Knudsen
HELENA, Mont. – A measure that would keep corporations from engaging in political speech is sufficient and can be put to voters, the Montana Supreme Court has ruled.
The second effort by the group Transparent Election Initiative gives Montanans a clearer issue to decide than the first, the court found last week. It overturns state Attorney General Austin Knudsen’s determination that it violated rules by putting forth more than one issue on a ballot initiative.
BI-9 seeks to label corporations as “artificial persons” and strip their rights to expend money or anything of value to influence the outcome of a vote of the electorate. Its previous version – BI-4 – was stopped by the state Supreme Court in January as too complex.
“Although BI-9 asserts a similar goal of prohibiting artificial persons from having the power to spend money to influence the outcome of elections, it goes about achieving this goal in a different, and more targeted, way than BI-4 had proposed,” Justice James Shea wrote.
The ballot initiative is called the “Montana Plan” and is a project of TEI and founder Jeff Mangan. TEI calls it a first-of-its-kind effort to keep “secret-donor money” out of the state’s elections, and the state Supreme Court has had to rule on it three times this year.
TEI is a group dedicated to fighting against the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which held that corporate spending on political issues is protected under the First Amendment.
Groups like the Montana Mining Association and the Montana Chamber of Commerce are challenging the initiative, saying it violates the free speech rights of corporations, as it would prohibit them from spending money or “anything of value” on political matters.
“If entities’ political speech could be effectively silenced through a simple definitional exercise, nothing would prevent states from eliminating entities’ ability to speak on all manner of subjects,” they told the Supreme Court. “That cannot be right.”
Those complaints will be heard in the event the initiative passes. As worded now, it creates a new section of the Montana Constitution that classifies corporations as artificial persons.
Knudsen said BI-9 gives citizens several different votes – a change to the Constitution, a limit to the powers of artificial persons, the regulation of spending by nonprofits and others and amendment to other constitutional provisions.
Dissenting justices agreed, with Chief Justice Cory Swanson declaring it “staggering in its scope and breadth of constitutional changes.
“The second significant change contained within BI-9 is limitation of all ‘artificial-person powers’ to only those newly defined by the Legislature after passage of BI-9,” he wrote.
“This revocation and restoration provision has fewer moving parts than BI-4, but it still accomplishes the same thing. It removes all constitutional, contractual and common law powers of any artificial person, meaning any non-human organizational entity.
“The constitutional amendment then delegates to the Legislature to determine what those powers actually are.”
