A new lawsuit aims to stop a ban on corporate political giving in Montana before it begins.
Montana voters this week overwhelmingly voted to pass a ballot measure prohibiting “artificial persons” — including corporations, nonprofits, trusts and other entities doing business in Montana — from spending to influence elections in the state. It’s set to go into effect on Jan. 1, 2027.
The Institute for Free Speech, a conservative nonprofit that is often critical of efforts to constrain political spending, announced Thursday that it had filed a federal lawsuit challenging the ban on behalf of the Frontier Institute, a politically active Montana think tank that is not legally required to disclose its donors.
“Montana cannot require people to surrender their First Amendment rights simply because they join together to make their voices heard,” Owen Yeates, senior attorney at the Institute for Free Speech and lead counsel in the lawsuit, wrote in a statement.
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“This law attempts to accomplish indirectly what the Constitution expressly forbids: silencing organizations that engage in political advocacy,” Yeates added. “Calling censorship a restriction on corporate privileges doesn’t make it constitutional.”
Montana is the second state to pass a corporate political giving ban. In May, Hawaii Gov. Josh Green, a Democrat, signed a bill banning corporate, nonprofit and union political spending, which the Institute for Free Speech is also challenging.
The effort is part of a novel legal strategy crafted by Tom Moore, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. He’s the former chief of staff to Ellen Weintraub, the former Democratic Federal Election Commission chairperson that President Donald Trump fired — illegally, she said — in February 2025 after more than 22 years on the independent commission.
Moore’s theory rests on corporations’ “power” to spend in elections rather than their “right.” Moore’s metaphor is that the Supreme Court may tell a person they have the right to fly, but they ultimately do not have the power to flap their arms and fly.
“The right to do it and the capacity to do it are two entirely different things,” Moore told The Washington Sun. “It doesn’t matter what a court says about it; they can’t issue any words that give you that capacity to fly. If you don’t have the capacity, you don’t have the capacity. And the people of the state of Montana have said overwhelmingly that we do not grant these corporations the capacity to spend in politics.”
With the looming implementation deadline, the Institute for Free Speech case, which is pending in U.S. District Court for the District of Montana, Helena Division, could move fast. But this is only the start of a larger effort to implement similar restrictions in states across the country.
“This is not built as a messaging bill. This is not built to make the point that we don’t like Citizens United,” Moore told The Sun, referencing the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision that allowed corporations, unions and certain nonprofits to raise and spend unlimited amounts of money to advocate for or against political candidates. “It’s built to win.”
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