LIVE: Pete Buttigieg BRINGS DOWN The House in RED STATE!!

The Montana Plan Initiative I-94 proposes that only 'real human beings' can spend money to influence Montana elections, explicitly excluding corporations, trade associations, unions, and dark money nonprofits. It also mandates transparency for individual spending. This initiative is designed to circumvent the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling by defining corporations as 'artificial persons' under state law, thereby allowing the state to impose limits on their political activities. This legal strategy aims to establish that corporate spending is not equivalent to individual free speech.

Meredith Prince details I-94's provisions: 'I 194 would remove the power of artificial persons to spend money to influence Montana elections... In plain English, that means only real human beings could spend money to influence our elections. Not corporations, not trade associations, not unions, and not dark money nonprofits.' Pete Buttigieg elaborates on the legal basis: 'The cleverness of the Montana plan is it flips the script on these corporations that have claimed to have the exact same civil rights that you and I do... a corporation is not the same thing as a person... it falls into a very specific category called an artificial person. And an artificial person under the law only gets to do what the law says it can do.'

Montana has a long history of battling corporate influence, dating back to the 'Copper Kings' and the Anaconda Mining Company in the early 20th century. Citizens successfully passed the Corrupt Practices Act of 1912, which prohibited corporations from contributing to or spending on elections, a law that stood for nearly a century. The Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision, equating money with speech, overturned this and similar state laws, leading to an explosion of unlimited corporate and dark money spending in elections, disempowering individual voters.

Governor Steve Bullock recounts: 'An 1884 election that set Helen as the state capital. William Clark and his arch rival Marcus Daly combined to spend over $90 million in today's money to influence 52,000 votes. That's $1,700 per vote.' He continues: 'voters pass a corrupt practice act of 1912, prohibiting corporations that could benefit from government action from paying or contributing in order to aid, promote, or prevent the nomination or election of any person.' He then explains: 'that Supreme Court case in 2010 called Citizens United... equated money with speech. It overturned decades of settled law and it allowed corporations to spend unlimited amounts in our elections.'

Buttigieg argues that the current political system is broken, leading to policy outcomes that do not reflect the will of the majority. Issues like gerrymandering, excessive corporate influence, and a lack of accountability mean that widely popular ideas (e.g., affordable healthcare, fully funded public schools, higher wages, paid family leave, gun background checks) struggle to become law. This dysfunction fosters cynicism, especially among younger generations who have witnessed repeated policy failures.

Buttigieg states: 'The whole point was to prove that when government does focus on delivering for citizens, you can make good things happen, which is a simple idea, but we're in a season where simple ideas and common sense ideas and even wildly popular ideas have trouble turning into political reality. Mostly because of how broken our political system has become.' He later adds: 'when twothirds of Americans think that we ought to be making the wealthy pay more and not less in taxes, when twothirds of Americans think wages need to be higher... And none of those things happen, that's when you start to get in real trouble.'