The polls have now closed in Montana, and the race I’m particularly interested in there is a vote on retaining state Supreme Court Justice Ingrid Gustafson. She’s got more than 15 years of judicial experience but has ended up in the center of a firestorm of Republican opposition to the court on abortion in particular and … everything … in general. Running against her is James Brown, a former Republican head of the state utilities commission, whose solo law firm represented a conservative dark-money organization that the Montana Free Press describes as being “at the center of a 2011 lawsuit that eventually overturned Montana’s campaign finance laws against corporate spending in elections.” He is framing himself as a pro-business candidate. Gustafson is not the only state Supreme Court justice on the ballot this year, but she is the only one whose race has turned into a partisan proxy battle — which has turned into the most expensive Supreme Court race in the state’s history. Republicans in the state have been angry about a number of decisions the court has made, seeing the court as infringing on the power of the Legislature. That includes, but is not limited to, some recent rulings blocking abortion restrictions as well as a 1999 ruling that the state constitution offers abortion protection under the right to privacy. Gustafson has become the focal point of this at least partly because a couple of abortion-rights groups decided she was and started fundraising for her.
