Montana Opens New Front In Battle Against 'Dark Money'
A bipartisan group of Montana politicians may have found a way to eliminate corporate 'dark money' in politics that does not violate the U. S. Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling
An epic battle is underway in Montana, where citizens are working to provide an off-ramp to the oppressive corporate domination of American elections.
A nonprofit group called the Transparent Election Initiative (TEI) hopes to place a first-of-its-kind initiative on Montana’s ballot this year to alter the definition of a “corporation” in the state and bar corporate spending in state and local elections.
The initiative, known as the Montana Plan, would circumvent the pitfalls posed by the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. There, a narrow 5-4 majority held that the Federal Election Commission (FEC) could not limit independent political expenditures by corporations, labor unions, or other collective entities because doing so constitutes a prior restraint on free speech under the First Amendment.
OpenSecrets, a non-profit group that keeps track of money in American politics, reports that independent expenditures by outside groups skyrocketed by more than 28-fold after the Citizens United ruling — from $144 million in 2008 to $4.2 billion in 2024. Much of the money is spent by PACs with innocuous-sounding names on advertising.
The problem is obvious: since the funders are anonymous, voters have no way of knowing exactly who is sponsoring the ad and why.
For its part, it is not clear where TEI is getting its money to wage the initiative campaign, and TEI founder Jeff Mangan failed to return requests for comment.
Reports filed with Montana’s Campaign Electronic Reporting System do not list individual donors. However, they do list debts exceeding $10,000 owed to the Cochenour Law Office in Helena, MT.
Attorney Matt Cochenour submitted the original TEI ballot initiative last August. He formerly served as Montana’s Acting Solicitor General, spent 13 years as Assistant Attorney General, and worked as a Senior Tax Counsel at the Montana Dept. of Revenue.
Creatures Of The State
The premise of the Montana Plan is that corporations are creatures of the state, which holds the power to define their form, limits, and privileges. TEI essentially wants to alter the legal contract that permits corporations to do business in Montana.
Specifically, the initiative bars “artificial persons” — including corporations, non-profits, trusts, and trade associations — from “contributing anything of value to candidate elections, supporting or opposing political parties, or supporting or opposing state or local ballot issues.” A violation would be punished by “forfeiting all privileges to do business in Montana.”
TEI won a victory earlier this month when the Montana Supreme Court unanimously dismissed — as premature — a challenge to the initiative brought by a battalion of industry lobbyists, including the Montana Chamber of Commerce, the Montana Mining Association and the Montana Petroleum Association.
A National Strategy
The Montana Plan has garnered national attention as a possible way to end the infusion of corporate “dark money” into local, state, and federal elections.
The Center for American Progress, a left-leaning public policy research organization, is calling upon all states to perform a “corporate power reset.” The Center argues that the states, and only the states, have the power to define what constitutes a corporation. It argues that states can “drain corporate and dark money from American politics” without overturning Citizens United.
More Money Than People
It’s no coincidence that this battle is taking place in Montana.
