Montana high court says 'Screw You' to U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling

The Billings Gazette reports on last Friday's Montana Supreme Court decision overturning (5-2) a lower court’s ruling and reinstating the state’s century-old ban on direct spending by corporations for or against political candidates.

A secretive, slippery conservative political group from Colorado now known as American Tradition Partnership, had challenged the Montana law after the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) 2010 Citizens United decision hugely expanded the political rights of corporations to influence US elections, a decision which has already greatly affected the US presidential campaign by virtue of SuperPAC activities in Iowa.

And how does Montana's (elected) high court expect to get away with challenging the SCOTUS Citizens United decision?

“Citizens United does not compel a conclusion that Montana’s law prohibiting independent political expenditures by a corporation related to a candidate is unconstitutional,” Chief Justice Mike McGrath wrote for the majority. “Rather, applying the principles enunciated in Citizens United, it is clear that Montana has a compelling interest to impose the challenged rationally tailored statutory restriction.”

Even the dissenting opinion dissed the U.S. Supreme Court!

"While I recognize that this doctrine is firmly entrenched in law," Nelson began, "I find the concept entirely offensive. Corporations are artificial creatures of law. As such, they should enjoy only those powers—not constitutional rights, but legislatively-conferred powers—that are concomitant with their legitimate function, that being limited liability investment vehicles for business. Corporations are not persons. Human beings are persons, and it is an affront to the inviolable dignity of our species that courts have created a legal fiction which forces people—human beings—to share fundamental natural rights with soulless creations of government. Worse still, while corporations and human beings share many of the same rights under the law, they clearly are not bound equally to the same codes of good conduct, decency, and morality, and they are not held equally accountable for their sins. Indeed, it is truly ironic that the death penalty and hell are reserved only to natural persons."

Take that, Anthony Kennedy and Fat Tony Scalia...

Steven Rosenfeld noted in a perceptive Alternet post that the Montana Supreme Court's own ox seems to have been gored by Citizens United.

The Court pointed out that judicial elections were particularly vulnerable to anonymous spending by large corporations. Montana’s 2008 Chief Justice race had advertising from all candidates costing about $60,000, it noted. “It is clear that an entity like Massey Coal, willing to spend even hundreds of thousands of dollars, much less millions, on a Montana judicial election could effectively drown out all other voices.”