Montana Chamber of Commerce endorsements can't be trusted

The Montana Chamber cannot be trusted when it comes to Montana Supreme Court candidate endorsements.

The Montana Chamber of Commerce board of directors will formally endorse candidates in the 2024 Montana Supreme Court elections. Sadly, they have a penchant for endorsing extremely partisan, unqualified candidates over highly qualified Justices. Lucky for us the Chamber’s Supreme Court picks haven’t been winning. 

This year may be no different. There are two important elections for the Montana Supreme Court on the ballot in November – one for chief justice and one for a justice seat, both open due to retirements. Judge Jerry Lynch and Cory Swanson are running to succeed the chief justice, and Judge Katherine Bidegaray and Dan Wilson are running for the justice seat.

What the Montana Chamber doesn’t tell their membership or you about their supposedly fair endorsement process is they have already spent thousands of dollars advocating for the extreme politically partisan candidates – Swanson and Wilson – even before making their endorsements official. Swanson and Wilson both share the same extreme partisan leanings and are professionally and personally connected to last election cycle’s unqualified losing hyper-partisan candidate James Brown. 

Voters are already seeing Chamber-backed advertising filled with lies, half-truths, and obfuscations. These ads are expensive. Out-of-state corporate and special interest-funded political action committees with fake names pour money into them to mislead voters. 

For example, Montanans for Fair Taxes is funded by out-of-state pharmaceutical companies, tobacco companies, uber-wealthy political extremists and Montana Chamber money. The same is true for another shady group hypocritically called Montanans for Judicial Accountability.

It’s a scheme cooked up by a group of partisan political hacks.   

Here’s how it works. A partisan hack creates a generically named PAC that accepts money from a special interest account filled with tens of thousands from out-of-state corporations, wealthy political extremists and the Montana Chamber. Then, the partisan hack creates more misleadingly named PACs and fills them with the tainted Montana Chamber money. 

Next, negative and misleading text and email messages, direct mail pieces and Facebook ads barrage you and our fellow Montana voters, maligning and denigrating very well-qualified non-partisan judges with lies, half-truths and nasty pictures. It’s disgusting and should be questioned. Voters have seen through this smoke screen in the past. And, you should see through it again in this election. 

Only you decide who to support in the upcoming Montana Supreme Court elections. Let’s choose the most qualified candidates with decades of Montana legal experience as attorneys and jurists, like Judge Lynch and Judge Bidegaray. 

We need experienced Supreme Court justices who are impartial, can’t be bought off, adhere to the Constitution, back the blue and eschew politics and partisanship. And let’s be very clear, Montana voters and Chamber members are being misled by dishonest partisan endorsements from the unethical Montana Chamber of Commerce. 

Jayson O’Neill is former director of the Western Values Project and previously worked with the Gov. Brian Schweitzer administration. He lives in Helena.