Montana may seem like a solidly red state, but its people tend to be pragmatic rather than dogmatic in their views. For instance, Section I of Article IX of the Montana Constitution reads: The state and each person shall maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment in Montana for present and future generations. The legislature shall provide for the administration and enforcement of this duty. The legislature shall provide adequate remedies for the protection of the environmental life support system from degradation and provide adequate remedies to prevent unreasonable depletion and degradation of natural resources. This is not flaming radical stuff; it is a simple recognition that destroying the environment is not in the best interests of Montana residents — although a few wealthy coal barons disagree with that proposition. Overwhelming Popular Support According to Truthout, Montana wants to become the first state to oppose the 2010 Citizens United decision by the US Supreme Court by using a 2026 ballot initiative — an innovative legal maneuver that could be adopted by other states. The idea is wildly popular. A poll conducted last month by a pro-democracy group known at Issue One found that 74 percent of voters in Montana, including majorities of Republicans and Independents, support the ballot initiative. “I haven’t talked to a person yet that doesn’t think that there’s too much money in politics,” Jeff Mangan, a lifelong Montana resident who is the founder and president of the Transparent Election Initiative, the organization behind the proposal, told the New York Times this week. While the governor and business interests claim the ballot initiative will be invalidated by the Supine Court, supporters believe each state has an inherent right to govern the corporations who choose to do business within their borders. If approved, the ballot initiative would revoke the charter of any corporation that fails to comply. Supporters say every state has the right to define corporations as “artificial persons” that lack free speech rights. “I think it’s creative lawyering, and I don’t mean that in a negative way, Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles told the New York Times. The governor and business groups are vehemently opposed to the initiative, but two former Montana politicians — Marc Racicot, who was governor from 1993 to 2001 and a former chair of the Republican National Committee, and former senator John Testor — are working together to promote the idea. Racicot said in an interview the political system had become “rancid” since Citizens United, with billions of dollars paying for an onslaught of attack ads without identifying the source. Most of those who have seen those ads would agree. “The money moves around through these serpentine collections of entities and groups, then it becomes unidentifiable,” he said. Restrictions on political spending have broad public support, Tom Moore, a senior fellow for democracy and government at the Center for American Progress, told the New York Times. “Everybody hates dark money,” he said. Professor Levitt added that even with the ban, special interests would still have an outsize influence. “This wouldn’t change a thing about Elon Musk’s political spending,” he said. Soft Secession Could Montana actually pull this off? Clearly the Supremacy Clause of the US Constitution could be a problem, but, from the very beginning, the states have jealously guarded their individual prerogatives within the federal system. Substack blogger Christopher Armitage this week posted an article that explores what he calls “soft secession,” an idea that suggests a state may, in certain circumstances, decline to participate in federal policies it seems contrary to the best interests of its citizens. He cites the words of Antonin Scalia, one of the titans of conservative thought, who wrote in Printz v. United States that the federal government “may neither issue directives requiring the States to address particular problems, nor command the States’ officers … to administer or enforce a federal regulatory program.” Legal scholars Jessica Bulman-Pozen and Heather termed it “uncooperative federalism,” meaning a state does not have to fight the federal government head-on. Its can simply decline to help, which means that without state assistance, most federal programs will stall or fail outright. The Fugitive Slave Act Armitage cites the personal liberty laws passed by northern states prior to the Civil War that made the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 nearly impossible to enforce. Although the federal statute stayed on the books, it stopped mattering because the states that opposed it refused to carry it out. Another example is state laws decriminalizing marijuana. States legalized it and created licensed dispensaries, at which point the federal prohibition “became a dead letter, because the DEA has no state police to make the arrests. That is the posture that is proven to work — do the thing, in enough places, because it’s the right thing to do, and let the federal government be spread in 1,000x directions. It’s the principles of asymmetric warfare applied to governance,” Armitage explains. “States are also building their own floor under the parts of democracy the federal government has let erode. Ten states now have voting-rights acts of their own that reach past the weakened federal statute, and Colorado counts paper ballots with risk-limiting audits on a system no federal agency touches. On climate, states run their own program. The Climate Alliance’s twenty-four governors speak for about sixty percent of the national economy, and the eleven-state Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative has cut power-plant emissions by more than half,” Armitage reports. Harm Reduction “This is harm reduction. A state that builds its own capacity keeps the choice to leave it idle. While the federal government dismantles the safety net and turns its enforcement power on the places that did not vote for it, those states can stand up their own alternatives and keep their hands off the demolition. A state should never be forced to choose between its own residents and an order it knows to be unlawful.” Soft secession is already underway, Armitage writes. “What remains is the decision to do it more intentionally, as the deliberate and peaceful strategy of dis-empowering bad actors and protecting people from a government that has actively become an existential risk for all of humanity; all while leaving the door open to stitching the country back together when the danger passes.” By definition, corporations are creatures of the states where they are chartered. Don’t the states have the power to regulate the organizations who chose to do business within their borders? It will be an uphill struggle, to be sure. Earlier this month, a federal judge struck down New York’s climate superfund law, ruling that federal law takes precedence. A similar law in Vermont is under attack by the federal government, as well. In the view of MAGA supporters, the doctrine of state’s rights only applies to red states. But Montana is a red state! And attitudes are shifting rapidly as more and more people are being personally affected by the ravages of an increasingly hostile environment. What if instead of kowtowing to the federal government, people simply said, “No, we are not doing that?” That’s when the power of “soft secession” will become real.