By the Board of Beyond Party – Montana First
We, the founding board members of Beyond Party – Montana First, have accumulated among ourselves several centuries of political experience, equally divided between the Democratic and Republican parties. But never have we witnessed a situation quite like the current state of Montana politics. Both major political parties are experiencing deep internal fissures. The Democratic Party has fractured over the U.S. Senate race, while the Republican Senate President and Attorney General made a last-minute bid to keep two of their own most effective legislators off the ballot.
Yet within that gloomy picture can be detected glimmers of a brighter future that Beyond Party is committed to pursuing.
Let’s start with the effort to remove Llew Jones and Steve Fitzpatrick from the November ballot after their successful primary elections. First a district court judge and then a 5-member panel of the Montana Supreme Court halted this deeply undemocratic maneuver. In another case, another district court judge found several provisions of the Montana Republican Party bylaws (including a loyalty oath requirement) contrary to Montana law and to what the judge called “small-r republicanism fundamental to the United States and Montana Constitutions.” Nothing could more clearly exemplify the value of an independent judiciary to a constitutional republic. Nothing could argue more persuasively for the passage of C-I 132, to keep our judicial elections free of party politics. Beyond Party strongly endorses that measure.
Meanwhile, the current travails of the Montana Democratic Party arose from a number of sources, beginning with Seth Bodnar’s decision to run for the U.S. Senate as an Independent. With no well-known Democrats having filed for the seat, Senator Steve Daines and Kurt Alme essentially guaranteed there would be none by their last-minute bait-and-switch manipulation of that race. This turned the Democratic Senate primary into a dark money free-for-all, which resulted in the nomination of a candidate no one in the party knew, with little chance of winning in November, and with most seasoned Democratic leaders lining up behind Bodnar’s Independent candidacy.
Regardless of how any individual voter might feel about Seth Bodnar, the fact that highly capable candidates like he and Mike Eisenhauer have added Montana to the growing list of states with credible Independent candidates is in itself a hopeful move “beyond party.”
If, as we expect, legislation is introduced in the 2027 legislative session to prevent repetition of anything like the Daines-Alme maneuver, Beyond Party will be mobilizing bipartisan support for such legislation.
This would not be the first time in Montana history that the corruption of our republican political principles, combined with the remarkable resilience of democracy, has led to a cross-partisan course correction.
In the 1899 session of the legislature, when U.S. senators were still elected by state legislatures, the copper baron William A. Clark simply bought a Senate seat by bribing legislators left and right. So blatant was his graft that even the millionaire’s club that the Senate had become refused to seat him. His dazzling corruption, though, added momentum to the growing movement for a constitutional amendment requiring the direct election of Senators. Montana now joined a handful of other states in an ingenious work-around that had been pioneered in Oregon.
The way it worked here was that the 1911 session of the legislature placed a straw poll for the Senate seat on the 1912 general election ballot and bound itself to abide by the results. In November, 1912, Democrat Thomas Walsh outpolled two other candidates and the Legislature kept its word in January, 1913 by unanimously electing Walsh to the Senate.
Walsh went on to become one of the Senate’s leading corruption fighters, and Montana passed a Corrupt Practices Act that included a ban on corporate contributions to political campaigns. That law remained on the books for exactly a century, until the U.S. Supreme Court struck it down in the wake of its 2010 Citizens United decision.
Now Montana citizens are once again pioneering democratic reform by proposing I-194, the “Montana Plan,” aimed at disabling one of the main props of the Citizens United decision. Beyond Party supports the “Montana Plan” as a responsible step in the direction of reversing the widespread decay of our political system unleashed by Citizens United.
In the same spirit, we will support bipartisan legislation to prevent last-minute manipulation of primary ballots. We support C-I 132 to keep our judiciary independent of partisan politics. And we are encouraged by the effort of capable Independent candidates to move our politics beyond the stranglehold of our increasingly dysfunctional two-party system.
Daniel Kemmis – Beyond Party Board Chair
Mae Nan Ellingson – Vice Chair
Joel Krautter – Secretary
Mike Halligan – Treasurer
Bob Brown
Frank Garner
Marc Racicot
Mary Sexton