Systems established an office in the city.

When the company was in the process of being acquired in 2001, by a larger public company, Sales sold his stock in the company and remained in Bozeman.

At the time Sales was selected by his Republican colleagues in 2006 to serve as speaker of the House, the Billings Gazette described him as "easily one of the body's most conservative members."

He is a supporter of the Tea Party movement, favors budget cuts and tax cuts, supports "right-to-work" legislation, and expanded gun rights.

As of 2007, Sales raised a small number of cattle and grew about 60 acres of hay near Bozeman, although he did not "consider himself a farmer or rancher."

Sales was elected speaker of the Montana House of Representatives in 2007.

At the time Sales became House speaker, he was relatively inexperienced; he assumed leadership of the chamber in just his second term and had never served as a committee chair.

As speaker, Sales clashed with Governor Brian Schweitzer, opposing his budget proposal.

Sales presided over a House controlled by Republicans by the thinnest of margins: during his term, there were 50 Republican representatives, one Constitution Party representative (Rick Jore) who was mostly allied with Republicans, and 49 Democratic representatives.

The highly contentious legislative session ended in disarray, as the Legislature failed to pass a state budget, as required by the state constitution.

In the ensuing special session, the budget was approved after Governor Schweitzer negotiated a compromise with several moderate House Republicans, effectively circumventing Sales.

Sales praised Sarah Palin in 2009, saying: "I think she should be part of the discourse and part of the process."

Sales criticized the Affordable Care Act and in the Montana Legislature voted against accepting the act's Medicaid expansion, stating, "There is no constitutional guarantee to healthcare."

Sales spent three terms in the Montana House of Representatives; his district, State House District 68, covered the northern part of Gallatin County and most of Broadwater County.

In his first term, Sales introduced 10 pieces of legislation, only one of which became law.

Among the measures introduced by Sales as a freshman legislator was H.B. 281, a bill to eliminate the office of the commissioner of higher education; the bill died.

Sales was House minority leader in 2009, during a session when the House was evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans.

During his opening speech in 2009, Sales read out eight quotations and attributed them to Abraham Lincoln, although Lincoln in fact never said them.

Once the spurious origin of the quotations were brought to light, Sales said that he had "got them off the Internet" and had no intention to mislead.

Sales raised a point of personal privilege in the House to apologize.

He was ineligible to run for a fourth House term in 2010 due to term limits.

He unsuccessfully ran for Gallatin County Commission in 2010, being defeated by incumbent commissioner Joe Skinner in the Republican primary election.

In 2011 Sales was formerly the Montana state director for Americans for Prosperity, a Koch brothers-founded advocacy group.

In an op-ed, Sales criticized U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulations to combat climate change (calling them a "power grab") and expressed strong opposition to a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions.

In 2012, his occupation was given in the Helena Independent Record as "private investor."

In 2015, Sales successfully introduced legislation, which he co-drafted the year before, to raise the speed limit on highways such as Interstate 90 to 80 mph.

Also in 2015, Sales voted against privacy legislation introduced by Senator Daniel Zolnikov to restrict the state government's digital collection and use of individuals' data.

The bills specifically would have prohibited the state or local governments from using automatic license-plate readers and would have required authorities to obtain a search warrants in order to obtain electronic communications held on electronic devices or by Internet service providers.

Sales stated that the bill would "encumber law enforcement from some activities that I don't think are abusive at this time" and were "solutions to problems that don't exist in Montana at this point."

As of 2016, Sales was "more or less retired."

Sales has been described as an "outspoken conservative" and an "ultraconservative."

In November 2016, Sales won an internal election among state Senate Republicans to be the president of the Montana Senate in the 2017 election.