Frontline on PBS recently covered a bizarre story out of the West that might help answer a burning question: Does Citizens United matter?
The Supreme Court handed down the decision in Citizens United in January 2010, which declared that corporations — as associations of individuals — have constitutionally-protected free speech rights under the First Amendment. Political speech is the kind of speech that the courts have most explicitly protected in the past century, and so campaign finance laws that would limit the amount of spending by corporations on political ads (in which they express their political opinions) are therefore unconstitutional.
But what does this have to do with meth labs?
In March 2011, the office of the Montana Commissioner of Political Practices received a box from Colorado law enforcement authorities that had been discovered and seized during a raid on a methamphetamine lab. The files appeared to belong to a nonprofit social welfare organization, then called the Western Tradition Partnership (now renamed the American Tradition Partnership). These documents indicated that the WTP was not functioning as a nonprofit social welfare organization at all; instead, the group appeared to be behaving more like a political action committee. The WTP claimed to not directly support certain candidates and supposedly kept social welfare as its primary purpose.
This is contrary to what the meth lab documents indicate. According to Frontline:
Folders labeled with the names of Montana candidates held drafts and final letters of support signed by candidates’ wives and drafts and final copies of mailers marked as being paid for by the campaigns. The folders often appeared to have had an accounting of what had been sent and paid for scrawled on the front.
Several folders included copies of the signatures of candidates and their wives. “Use this one,” someone wrote in red pen next to a cut-out rectangle on a page with five signatures from one candidate.
Steab, the Montana investigator, said she believed these cut-out signatures were then affixed to fliers from the candidates.
These documents indicate that not only was WTP directly involved in campaigning for candidates, but that the organization even went so far as to coordinate on materials with candidates– an action that is one of the few that remains illegal under Citizens United.
WTP was also the lead plaintiff in a 2010 case against Montana’s strict campaign finance law, which outlawed any spending by corporations on political campaigns. Though the Montana Supreme Court upheld the law, the US Supreme Court threw it out in June 2012 in a per curiam opinion in which the majority refused to review the original Citizens United ruling. In a dissent in which he was joined by Justices Ginsberg, Sotomayor and Kagan, Justice Breyer wrote, “Montana’s experience, like considerable experience elsewhere since the Court’s decision in Citizens United, casts grave doubt on the Court’s supposition that independent expenditures do not corrupt or appear to do so.” At the time of the Supreme Court’s ruling, then-Montana Attorney General (and currently its Democratic governor-elect) Steve Bullock lamented the decision. “This isn’t just about our history,” Bullock told the Ravalli Republic. “Two former secretaries of state and other experts in the field testified that an influx of corporate spending will corrupt the political process and drown out the voices of everyday Montanans.”
After the decision, the WTP funded a newsletter (billing itself as Montana’s “largest and most trusted news source”) that accused Bullock of being soft on sex offenders– even as the WTP claims to be an organization that exists to oppose “environmental extremists.”
The Colorado meth lab documents appear to confirm Justice Breyer’s suspicion that where endless amounts of money can fund campaigns, political corruption is sure to follow. If corporations can effectively buy politicians, how can we be sure they’ll be true to their constituents and the Constitution?
Finally, it’s interesting to note that Montana’s law, a relic of the days when the Copper Kings ruled the state and controlled its politics, comes from the same era in which the United States Supreme Court first articulated our modern understanding of the free speech protections of the First Amendment. While the protection of political speech is supposedly a pillar of our democratic system, Citizens United appears to have undone a century of protection from political corruption.
