Groups sue state over election laws
Two grassroots organizations have filed
suit in Lewis and Clark County District Court claiming the state’s
Commissioner of Political Practices wrongly charged them with
violating Montana’s election laws on financial disclosure.
In their 58-page complaint filed Nov.
24, Western Tradition Partnership (WTP) and Montana Citizens For
Right To Work (MCRW) named Commissioner of Political Practices
Dennis Unsworth, Montana Attorney General Steve Bullock and the
county attorneys in Lewis and Clark County and Cascade County.
WTP and Champion Painting, of Bozeman,
won an earlier lawsuit naming Unsworth and Bullock on Oct. 18. The
victory overturned Montana’s 1912 Corrupt Practices Act, which
prohibited corporations from making independent political
expenditures.
Montana’s law came into conflict with
federal law after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled earlier this year in
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and OK’d corporate
and union spending on political ads for or against candidates.
Helena District Court Judge Jeffrey
Sherlock ruled the Montana’s 1912 Corrupt Practices Act
unconstitutional, noting that similar bans in Wisconsin and
Minnesota have already been declared unconstitutional.
State charges
Three days after Sher lock’s ruling,
Unsworth issued a 43-page statement charging WTP and the Coalition
For Energy and Environment (CEE) with violating state
campaign-finance laws on numerous occasions.
Unsworth cited testimony from former
WTP employees and flyers that he claimed demonstrates direct
political advocacy. He also accused WTP of creating a “sham
organization” — CEE — to hide its activities.
Following a two-year investigation,
Unsworth concluded that WTP had been involved in 19 Montana
legislative races in 2008, including the House District 3 race, in
which Mick Holm, D-Columbia Falls, lost to Dee Brown, R-Coram, and
the House District 8 race, in which Cheryl Steenson, D-Kalispell,
defeated Craig Witte, R-Kalispell.
Unsworth also cited a WTP PowerPoint
presentation called “WTP 2010 Election Year Program Executive
Briefing,” which he said “appears to be targeted to Montana
donors.” The program called for spending $77,000 on primary races
and $460,000 in the general election. A much larger program for
federal races targeted 15 Senate races and 30 House races with a
total projected cost of $8.2 million.
According to Unsworth, the
presentations for both programs claimed the following advantages:
“Corporate contributions allowed,” “No contributions limit,” and
“It’s confidential.” Notes on the Montana program included:
“There’s no limit to how much you can give,” “Finally, we’re not
required to report the name or the amount of any contribution we
receive,” and “You can just sit back on election night and see what
a difference you’ve made.”
Unsworth claims WTP tried to hide some
expenditures by attributing them to CEE, but “it is highly unlikely
that thousands of slick, oversize, full-color, glossy,
professionally designed and printed campaign flyers could have been
mailed out to registered voters in 13 or more ‘targeted’ Montana
legislative districts for the amount of contributions and
expenditures reported by CEE — less than $12,000,” he said.
Local election
WTP played a role in this year’s House
District 4 election, in which Will Hammerquist, D-Whitefish, lost
to Derek Skees, R-Kalispell. In a 6-by-10-inch glossy flyer mailed
to homes in the Whitefish district, WTP accused Hammerquist of
“plans to raid school funds.”
The flyer cited an Oct. 7 Whitefish
Pilot article in which Hammerquist said he wanted to re-direct
money from the state’s coal-tax trust fund that currently is
invested in out-of-state businesses to Montana businesses in order
to stimulate the local economy.
In the flyer, WTP claimed Hammerquist’s
plan would take money away from school districts in order to
“create Montana’s own version of Obama’s failed ‘stimulus’.” The
flyer did not mention Derek Skees, but it advised readers to call
Hammerquist and provided his phone number.
WTP also mailed a newsletter to HD4
residents signed by WTP executive director Don Ferguson claiming
Hammerquist had “flatly refused” to fill out WTP’s campaign survey
and “repudiate his past support for radical greens’ high-cost,
tax-hiking, job-killing agenda for Montana.”
“Should Gang Green succeed in
installing more of their puppet politicians in power in Helena, the
results will be more efforts to block even the most responsible
energy development, more lost jobs, and blocked access to public
lands — and more assaults on private property rights as well,”
Ferguson said.
Ferguson also noted that “Republican
Derek Skees has pledged 100 percent support for high-paying jobs
and affordable energy for Montana.” An enclosed copy of the survey
noted that Skees was correct on all 16 survey questions, and a form
on the back solicited donations to WTP.
Hammerquist works for the National
Parks Conservation Association as the Glacier National Park program
manager. He has played an active role in trying to stop coal mining
and oil and gas development in the North Fork of the Flathead River
drainage, including in Canada.
Grassroots
In its own words, WTP is “a grassroots
organization whose primary purpose is to assist Americans to
‘Rediscover America’s National Treasures’ by promoting responsible
natural resource development, private property rights, and multiple
use of, and access to, public lands.”
WTP was founded in May 2007 by former
Republican U.S. Represen tative for Montana Ron Marlenee and former
Mon tana legislator John Sinrud. The group reportedly has ties with
several groups, including its co-plaintiff against the state, MCRW,
a right-to-work group headed up by Christian LeFer, of
Kalispell.
Sinrud, a 1998 Montana State University
graduate, where he was president of the College Republicans, was a
Republican state representative for Bozeman from 2001-2007 and
chaired the House Committee on Appropriations. He moved to the
Flathead Valley and replaced George Culpepper as government affairs
director for the Northwest Montana Association of Realtors in June
2009.
Sinrud attends some Whitefish planning
board and city council meetings. In this year’s election, he spoke
in favor of Constitutional Initiative 105, which has passed and
will ban realty transfer fees, an idea past Whitefish city
councilors have discussed as a revenue source. Opponents of CI-105
claimed significant money was spent by real estate interests in
Chicago to promote the initiative, meaning out-of-state
corporations were trying to amend the Montana Constitution. Sinrud
left WTP in November 2008.
According to its Web site, WTP’s
legislative agenda includes halting governmental takings without
compensation, property tax relief for responsible natural resource
developers, streamlining regulation of forest-fuel reduction
projects, extending a “tax holiday” on energy and resource
development, prohibiting “venue shopping” by environmentalists,
making the losers pay for environmental lawsuits, and letting
legislators review pollution standards set by “unaccountable state
bureaucratic agencies.”
Sues state
In their 11-count complaint, WTP and
MCRW claim that some Montana election statutes are unconstitutional
because they are “impermissibly vague, overbroad” and infringe on
free speech rights. They cite the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in
Citizens United as saying that “independent expenditures and the
corporate form pose no threat to the electoral process.”
The complaint claims that Unsworth’s
labeling of WTP as a “political committee” places an “onerous
burden” on people who want to advocate a political opinion. It
cites the case where Unsworth ruled an East Helena church had
formed an “incidental political committee.”
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals,
however, overturned U.S. District Court Judge Donald Molloy, who
ruled last year in support of Unsworth’s complaint. The appeals
court said state regulation of the Canyon Ferry Road Baptist
Church’s “negligible” expenditures in support of a 2004 state
ballot initiative defining marriage would cause “fatal problems of
unconstitutional vagueness.”
WTP and MCRW also claims the way
Unsworth’s charges were made against them violated the groups’ due
process rights. The process and procedures “provide no meaningful
opportunity to defend against a complaint or to cross-examine
persons or materials used by the Commissioner of Political
Practices.”
Unsworth’s allegations that the “flyers
are illegal,” that WTP “engaged in money-laundering,” and that CEE
was a “sham organization” were released to the public before WTP
could respond, the complaint points out. Furthermore, Unsworth’s
lengthy investigation meant WTP “has had to conduct its political
speech and activities in Montana for two years under a cloud of
possible state persecution.” It could take two more years for the
Office of Political Practices to conclude its investigation of
other allegations against WTP, the complaint notes.
Perhaps most fundamentally, the
complaint states, “’Speech’ protected by the First Amendment to the
United States Constitution includes ‘political speech.’” As such,
state laws that attempt to regulate disclosure and registration of
free-speech rights “must pass ‘exacting scrutiny,’” which Montana
laws fail to do.
Other cases
WTP’s and MCRW’s case is not the only
lawsuit claiming the state’s campaign-finance laws are
unconstitutional. Montana Shrugged, a Tea Party organization in
Billings, got help from the James Madison Center for Free Speech,
in Terre Haute, Ind., in filing a lawsuit against Unsworth, Bullock
and the Yellowstone county attorney in U.S. District Court on Oct.
28.
Bullock responded by saying the lawsuit
is “part of a coordinated, national effort to dismantle campaign
and election laws” and “to tell voters they have no right to know
who’s influencing elections.”
The Office of Political Practices
recently reported a successful outcome in another case. The office
settled its lawsuit against Montanans In Action on Nov. 10, four
years after Unsworth initiated an investigation of the group. He
claimed the group, which had supported three ballot initiatives in
2006, was backed by Howard Rich, a New York real estate developer
and prominent supporter of Libertarian causes.
Montanans In Action’s chairman, Trevis
Butcher, said his group had done nothing wrong but agreed to settle
because it was tired of the lengthy legal battle. The group agreed
to disclose the source of the $1.2 million it spent supporting the
ballot initiatives, and Unsworth agreed to lower the penalty
assessed against the group to $75,000.