Is Montana Holding the Key to Undoing Citizens United?

Mother Jones; Drew Angerer/Getty Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily. In early January, Jeff Mangan, the founder of a small nonprofit called the Transparent Election Initiative, was preparing to launch a ballot initiative to reduce the flow of money into Montana politics when his email inbox pinged with a message from the director of a canvassing firm. TEI’s measure, dubbed the Montana Plan, took aim at the rich players dumping millions of dollars of dark money into elections and tipping the scales in their favor. So the content of the pitch took Mangan aback. The director offered to help collect the tens of thousands of voter signatures Mangan’s group needed to qualify its initiative for Montana November ballot—for $21 to $23 dollars per signature. If TEI signed on, the cost just to get on the ballot could reach over $850,000, more than double TEI’s total fundraising in 2025. That price tag virtually guaranteed the nonprofit would have to find a wealthy donor to bankroll their effort aimed at…curbing the influence of wealthy donors. Mangan forwarded the email to his chief of staff. “This is why we are doing this lol,” he wrote. Instead of paying, TEI spent months recruiting and training 711 volunteers who collected over 45,000 valid signatures from voters across the state. Now their initiative will appear on Tuesday’s ballot as I-194. It would stop private corporations, nonprofits, unions, and other groups from spending money to elect a Montana political candidate or pass a state ballot initiative. Billionaires’ spending on elections increased 160-fold between 2010 and 2024. Mangan is Montana’s former commissioner of political practices, an appointed position overseeing election integrity and transparency. So he knows well that politics has a price of entry. He also knows that that price has risen sharply since 2010, when the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United that corporations had a First Amendment right to spend unlimited money in elections, as long as they didn’t coordinate with official campaigns. The decision sent a flood of cash into political contests. And it heralded a new era of so-called “dark money,” as corporations and affluent individuals passed their dough through nonprofits to hide its origin, then funneled it to super PACs that could spend unlimited sums on election advertising, from TV ads to social media videos to mailbox flyers from groups with inscrutable names. Billionaires’ spending on elections increased 160-fold between 2010 and 2024, according to a report from Americans for Tax Fairness. During the last presidential election, billionaire families accounted for 1 in every 6 dollars of political spending—a total of $2.6 billion, mostly in support of Republicans. Montana, like every state, has been dealing with the ramifications. This past primary season alone, four PACs pumped $4 million dollars into three dozen legislative races in Montana—running attack ads in low-profile contests in the kind of small towns “where strangers get noticed,” the Montana Free Press reported. “It’s both that there is a lot of money, but it’s also this very specific style of very ugly politics that is felt differently in a lot of these smaller communities,” TEI Chief-of-Staff Liana Keesing explains. This new era of turbocharged political spending is immensely unpopular. In a May Politico poll, 72 percent of Americans across both parties agreed there was too much money in politics, a number that has stayed steady for years. But reformers have struggled to challenge the system without violating Citizens United, the decision that infamously treated money as speech and corporations as people. The Montana Plan offers them a way forward. While the measure wouldn’t undo Citizens United, it would essentially sidestep it—at least in Montana. It relies on states’ long-established authority to decide the list of powers granted to corporations chartered in-state. For over a century, states trying to attract business have declined to limit these powers, allowing companies chartered there to do anything as long as it was legal. But the Montana Plan would remove one power from the list: their ability to spend money in elections. It wouldn’t stop individuals—say, an Elon Musk or George Soros—from pouring millions of their personal wealth into independent political ads in Montana. But it would force them to put their names on their spending Tom Moore, the senior fellow at the left-leaning Center for American Progress who first conceived this strategy, argues that the Montana Plan makes Citizens United irrelevant, because without the power to spend in politics, it doesn’t matter whether corporations have the right to. The distinction is a bit academic, but Moore offers an analogy: “Neither you nor I have the power to flap our wings and fly,” he explains. “If the Supreme Court came to us and said, ‘Hey, congratulations, you’ve got a constitutional right to fly,’ it doesn’t change that underlying reality that we don’t have the capacity.” The Montana Plan would apply to “artificial persons,” an umbrella term that includes nonprofits and unions as well as for-profit companies (the initiative contains a carveout for publishers of “bona fide” news and commentary). It wouldn’t stop individuals—say, an Elon Musk or George Soros—from pouring millions of their personal wealth into independent political ads in Montana. But it would force them to put their names on their spending, since they could no longer funnel the money through donor-obscuring nonprofits. Will the courts accept this circumventing of Citizens United? Hawaii has already offered a test case. In May, Gov. Josh Green made a splash when he signed a bill similar to the Montana Plan, drawing lawsuits from the right-leaning Grassroot Institute of Hawaii and the pro-business US Chamber of Commerce who argued the new law violated the First Amendment. The Montana Republican Party formally opposes the Montana Plan. So does the Koch-aligned political advocacy group Americans for Prosperity, and several local chambers of commerce and industry associations. On the other side, former Montana governors Steve Bullock (a Democrat) and Mark Racicot (a Republican) support the initiative. New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Biden-era Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg have also endorsed the effort. “The Montana Plan offers a practical, lawful solution to tackle one of the biggest issues underlying everything else we care about: reclaiming democratic control and putting power back in the hands of regular people, not special interests,” Buttigieg posted on X in April. Whether Moore’s idea succeeds in Montana or Hawaii or another state, his ultimate goal is to get his theory in front of the Supreme Court and challenge the justices to rule against state authority to define—and limit—corporate powers. “We think there are good reasons why the Supreme Court will not love it, but will love the consequences of overturning it even less,” he says. “They would have to dismantle foundational corporation law that’s been around for 200 years.” And if the Supreme Court one day issues a ruling overturning the Montana Plan, despite popular opposition to big money in politics? “People have said, if the Supreme Court overturns this, that might be the kick in the pants that America needs to get an anti-Citizens United constitutional amendment,” Moore says. As for Mangan? He hopes to use the ballot initiative to build a bipartisan movement for campaign finance reform—one that returns to an earlier, more “grassroots, helping-your-neighbor” type of politics, he says. “Citizens know that’s what’s missing today, and that’s the reason that we’ve been successful is because we’ve been able to get them excited about it again.”