Corporate financing would puzzle founders
"These people are my enemies – fierce, bitter, implacable. But they are your enemies too. As they crush me today, they will crush you tomorrow. They will force you to dwell in Standard Oil houses while you live, and they will bury you in Standard Oil coffins when you die."
The speaker quoted above, copper speculator F. Augustus Heinze, was stoking the anxiety rampant in Montana after the death of Marcus Daley, the most trusted of the Montana "Copper Kings," and the sale of his mining empire to the John D. Rockefeller-owned Standard Oil Company.
Fear of big, controlling outside interests, real or imagined, is in the DNA of the Montana body politic.
Throughout our history and into the present day, Montana politicians on both the left and right, and particularly on the extremes, offer themselves as the defenders of the freedoms, rights and resources of vulnerable Montana against threats, private or public, from powerful forces outside our borders.
Heinze was one of the first in a long tradition of Montana political figures who never forgot how to use, or misuse, the arousal of this core instinct of Montana populism.
Fear of the power of big corporations led Montanans to gather signatures to place an initiative on the ballot in 1912 to ban corporate contributions to Montana political candidates.
Predictably I-118 was approved that year by an overwhelming vote of 44,337 to 13,645. It has been the unchallenged law in our state until a few weeks ago.
The Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision of the U.S. Supreme Court is a mortal threat to Montana's 1912 people-made law, and similar laws in 22 other states.
The decision, dealing directly with laws banning corporate independent expenditures in political campaigns, affirmed that the legal personhood of corporations entitles them to the same First Amendment right to freedom of expression as is afforded human beings.
And, since in an earlier decision, Buckley v. Valeo, the high court ruled that money is speech, the effect of the recent Citizens United ruling is that not only is it constitutional for wealthy individuals to spend unlimited amounts of money on their own political campaigns, but that now corporations have the individual constitutional right to directly weigh into any political campaign, federal state or local, and spend as much as they want to.
The First Amendment now means that, without limitation, money talks. Montana's 100-year-old ban on corporate money in our political campaigns is dead ripe for challenge, its legal underpinning stripped away by the Citizens United decision.
The inequality of this is breathtaking. A multi-billion dollar, multi-national "corporate citizen" can buy unlimited political air time while many living, breathing "common citizens' couldn't afford a high powered megaphone.
While I to some extent agree with the "living document" concept of necessarily applying the Constitution to the times, it is unfathomable to me how the Constitution's drafters, in some Godlike fashion, are interpreted to have created life in corporations, and that "citizens' who happen to be incorporated may live for unlimited human lifetimes, and be eternally entitled to buy far greater influence in our political system than mere mortals who are the flesh and blood posterity of the "We the peopleÉ" who wrote the Constitution in the first place.
Our founders, people who had real faces and real names like James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, would have shown real puzzlement methinks in recognizing as their posterity the likes of Standard Oil, Microsoft, General Electric and the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway.
Bob Brown, former Montana Senate President and Secretary of State, is currently a Senior Fellow at The University of Montana, Maureen & Mike Mansfield Center.