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waiting for the Supreme Court to hand down decisions on a whole handful of whoppers — the Affordable Care Act, the Arizona "Papers, Please" law — it was something the Court didn't do this week that may be the most overlooked matter of all. It has before it a case from Montana whereby that state's supreme court upheld Montana's 100-year-old ban on corporate campaign contributions in the face of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in the Citizens United case. The Court's action — or, more accurately, its non-action — does not bode well for the future of the Montana statute. If the Court again decides to put off the case, probably until the fall, then the best result that supporters of the Montana law can hope for is probably that the law will be overturned later rather than sooner, and perhaps with some ringing dissents that are loud enough to shake the foundations of reasoning that undergirds the reasoning in Citizens United. Governor Brian Schweitzer of Montana is not optimistic. So I rung him up this afternoon.

"Now, what the Supreme Court is saying is, 'Yeah, you can bribe an American official,' " Schweitzer told me. "What we're saying in this country now is that if you're an American corporation and you want to bribe an official somewhere in the world, do it in America, where it's legal.

"And then they say, you know, 'Free speech. Money is speech,' " he continued. "No, money is power. Don't screw around here. Let's just tell it the way it is: They're buying power. You'll see guys that have a business, and they employ a thousand people and they think they're pretty big stuff, and they'll say, 'Yeah, this ought to be okay, a corporation is a person. We want to function as a full person.' So they say, 'Yeah, Citizens United, that's a good thing.'

" 'You are a dumbass, sir, and I'll tell you why you are. Because the pharmaceutical companies and the military-industrial complex, and the insurance companies, they'll step on you like a big. The $500,000 that you can afford to put into the kitty to induce someone to vote your way? You are a piker.' That's the equivalent of buying someone one drink and thinking you're gonna sleep with them. It doesn't work that way."

The Montana law dates back to 1912, when the state's politics were pretty much owned by two copper barons, one of whom, William Clark, literally paid state legislators in the legislative chambers to be elected to the U.S. Senate, which found him so utterly corrupt that it refused to seat him. Schweitzer looks around and sees a universe of William Clarks. "I think we're probably a little more corrupt than we were with the Carnegies and the Rockefellers, and the oil trusts and the banking trusts," he says. "The big guys, the big dogs, are going to own everything from the White House to the courthouse. Now, we will have two political parties — the corporate party and the corporate-light party. In Montana, we had a bellyful of it long before the rest of the country did."

The history of how Montana came to frame this law, as obviously relevant as it is to our current political condition, is likely to leave the majority of the Supreme Court unimpressed. The framework of the new Gilded Age may be too solid to be brought down by laws enacted to prevent the depredations of the last one we had.

"We're trying, you know. We thought in 1912, when we went first, that we think we ought to have elections by people, and people ought to decide who represents them," Schweitzer says. "We went 100 years thinking that was a pretty good system and now the U.S. Supreme Court says, 'No, you've been breaking the law, breaking the Constitution.' Silly us. We thought having a democracy was more important than having the most corrupt political system in the world. Now, the United States Supreme Court says, 'No, we prefer corruption over democracy.'

"I think the wheel's already greased. I think that big old wheel, the United States Supreme Court, they're going to roll right over Montana, and say, 'What were you people thinking? You farmers and loggers and truck drivers and miners? Why did you think you could run your own government without corporate corruption? Don't you understand? Times change. Corporations run this country.' "

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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