HELENA — From the start of the 2025 Montana legislative session, Republican leaders made an overhaul of the state judiciary one of their top priorities. On Thursday, a number of those proposed changes came up for debate in the Montana House.
The House had almost 75 bills on their agenda during an all-day floor session. That included 13 that made changes to the judicial branch or to legal procedures – and seven of them were proposals from the Senate Select Committee on Judicial Oversight and Reform, a Republican-led committee that investigated the judiciary last year.
(Watch the video to hear more on the judicial bills debated Thursday.)
The House endorsed ten of the bills, most of them on near-party-line votes, with Republicans in support and Democrats in opposition. Republican lawmakers have argued for the last three legislative sessions that Montana courts have overstepped their authority and caused people to doubt their impartiality.
“This is a bill aimed at enhancing public confidence in our courts and ensuring that they're rendering true and sound decisions without bias,” said Rep. Shane Klakken, R-Grass Range, while presenting Senate Bill 30, a select committee bill that would tighten rules for when judges must recuse themselves because of a conflict of interest.
Democrats have called bills like these part of a pattern of attacking the judicial branch’s independence.
“This change in statute is not needed at all, so let's let the Supreme Court do their business, and we can do ours,” said Rep. Tom France, D-Missoula, speaking against Senate Bill 342, which would give the Montana Supreme Court’s chief justice full authority to select a state court administrator. Currently, all seven Supreme Court justices share that authority.
In addition to SB 30 and 342, the bills the House advanced Thursday included Senate Bill 40, which would require the Supreme Court to release records about its deliberations once a case is final; Senate Bill 48, which would allow someone filing a Judicial Standards Commission complaint against a judge to make that complaint public; and Senate Bill 97, which would require that any lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of a law be filed in the home district of the legislator who sponsored the bill.
However, three of the bills failed on the floor: Senate Bill 13, a select committee bill that would have required lawsuits over ballot initiative qualification to start in district court instead of the Supreme Court; Senate Bill 92, which would have made it optional instead of mandatory for Montana attorneys to belong to the State Bar; and Senate Bill 395, which would have tightened the requirements for someone filing a lawsuit to claim standing.
Two of the biggest ideas that came out of the select committee have already stalled in the Legislature. Multiple bills that would have allowed judicial candidates to run with a political party label were voted down on the House floor, and the proposal to create a “government claims court” that would have taken over jurisdiction on constitutional challenges failed on a tied vote in the Senate Finance and Claims Committee.
Out of the original 27 bills the select committee proposed in December, 18 have died in the process, eight are still moving forward and one has become law. However, some of the ideas in the original bill drafts resurfaced in other legislation.
Rep. Fiona Nave, R-Columbus, who sat on the select committee as a non-voting member, expressed frustration during Thursday’s debate about the number of committee bills voted down on the House floor.
“I must say that those bills are not having very good luck in this session, because in this House there seems to be an overwhelming feeling that no one can touch the courts – that they can't be managed, that they can't be dealt with at all, that they are allowed to do their own thing however they want to do it,” she said.
