Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Montana. Now that's an unexpected source for business regulation.

Why do you say this?

I ask because, I am from Montana and I often find outside knowledge of Montana consists of "they have an unlimited speed on the highway/interstate" (which hasn't been true for quite sometime) mindset applied to any information about Montana. It is usually viewed as a red state, but it's a different kind of red than what you find on the coasts. Our governor is blue and our state was essentially founded by socialists. Our state is usually pretty vocal on political matters and protecting the public (our most famous and easiest example of course being protection of public lands).

Not OP but I had the same thought as them. I know I was expecting the first state to be WA or CA, or some other heavily/known blue state, not a (somewhat random) midwestern state. If I were to research it further I'm sure it wouldn't come as much of a surprise, but my initial and uneducated reaction was shock.

Montana is considered a Western state, not midwest. I agree it's somewhat surprising, but Montana is dominated (population-wise) by relatively left-leaning population centers. I'd consider it to be a libertarian leaning western state similar to Colorado but without the insanely religious component of Colorado Springs.

I agree with this to an extent. The red has a Libertarian tint, but even the Libertarians in Montana are different. The best way I've been able to identify with it over the years is consider myself an independent.

And without the CA transplants who (I'm generalizing here) lean left to the point where "libretarian" is not a good descriptor for any government they have a meaningful say in.

Montana might be a western state but as far as most people on the coasts (also generalizing) care or know (is there a difference) if you don't have saltwater coastline or a big city you're a backwards flyover state with nothing much going on.

You're probably not wrong about "most people on the coasts" (I'm from WA and live in CA) but I think those of us on the west coast are far less inclined than east coasters to dismiss Western states like UT, MT, WY, NV, CO, etc, as "midwest". I think to the east coast it's often "somewhere over there in the middle" and not realizing how far west they really are, and how similar in many ways the culture is to the Pacific states, particularly the inland areas of said states. The same way I think all those east coast states are "little states somewhere way over there" :)

I work in a city on the east coast. About 1/4th of the people I work with are from or have lived on the west coast.

I notice no difference.

Actually, most of the "transplants" that go to Montana or Idaho are those who are going because they believe the state is "too liberal" or that there's "too much crime".

Sure, but that doesn't mean they don't bring values that don't fit there.

I actually sat next to a woman and her son at a Seahawks game in Seattle; they live in Pocatello, ID but had moved there from Redding, CA a handful of years ago. Some amusing (to me) bullet points from our conversation:

* She wanted to make sure they went to an afternoon game because she didn't want to be in "the city" after dark

* As a reaction to moving to Pocatello, "when we moved to Idaho, I thought WE were conservative, but..."

* She was successful in her career and her husband was a stay at home dad and had difficulty meeting people/making friends as someone not in the workforce and who didn't 'fit in' to the social fabric of non-working folks (Eg, female homemakers).

They might even be more conservative than the average Idahoan, but it's not a binary thing; likely they've got "California values" they didn't even realize they held, but folks in Idaho could spot a mile a way.

The same way (say) cops in populated areas of California might be VERY pro-law-and-order and consider themselves very conservative, but not bat an eye over LGBT issues that might rile up a bible-thumper from the midwest who is otherwise a moderate.

When I think of Montana politics the first thing I remember is this: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/05/2...

For better or worse this makes me think of Montana as a pretty red state unlikely to pass regulation like NN.

Well, it actually dovetails into NN quite well. Montanans do not like outsiders, for some definition of outsider, f'n with them.

Being red isn't the governing factor on which side of NN you fall on. Current FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworce (D) https://youtu.be/Ja6MW94RaIQ?t=3m40s put it nicely.

Yes that was our most recent national claim to fame in politics. Gianforte is not a good representation of Montana politicians. He is a party boy and his campaign was nearly a replica of Trump's in a time of political uncertainty. He went up against a very weak Democratic candidate and a very week Libertarian candidate. That event also took place on the night before going to the polls after most Montanan's had sent in their ballots through the mail. When it boils down to being a red state, you'll see more party line voters. However if you were to sit down with these red staters you'd find they're mighty different.

Just to be clear, the majority of Montana's do not vote by mail. It's just about 1/3 of the population. And only 2/3 of those absentee ballots had been returned when that news hit.

So still ~75% of the population voted with that knowledge and put him in office.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2017/05/25/poli...

The weird thing about ISPs is that whether or not they are effectively a monopoly is location dependent. It's probably safe to assume that a higher than average percentage of people in Montana have access to one or fewer broadband services. I wonder if that factors in.

A pretty solo point. I think that story is more about the candidate than any particular party. Note one of the comments in the article:

Both papers, the Missoulian and the Billings Gazette, issued scathing denunciations of Gianforte.

He did win though, so while there may have been unusual circumstances suggested by other commenters - he had some support of the people of the state.

Because people vote party lines. If your goal is Republicans in office, then a little assault isn't gonna get in the way of that.

There were a lot of votes cast before the incident, so the outcome might have been different had the incident happened sooner.

This is the most salient point -- Montana has one of the largest, if not the largest, vote-by-mail operations in the US, so ballots were probably cast and posted a few days before the election.

Oregon only uses the mail for voting so Montana isn't the largest.

It is not the most salient point. I personally know several folks that still voted for him in person after it happened. Getting a Republican into office was the number 1 priority and pushing down a reporter was hardly crossing a line when they already distrust the media.

Greg isn’t from Montana* and is about as far as you can get from the typical Montanan imho. Curiously though he is an actual hacker.

*He’s a transplant like many who live here including me.

He's from New Jersey -- my alma mater (Stevens Tech) named a building after him; alumni basically rebelled and withheld donations until his name was removed.

Haha wow, well sorry to burst your bubble but he essentially succeeded at the same goal at MSU.

Montana is very purple (and very weird politically). Rural red areas but most of our population centers are wildly blue. Democrat governor, 1 Dem Senator. There's no real religious right, just a libertarian right.

'wildly blue' is incorrect about the population centers. If that were correct the vote would have gone to Trump given how the vast majority of the population is in the cities.

Look at the election results from Missoula, Great Falls, Billings, etc and then compare them to San Francisco (a place actually wildly blue).

I generally assume that Democrats are more concentrated in cities, which generalizes to states with high rural population percentages being Republican.

I don't know why this got downvoted, this is a pretty common theme across America. Look at the Alabama senate race and pretty much every race in North Carolina for examples. This, as well as gerrymandering, has lead to the disproportions in the house and state governments. Democrats being concentrated makes it much easier to have close races in terms of total votes cast per party, but disproportionate representation.

Montana has an interesting history. There were stories that said that Montana statehood was delayed by 25 years due to support of the south during the civil war.

Jeanette Rankin, the first female member of congress, was elected twice, in time to be the sole vote against entering WWI and WWII. She was a pacifist and a Progressive Republican.

So while small in population, there might be more diversity of opinion than you might think.

(Full disclosure: 3rd generation Montana citizen, living the expatriate life in Bridgeport, IL)

Yes! And the history of far left labor movements like the IWW (“Wobblies”) in MT is interesting too.

Butte, for example, has historically been very blue collar, socially conservative / Irish Catholic, and left wing in a “you can’t scare me, I’m sticking to the union” kind of way.

Something like 13% of Missoula County voted Green Party in 2000.

Way I see it, MT has a mix of hippy-left, labor left, and truly moderate right wing politics that make it far more purple than red.

EDIT: Also a multi-generation Montanan with homesteading ancestors.

Sticking to the union is right! While working away from home on a job in Anaconda we were politely reminded that it wasn't that long ago that they hung a guy with a logging chain for crossing the picket line. We were non-union from a few hours away. That was plenty of motivation to finish up and leave town.

3rd generation Montanan, raising the 4th.

The US has forgotten just how rough those labor disputes were. I mean, for example, just how roughly treated striking workers were treated by company goon squads. Infamously, the Ludlow Massacre of 1913.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre

Surprisingly, it's also the only state to require just cause for terminating an employment relationship (not at-will).

Montana has had bad experiences with a lack of regulation in the past. Montana was also the state with corporate political donations limits that went up against Citizens United.

> Montana was also the state with corporate political donations limits that went up against Citizens United.

This is incorrect. Corporations are not allowed to donate to political campaigns, and that's been illegal throughout the US for a very, very long time.

Individuals (like you and me) who are unaffiliated with political campaigns are allowed to make political statements. And we're allowed to spend money to make those statements, as long as we don't coordinate with campaigns at any point. Citizens United ruled that individuals retain this right when they band together in groups to make political statements (again, as long as that group of people remains unaffiliated with political campaigns and does not coordinate with them in any way).

Montana tried to argue that this law didn't apply to state and local elections, but they were struck down, because... well, it was a particularly weak argument for them to make in the first place, from a legal perspective.

"Unaffiliated" is doing a lot of work in that description, as it turns out.

Not really; this area of case law is pretty well-established, going back long before the Citizens United decision.

"The great object of an incorporation is to bestow the character and properties of individuality on a collective and changing body of men." - chief justice Marshall

a few of these decisions to be aware of:

The Rev John Bracken v. The Visitors of Wm & Mary College (7 Va. 573 -- 1790 Supreme Court of Virginia) established that a corporation had the right to reorganize itself, ie, that the people working together for a common cause could hire+fire just like they would if there was a single owner

Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward (17 U.S. 518 -- 1819) established that groups of people could enter into contracts and that they'd be enforceable just as contracts with a "natural person".

Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886) established that the 14th amendment (due process) applied to groups of people organized under a common cause, and not just to individuals. This is followed up in Pembina Consolidated Silver Mining Co. v. Pennsylvania – 125 U.S. 181 (1888) which rather explicitly states "corporations are merely associations of individuals united for a special purpose and permitted to do business under a particular name and have a succession of members without dissolution".

United States v. Auto Workers, 352 U.S. 567 (1957) upheld the ban on corporate campaign funding, but as is so eloquently noted in the dissent, "associations of manufacturers, retail and wholesale trade groups, consumers' leagues, farmers' unions, religious groups, and every other association representing a segment of American life and taking an active part in our political campaigns and discussions" should have "all channels of communication be open to them during every election, that no point of view be restrained or barred, and that the people have access to the views of every group in the community."

Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce (1990) and McConnell v. Federal Election Commission (2003) extended the restriction on campaign funding to also cover advocacy, limiting the speech that could be undertaken by groups of people pooling funds together.

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 844 (2010) overturned the Austin and McConnell decisions. Justice Kennedy: "wealthy individuals and unincorporated associations can spend unlimited amounts .... Yet [under the Austin decision] certain disfavored associations of citizens — those that have taken on the corporate form — are penalized for engaging in the same political speech .... When Government seeks to use its full power, including the criminal law, to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, it uses censorship to control thought. This is unlawful."

My point isn't that it was a strong or weak argument and if it should have been able to stand against Citizens United. Rather, my point was that part of the social and political fabric of Montana for the past century has been one of curtailing excessive political power held by corporations.

The Corrupt Practices Act of 1912 was a demonstration of the shift from corporate control of the state house to one where corporations were viewed very warily. It was recognized that a corporation is more likely to act in its own interest than that of the state or its citizens.

In the decades since then, this has found its way into many pieces of law and the political consciousness of Montana appears to be one that still views corporations through a wary eye. It is recognized that it is the responsibility of the state is to protect its citizens from corporations. Going by http://www.nclc.org/images/pdf/udap/report_50_states.pdf , Montana has fairly strong consumer protection.

So, let me rephrase my original statement... Montana is a state that appears to value protecting its citizens more than corporations as demonstrated by its challenge (the only state that did so) to Citizens United. That Montana is attempting to implement net neutrality should come as no surprise when one looks at the history of the state and its relationship with corporations.

Maybe it's time to re-think your preconceived ideas of Montana.

People don't fit into neat left/right political boxes.

Sadly the US only has two political parties so none of that even remotely matters.

Amusing how a country with a thousand different religious denominations only has two political opponents isn't it?

It may be amusing, but it's a natural result of how voting is done in the US https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=EC7679C7ACE93A5638&v=s7tW...

My perception is that Bullock generally avoids national issues save for his advocacy against Citizens United when he was AG.

I think he’s running

Reply on news.ycombinator.com