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In late May, the Montana Chamber promoted an op-ed urging people to oppose The Montana Plan I-194. This is one of two responses from TEI and The Montana Plan I-194.
The Montana Plan Doesn't Silence Anyone
The Montana Chamber of Commerce, joined by the Kalispell and Billings chambers, has an op-ed running in papers across the state urging opposition to I-194, the Montana Plan. Set it next to the letters real Montanans have been writing in - making the case for the measure in their own names - and it reads like what it is: three trade associations speaking for their largest members. But it's a serious statement from serious organizations, and it deserves a serious answer. Here's ours.
The chambers open with a big number: 300 billionaires spent more than $3 billion on the 2024 elections. Keep that number in mind, they say. We agree, keep it in mind. But here's what makes that very big number even worse: it's only the part we can see. Those billions got reported, with names attached. The bigger danger is everything that didn't, such as money routed through nonprofits, shell companies, and allied committees, so that by the time that mailer hits your mailbox, you can't possibly find out who paid for it. We have no idea how much rode in alongside it. And those hidden channels, the nonprofits, and the shell companies are exactly the entities The Montana Plan stops from spending at all.
I-194 is a change to Montana's corporate law. That means it can only reach what corporations do. The other half of the problem, wealthy individuals routing money through super PACs, runs on different law, and it's being challenged by different people on different grounds. That fight matters, but it isn't this one. I-194 does one narrow, concrete thing: it stops Montana from handing its own creations, corporations and other state-chartered entities, a political checkbook funded with other people's money.
That's the distinction the chambers need you not to notice. The Montana Plan doesn't quiet a single Montanan. Every business owner, every employee, every rancher and shopkeeper keeps every right they have: to speak, to give, to organize, to spend their own money on any race they choose. What changes is who's doing the talking: a person, on the record, instead of a company bank account.
Take the chambers' own example, the family restaurant that wants to back a local levy. Nothing in I-194 stops that owner. You decide what to pay yourself; take a little more out as income, and it's your money, the same as money for a new truck or your kid's tuition. Spend it on the levy as yourself. For nearly every small business there's no tax penalty for doing it that way, because political spending was never a business write-off to begin with. The only thing that changes is that a person speaks, not a storefront.
A small business is itself a state-chartered entity, so under The Montana Plan it loses political-spending power too, but that costs the owner nothing. She controls the money; she can take it out and spend it herself, as a citizen. No one at a billion-dollar corporation can do that. You can't walk into the company treasury and pull out a campaign budget, because it isn't yours to take, it belongs to the shareholders and the customers. So the chambers' "silenced business" isn't a silenced person at all. It's a corporate treasury, other people's money, that today can be spent as if it were one person's speech. The Montana Plan ends that, and silences no one. Montana has done this before: the 1912 Corrupt Practices Act barred corporate treasury spending in elections, not any Montanan's own voice. I-194 draws the same line a century later.
So consider who wrote this. Three chambers of commerce made their case in the voice of the corner café and the family ranch, but on this question, they don't speak for the corner café. The mom-and-pop hardware store doesn't have a treasury big enough to move an election, and its owner can speak freely either way. The little guy isn't who loses anything here. The large members are. "Don't silence small business" simply sells better than "don't touch our biggest members' political spending."
Read I-194, all of it, as the chambers suggest. Then ask the question they're hoping you'll skip: when a corporation spends in your election, whose money is it, and who decided to spend it? The Montana Plan's answer is simple: people should speak in politics, not corporate treasuries. When it passes, every dollar spent in Montana's elections will trace back to a person, disclosed, and freely given. That's a far better system than the one we have now.
The Transparent Election Initiative
The Montana Plan I-194
Jeff Mangan, Founder
Written by
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