Corporate election spending raising heat

The U.S. Senate narrowly killed debate on a bill that could have given Montana more control over corporate spending in elections, a bill one of its co-sponsors praised in a press conference shortly before the vote.

And Democratic candidates for the House and Senate have seized on the issue in their campaigns, something co-sponsor Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., said was not the point of the bill.

“I don’t know if it will pass or not,” he said during the press conference Thursday morning. “I think it should pass.”

The amendment failed to advance for a final vote on a straight party-line vote to end debate, with all “nays” Republican votes and all “yeas” Democrats and Independents.

Many had called the vote on the bill — and on a proposal to make it harder to pay women less for doing the same job as men — a political ploy done to bolster chances in the election year.

“These are bills designed intentionally to fail so that Democrats can make campaign ads about them failing," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said of the Democratic measures.

Meanwhile, Democrats said the same thing about bills in the House, including a bill to circumvent the Affordable Care Act’s requirement on insurance coverage, allowing people to keep insurance that does not meet the requirements of the bill.

"It's a symbol of the continuing dysfunction of Congress, a bill that's going to go nowhere," Rep. Jared Polis, D-Colo., said of the House health care legislation.

That bill passed the House Thursday with Rep. Steve Daines, R-Mont. — the Republican candidate for the Senate seat in this year’s election, voting for it.

Democrats quickly picked up on Daines’ vote Wednesday to continue with that bill instead of taking up the House version of the corporate election spending bill in campaign press releases attacking him and the man running for his House seat, Republican Ryan Zinke of Whitefish.

Montana Rep. Amanda Curtis, D-Butte, who is running against Daines, and former Sen. Max Baucus aide John Lewis, the Democrat facing Zinke, as well as the Montana Democratic Party, put out releases attacking Daines and Zinke for their support of the Supreme Court decisions, Citizens United and McCutcheon vs. FEC, the Democrats say give corporations and the wealthy an unfair advantage in campaigns.

Daines’ office and the campaign of Zinke had not responded before printing deadline to requests for comment the Havre Daily News made this morning.

Tester said Thursday morning that the amendment was not a political ploy.

“There are a lot of amendments that are put up for campaign ads,” he said. “I think this particular issue, Montanans decided a hundred years ago, and, quite frankly I think it’s very, very important to our democracy and I hope it does pass.”

He said the goal of the amendment is to put elections back into the hands of the people, and give Montana the control it took when it passed campaign election laws in 1912.

“Most Montanans probably assume that we already have the right to regulated campaigns, but not any more,” Tester said. “After the U.S. Supreme Court issued its Citizens United ruling and its McCutcheon decision, our campaign finance laws were literally thrown out the window, and that is why we need to amend the Constitution, because right now corporations and third-party groups can dump unlimited amounts of secret money into elections and drown out the voices of regular folks like us. It means the voices of a wealthy few matter more than ordinary middle-class folks, school teachers repair men, plumbers, the list goes on. …

“I have heard people speak on the floor and talk about how this is gonna not allow the gramma that would put a yard sign up in her yard and it’s not going to allow newspapers to run ads,” he added. “The folks that are standing up and saying that are absolutely wrong, and they know they’re wrong, and they’re the ones that are trying to politicize this issue.”

Information from The Associated Press was used in this article.