ACSBlog

by Jeremy Leaming

The Montana Supreme Court recently upheld the state’s century-old prohibition against corporate financing of elections, providing a striking rebuke to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 opinion in Citizens United v. FEC.

In Citizens United the high court ruled 5-4 that corporations have First Amendment rights equivalent to persons, and therefore can funnel their expenditures into politics. Citizens United overruled long time federal regulations of corporate campaign financing.

Montana’s high court, with two members dissenting in Western Tradition Partnership, Inc. v. State of Montana, said the Citizens United opinion does not nullify the state’s Corrupt Practices Act, enacted in 1912. The Montana campaign finance regulation was invalidated by a lower court state judge, citing Citizens United.

Writing for the Montana Supreme Court majority, Chief Justice Mike McGrath said the state had never lost a “compelling interest to enact” the law. “At the time,” McGrath wrote, “the State of Montana and its government were operating under a mere shell of legal authority, and the real social and political power was wielded by powerful corporate managers to further their own business interests.”

The chief justice continued that today concerns of “corporate influence, sparse population, dependence upon agriculture and extractive resource development, location as a transportation corridor, and low campaign costs make Montana especially vulnerable to continued efforts of corporate control to the detriment of democracy and the republican form of government. Clearly, Montana has unique and compelling interests to protect through preservation of this statute.”

Jeff Clements, general counsel of Free Speech for People, a public interest group devoted to overturning Citizens United, lauded the Montana high court’s opinion, writing, “Corporations are not people. The Framers understood that. We are proud to stand today with the State of Montana to vindicate the Framers’ intent and to defend our democracy.”

By Steve Sanders, who teaches Sexuality and the Law, Family Law, and Constitutional Litigation at the University of Michigan Law School.

Rick Santorum, the former Pennsylvania senator who currently sits near the top of the Republican presidential field, raised eyebrows over the weekend for comments to NBC’s Chuck Todd on same-sex marriage. It’s old news, of course, that Santorum opposes such marriages (he has compared them to child abuse and bestiality). What was noteworthy about these latest comments was Santorum’s casual observation that, under the sort of federal ban he supports, not only could new marriages not be performed, but all existing same-sex marriages would be nullified. 

This comment largely disappeared into the rivers of hype and frivolousness coming out of this year’s Iowa caucuses. Nonetheless, it gives us the opportunity to think seriously about the difference between marriage creation and marriage nullification, and whether they differ as matters of civil rights and liberties. I address this topic in a forthcoming article in the Michigan Law Review titled, “The Constitutional Right to (Keep Your) Same-Sex Marriage.” 

If a federal constitutional ban on same-sex marriage were approved, Santorum was asked, “What would you do with same-sex couples who got married? Would you make them get divorced?” He replied, “Well, their marriage would be invalid. I think if the Constitution says ‘marriages are this,’ then people whose marriage is not consistent with the constitution….” At that point, he literally shrugged. (See the video here.)

Granted, Rick Santorum is no one’s constitutional scholar. Still, it is stunning when someone who is being taken seriously as a presidential candidate (at least for this week) literally shrugs at the idea that the federal government might unilaterally void more than 130,000 perfectly legal marriages. After all, as a federal court observed in 1949, the “policy of the civilized world, is to sustain marriages, not to upset them.” Imagine the indignities and the hellish disruptions to lives, children, and property rights that Santorum’s policy would create. 

Then, ponder the fact that right now we have laws in a majority of states that do pretty much the same thing.