The Montana judiciary is in deep trouble. The Wall Street Journal picked up on a local story that has been exploding since last April but has just now started to get national attention. In April, the Montana judiciary was caught red-handed lobbying against bills that would lead to more accountability for judges. This comes right on the heels of the scathing Wall Street Journal report that found hundreds of judges refusing to recuse themselves from hearing cases in which they had financial investments — a story that reached even the Supreme Court — as the judiciary is being exposed.
State lawmakers learned this year that Montana judges had opined on proposed legislation in response to a survey of their views from Court Administrator Beth McLaughlin. Lawmakers worried that this compromised the impartiality of judges who may hear cases challenging the legality of new legislation. But when lawmakers asked to see the correspondence, Ms. McLaughlin said the emails no longer existed. Lawmakers tried to retrieve them from the Department of Administration, which houses state email archives.
Lawmakers had to send subpoenas to the judiciary to get the emails about judicial lobbying, but in response, the Supreme Court simply moved to quash “all the subpoenas — including the ones issued to them,” said Montana’s Attorney General Austin Knudson.
The Montana Daily Gazette has done extensive work on this scandal, including publishing all of the incriminating emails.
These emails contained information that was highly embarrassing to the court, which the Montana Daily Gazette has written about at length here, here, here, and here. The Supreme Court and the Admin got caught with their pants down, with their hands in the cookie jar, with a flashlight sneaking out the window to go meet some fellow Democrat paramour or any other folksy way of saying that they got busted doing VERY BAD THINGS.
The justices went ballistic and struck back. They ruled the subpoena invalid and demanded that the legislature be prohibited from “disseminating, publishing, or reproducing” any further information from the emails and asked for it to be returned immediately.
What started all of this?
A group of fed-up citizens who had suffered false imprisonments, loss of children, and more at the hands of corrupt judges formed the Montana State Council on Judicial Accountability (MSCJA) and began lobbying the state for new oversight and real accountability. They drafted legislation: bill number HB685, which would create a citizen’s oversight board for judicial complaints. HB685 got a sponsor and began to make its way through the legislative process. At the same time, bill SB140 was introduced, which would allow the governor to appoint judges instead of a political panel of insiders called the Judicial Nomination Commission. According to the Gazette, the Montana Supreme Court is “stacked with leftists,” thanks to that commission.
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