Buttigieg endorses Montana Plan, announces Butte town hall
Jordan Hansen
(Daily Montanan) Transparent Election Initiative announced this week that former U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg has endorsed the “Montana Plan” which seeks to keep corporate money out of politics through a ballot measure.
Buttigieg will come to Butte for a town hall on May 17, the release from the Transparent Election Initiative said. The event will start at 1 p.m. and the location will be announced later, the release said.
Initiative I-194 needs 30,000 signatures by June 19 to be on the November ballot. It started as a state Constitutional initiative, but now is a statutory initiative, which would change Montana state law – not the Constitution.
The initiative would create a new law to prohibit corporations, which are known in law as “artificial persons,” from spending money on political candidates or ballot issues in the state. It’s a direct challenge to the federal Citizens United ruling, a case where the U.S. Supreme Court said the power to spend money in elections is tantamount to free speech.
“Montana has a history, going back to the days of the Copper Kings, of dealing with and standing up to concentrated power and wealth, distorting democracy, and the Montana Plan is a way to change all of that under our Constitution and under the legal system that already exists, to change the trajectory of politics by making sure that there isn’t that kind of corporate spending,” Buttigieg said in a video accompanying the release. “The basic principle is simple, that no corporation or any other kind of outside group should be able to distort decision making with massive wealth and dark money.”
Butte was chosen intentionally for the event, harkening to its important place in the country’s labor movement and what can happen when power, money, and politics become deeply intermixed.
“There is no more fitting place than Butte to have this conversation,” Jeff Mangan, former Montana Commissioner of Political Practices and founder of the Transparent Election Initiative said in a release. “Montanans know what happens when economic power becomes political power. From the Copper Kings to the Anaconda Company, Butte has lived through what it means when elections answer to corporations instead of citizens.”