HELENA — With less than a month to go before voters start receiving ballots, candidates for two open seats on the Montana Supreme Court are crossing the state to make their case.
On Wednesday night, chief justice candidates Jerry Lynch and Cory Swanson and associate justice candidates Katherine Bidegaray and Dan Wilson spoke at a candidate forum at Carroll College. It’s just one of a number of similar events all four candidates are appearing at this month.
Students and community members were on hand for Wednesday’s forum. The event came during “Constitution Week,” and candidates began by talking about their views on the U.S. and Montana constitutions, before taking questions from the audience.
Some of the sharpest answers came in response to a question on whether the Montana judiciary is “under attack.” Lynch, a former federal magistrate judge for the District of Montana, had used that phrase in his first statement. He said he said he’s running to push back against what he sees as political leaders undermining the Supreme Court.
“The court, sitting on behalf of the people to protect their constitutional rights, has to do its job; each justice has to do their job – if it’s unconstitutional, it’s unconstitutional,” he said. “When there are 27 to 28 laws – I'm probably off on one or two – that are passed that even the legislative attorneys say, ‘Gosh, you got a problem here, this is problematic,’ but that nonetheless pass, and then it becomes a political ping-pong to attack the courts and undermine – and I’m being frank with you – undermine the integrity of the courts, that’s not acceptable.”
Swanson, the Broadwater County attorney, has said he doesn’t see it as the role of the court to “fight back” against other branches. He said he’s concerned about actions that would escalate political battles, but he believes “cooler heads will prevail” when it comes to resolving friction with the Legislature.
“I think some of this yelling that's going on in the political world and some of this criticism that goes on from the Legislature is some noise,” he said. “I'm not afraid to listen to them – I think we need to make that clear, we should listen to our political partners. But I am not shaking in my boots that the Legislature is going to tell the courts to do something that the courts are saying we can't do. If we say we can't do it, we're not going to do it, they can’t make us do it.”
Bidegaray, a district court judge from Sidney, has also talked about courts being under attack. She said Wednesday that she believed people have been sharing “misinformation” about the courts and “cherry-picking” their cases.
“What's happening in Montana and across the country right now, with the attacks that are being included in the news and everything else, is that it is eroding the public's trust in our judiciary,” she said. “I think each of us who is licensed to be an attorney has a special responsibility to help correct the record and to not allow people to continue to disseminate misinformation about how the court operates.”
Dan Wilson, a district judge in Flathead County, said there will always be periods of “stress and strain” between branches of government, and that the best way to get through this period would be for the Supreme Court to stick to its obligations.
“If we get bogged down in thinking that we are presently hearing the heartbeats of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, then we are not going to be in a frame of mind healthy enough to move forward with what our obligations are,” he said. “Courts need to stay in their lane, decide what courts are supposed to decide.”
Candidates also answered questions on issues like legal precedent and judicial originalism.
The four candidates met last week for a forum in Missoula, during the State Bar of Montana’s annual meeting. They’ll do more next week, including one Wednesday in Great Falls sponsored by the Montana Farmers Union and one Thursday in Bozeman sponsored by the Gallatin County Bar Association.
