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Months ago, before Montana’s constitutional abortion rights measure, Constitutional Initiative 128, was certified to appear on the November ballot, an anti-abortion source made me a prediction.
In a political landscape shaped by the end of Roe v. Wade, he said, opposing abortion has become a liability for Republican politicians as they seek reelection. So if CI-128 were to make it on the ballot, he continued, he expected most of the opposition to come from a grassroots element of the conservative political scene: churches, faith leaders and conservative Christian policy groups.
With the Nov. 5 election around the corner, that source turned out to be pretty spot on. As I reported this week, individual pastors, church congregations, the lobbying arm of the Montana Catholic Conference and the Montana Family Foundation have in recent months helped form a coalition working to oppose CI-128 with an explicitly faith-based rationale.
Some of the most vocal members of that opposition movement are hyping up the power of the Christian vote. If enough church-goers who believe in opposing abortion turn out, they argue, CI-128 will fail.
“There’s an opportunity here for Christians to apply our faith,” said Missoula pastor Mark Pritchard in a recent sermon posted on his congregation’s website, Church at The Gates. “If we showed up, this thing would be over tomorrow.”
It is difficult, if not impossible, to check the math on that claim. According to the 2020 U.S. Religion Census, about 378,000 people in Montana said they were affiliated with some religious group. That’s more than half of the number of Montanans who voted in the 2020 general election, but national research makes it clear that having a religious affiliation doesn’t always mean someone opposes abortion.
In fact, 2024 findings from the Public Religion Research Institute show that most people who identify with a broad swath of religious denominations support abortion access in all or most situations. In the course of reporting this week’s story, I heard from Christian pastors who wholeheartedly reject the idea that their faith demands opposing abortion rights.
“We just really believe in the right to make personal and private decisions about one’s reproductive health,” said Lisa Harmon, senior pastor at Billings First Congregational Church. “Especially from a Christian theology, Jesus modeled this deep respect for human dignity and autonomy.”
For its part, the group backing the initiative, Montanans Securing Reproductive Rights, says its research shows the majority of Montanans support some kind of abortion access protections.
Still, some of the loudest voices in Montana’s faith-fueled opposition movement have access to a powerful pulpit. Time, and more reporting, will hopefully help us track how that messaging strategy will impact CI-128’s outcome at the polls next month.
READ MORE:
From the pulpit, abortion initiative opponents urge congregations to vote against CI-128.
—Mara Silvers
3 Qs for
Earlier this week, Montanans for Election Reform — the committee pushing for the passage of Constitutional Initiatives 126 and 127 — posted up at Missoula’s Imagine Nation Brewing to field questions from locals about how their proposals would change primary and general elections. MTFP spoke with western regional organizer Eric Buhler for a few minutes to find out what’s on voters’ minds as they weigh these constitutional amendments ahead of Nov. 5. His comments have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
MTFP: These initiatives could mean big change for voters in Montana, with CI-126 proposing a top-four primary with all parties on a single ballot and CI-127 requiring a majority vote to win the general election. What’s the most common question you’re getting from voters about these initiatives?
Buhler: The most common question is probably “What’s the most common question?” People are just kind of wanting to get a sense of where things stand. They comment on how easy CI-126 was to grasp, and how CI-127 took a little bit to wrap their head around, which is the feedback we’ve gotten from the very beginning. CI-127 does take a little bit of conversation. When they got their ballot, CI-126 made sense, but [with] CI-127 they wanted to have conversations, ask their friends questions, do some research.
MTFP: Why do you think that’s the case? On its face, CI-126 seems like it has a lot more going on with what the ballot looks like, what federal and statewide offices it applies to, how many candidates advance to the general, while CI-127 just says “certain offices must be decided by majority vote.”
Buhler: CI-127 brings up things that [voters] haven’t thought about a lot — what are the consequences, the unintended consequences? That’s something they haven’t thought through a lot. CI-127 has language that leaves this to the Legislature, so they can’t really commit to the unintended consequences when there’s still a piece that the Legislature has to secure later on. That either makes them feel confused or nervous that we’re putting this, CI-127, out there that actually instructs the Legislature to take one more step. There’s the confusion of, “Does this give the Legislature power to pick the winners and losers?” and we’re helping them understand that no, this actually constrains the Legislature to pick a system that helps us find the winners if there’s no majority.
MTFP: Montanans for Election Reform has also fielded criticism from initiative opponents for getting millions in contributions from national groups like Article IV — money you all have argued is critical in cutting through messaging from other campaigns to communicate with voters. How effective do you think those efforts have been at this point?
Buhler: I think the message has gotten out. There’s still an untouched number [of voters]. The final two weeks, that’s all we can do. But I really think a large portion of Montanans have either encountered us out signature gathering, have had conversations with us over the summer or leading up to Election Day. There seems to be some good feedback that they’ve heard about it, they’ve already voted, they made their decision.
A lot of voters really want that one-on-one [contact] to say, “Here’s who I am, here are my values, here’s my party. How will this impact that? That’s ultimately what I really care about.”
—Alex Sakariassen
Wildlife Watch 🐻
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced this week that Grizzly 399, perhaps the most famous grizzly bear in the world, died Tuesday evening after being struck by a vehicle traveling through Snake River Canyon in Wyoming.
The 28-year-old sow’s identity was confirmed via her ear tag and microchip, according to USFWS. The whereabouts of a yearling cub with her at the time are unknown, though the cub is believed to be uninjured.
Grizzly 399, frequently photographed with litters of cubs over the past two decades, was as close to a celebrity as an animal can be, drawing scores of visitors to Grand Teton National Park eager to lay eyes on the bruin. The National Parks Conservation Association deemed her “the world’s most-photographed bear,” and she was the subject of multiple books.
This week’s death announcement quickly garnered the attention of wildlife advocates and media outlets around the world. Publications ranging from National Geographic to The Guardian to People have written about 399’s death.
When 399 emerged from her den last year with a cub, dubbed “Spirit” by wildlife photographer Thomas Mangelsen, she became the oldest known living grizzly in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem with a cub. She gave birth to 18 known cubs during her lifetime, according to reporting by Wyofile, and in 2020 emerged from her winter den with four cubs, an extreme rarity.
Also known as the “Queen of the Tetons,” Grizzly 399 played an outsized role in conversations surrounding grizzly bear conservation.
Park County Environmental Council wrote in a Facebook post that “her remarkable life, marked by resilience and adaptability, inspired countless people worldwide.”
“For almost three decades, she navigated the challenges of her wild existence, thriving in a landscape increasingly shaped by human activity,” PCEC wrote. “To honor her legacy, we must prioritize wildlife conservation and mitigation measures to prevent future tragedies like this and the many others that happen every year around the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and here in Park County.”
NPCA Northern Rockies Connectivity Program Coordinator Allison Michalski said in a statement that her death is “a stark reminder of the responsibility that humans have in making sure wildlife can safely move across large, connected landscapes.”
“As visitation to national parks and gateway communities continues to grow, we must continue to invest in on-the-ground solutions that reduce vehicle collisions with wildlife and ensure the safety of drivers who live, work, and recreate on these lands,” she said.
According to USFWS, an average of 3.3 of Greater Yellowstone grizzlies are killed in vehicle collisions each year.
—Amanda Eggert
Off Limits 🚫
As we reported last month, the Montana Legislature has shifted its longstanding public access policy for communications produced as legislators, staffers and lobbyists draft bills. The change, based on a June court ruling, means the “junque files” that were previously considered public records are now partly shielded from inspection unless individual lawmakers choose to waive a newly articulated “legislative privilege.”
Like my colleagues at MTFP and other news outlets, I routinely examine those files in an effort to understand the agendas motivating proposed Montana laws — agendas that are not always visible once drafted bills are introduced for formal public debate. As such, I’ve been very curious about what the new rules will and won’t let us see as we head into next year’s legislative session. Last month, I requested a handful of junque files in an effort to find out.
One file I asked for was for a bill request by Sen. Wendy McKamey, R-Great Falls, which has asked legislative staff to draft a bill that would, according to its short-form title, “Provide property tax exemption for wireless infrastructure.”
Similar bills, sometimes prepared in coordination with industry groups, are fairly common legislative fodder. Next year, as lawmakers respond to fallout from the state’s historic 2023 residential property tax spike — a situation caused partly by how the state’s tax system shifted the tax burden off some large businesses — I expect those sorts of proposals to draw significant scrutiny from the public.
In years past, requesting the bill draft’s junque file would have been an easy way to get a bit of early detail on this sort of proposal. This year, though, the version of McKamey’s bill request form produced by legislative staff redacted key information — both a brief description of what the senator wants the bill to do, as well as what appears to be contact information for someone with whom she has directed the staff bill drafter to consult.
It’s important to stress that, with this bill not yet even drafted, there is plenty of legislative process between here and it becoming a law — including fiscal analysis, committee hearings, floor debates and review by the governor. McKamey or another proponent may use portions of that journey to address the obvious questions about what the bill would do, where the idea came from, who would benefit and who would pay more to cover its costs. (She didn’t respond to my inquiries about the bill’s intent via phone and email Thursday.)
The reality of Montana’s pressure-cooker 90-day legislative sessions is that the Capitol is awash in ideas, with more bills put up for consideration — 1,698 in 2023 — than any sane person can keep track of. Amid that deluge, even small barriers to public access can make it significantly harder for journalists, watchdog organizations and interested citizens to keep bills that deserve tough scrutiny from slipping through the cracks.
—Eric Dietrich
Following the Law ⚖️
Montana’s lawyer conduct court, the Commission on Practice, recommended this week that the Supreme Court suspend Attorney General Austin Knudsen’s law license for 90 days, saying the attorney general and staff he supervised ignored Supreme Court orders and made disparaging remarks about the judicial system while representing the state Legislature in a highly public dispute with the state judiciary.
A decision on that recommendation now falls to the Montana Supreme Court — though, as of midday Friday, five of the high court’s seven justices had recused themselves from determining Knudsen’s penalty. Chief Justice Mike McGrath, also a former attorney general, and Ingrid Gustafson are the only justices not to recuse themselves, meaning that district judges empaneled as replacements will determine the outcome.
The practice commission found that in 2021, while representing the Montana Legislature in a dispute over judicial branch records, Knudsen and his staff refused to observe orders from the Montana Supreme Court while accusing the justices of “misconduct,” “actual bias,” “misstating facts,” “lacking jurisdiction,” and “making veiled threats and attacks on (Knudsen’s) integrity.” In one case, the commission found, Knudsen personally accused the Supreme Court of issuing an order “inaccurate almost to a word.”
“No attorney licensed to practice law and armed with its privileges and responsibilities, particularly the chief legal officer of our state, charged with the duty to defend any elected official and the laws of our state, can attack other elected officials of our state with impunity, in apparent total disregard for the Rule of Law,” panel chairman Randall Ogle wrote in the commission order.
Knudsen now has 30 days to make his case to the high court. Meanwhile, he remains a qualified attorney and is, by appearances, likely to be reelected Nov. 5, as has every Montana attorney general since 1942 who has sought a second term.
Montana’s Constitution requires that the attorney general be “an attorney in good standing admitted to practice law in Montana who has engaged in the active practice thereof for at least five years before election.”
During the practice hearing, Knudsen, who did not write all of the language cited by the commission himself but was supervising the attorneys who did, acknowledged some of the wording may have been too strident.
“If I’m being really honest, in hindsight I think a lot of things could be done — could have been done different here, and probably should have been done different here,” he said. “If I had this to do over, I probably would not have allowed language like this, so sharp, to be used.”
The attorney general denied that his behavior or the behavior of his staff violated the Montana Rules of Professional Conduct.
The original investigator in the case, attorney Dan McLean, had recommended dismissing the case against the Knudsen out of concern that punishing the attorney general would also undermine public trust in the judiciary. Knudsen indicated this week that he preferred that conclusion.
The Commission on Practice concluded that not holding attorneys accountable was the true threat to confidence in justice.
—Tom Lutey
Viewshed 📸
Among the wealth of extraordinary photographs featured in reporter Rob Chaney’s four-part series on the energy future of Montana’s coal country, which MTFP published this week, I keep coming back to this one, by Missoulian photographer Ben Allan Smith.
If you look at it glancingly, or long enough, it registers as almost purely graphic, an abstract arrangement of uniform lines operating entirely in a visual language of shape and shading. But look again and it reveals itself as an example of photography doing something that’s hard for words alone to do: illustrating the scale of the MTSUN solar farm near Billings.
As is the case with much of the industrial energy infrastructure of southeast Montana, you can’t comprehend the project’s vastness by driving around its perimeter, or down that dirt service road traversing this image. You have to get some distance — provided in this case by a camera-equipped drone — to do that. And sense of scale is critical to Chaney’s ambitious investigation of the past, present, and possible futures of the communities that sit atop the largest coal deposits in the Lower 48 states.
It requires a hard-to-find perspective to report the biggest pictures without getting lost in the details. The series does just that, even as it brings the challenges and opportunities of one of the largest and most consequential energy transitions in state history into cuttingly sharp focus.
READ MORE: “The Future of Coal.”
—Brad Tyer
Highlights 🔆
The Great Falls Tribune, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2000 and once employed dozens of reporters as it covered North-central Montana, is now down to a single editorial staffer. Matt Hudson wrote this week about how a local philanthropist and former Tribune staffers worked to transfer the paper’s physical archives to the Cascade County Historical Society in an effort to keep its decades of historical records from being lost as the newspaper’s former building was sold in 2022.
On Our Radar 
Amanda — New York Magazine on Wednesday published a story threading together the power, politics and money underpinning a controversial land swap the U.S. Forest Service is considering in the Crazy Mountains, a piece I’ve been eagerly awaiting for months. New York City-based journalist Ben Ryder Howe, who has tackled other public land access issues for prominent national outlets, was at work on the story for two years.
Alex — Lately, I’m craving tidbits of journalism that have nothing to do with the election. One of my go-to podcasts, the New York Times’ Matter of Opinion, delivered recently with a bonus episode devoted solely to the favorite spooky Halloween stories of several prominent national opinion writers.
JoVonne — Indigenous artist Wally Dion, known for his translucent star quilts, has been trending on Instagram and Facebook recently as a result of an art display he made a few weeks ago. Dion, who has Saulteaux ancestry, posted a video on his Instagram page that showed a long, rectangular quilt with the words “LAND BACK” stitched across it waving in the wind. The phrase is associated with a Native-led political movement that advocates for tribal sovereignty through land recognition and acquisition.
Matt — Public access discussions in Montana often focus on rural streams and the fencing of wide open spaces. In comparison, I found it fascinating to read this column about the murky public-private access rules for a lake in the middle of metro Minneapolis.
Jacob — The Major League Baseball World Series starts Friday night and my beloved Yankees will play the LA Dodgers in the championship showdown for the first time since 1981. Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani, the likely MVPs for their respective leagues, will also face off. Since the start of the “Divisional Era” in 1969, tallies by MLB and Sports Illustrated indicate a MVP-faceoff like that has only happened five times, the last being in 2012.
Zeke — John Valiant’s nonfiction book, The Tiger, takes place in the remote Russian east, offering pertinent insight into the tenuous, high-stakes interplay between humanity and the natural world.
Eric — There’s been a lot of discussion the last couple years about what artificial intelligence technology is and isn’t good for. Frankly, I’ve found most of it to be, to use a family-friendly phrase, vapid technobabble. So it was refreshing this week to run across this remarkably clear blog post describing a simple way to conceptualize AI’s different use cases (as the author puts it: “Gods, Interns, and Cogs”).
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