i don't know. peter welch, governor from vermont. in the news a little bit lately. heather mcgee, maria returning to the show, co-host of "need to know" on pbs and glenn greenwald former constitutional and civil rights litigator and author of "with liberty and justice for some." in a 5-4 ruling this week, the united states supreme court crushed montana's attempt to preserve its century old corrupt practices act which ban corporate contributions to parties and upholding the law earlier this year, montana supreme court chief justice mike mcgrath wrote "with the infusion of corporate money and in support of an opposition to targeted candidate, the candidate would be unevil to compete and montana citizens who for over 100 years made their modest election contributions meaningfully count but be shutout of the process." the u.s. supreme court rejected montana's claim that their history gave the state "unique and compelling interests in eliminating corporate influence on elections." justice briar wrote, "that nment expenditures do not corrupt or appear to do so." not only will the court not reconsider, the citizens united ruling, but not abide states acting independently to prevent their state electoral processes to unlimited contributions from corporate donors." i just want to get your reaction to the court's actions here? >> it's bad, really bad. what essentially happens is when we had too much money in politics already, we made it constitutionally protected to have unlimited amounts of money. so, any corporation, which they haven't really been doing it that much, but these loopy billionaires out there and some self-conscious billionaire as who have been able to write the big, fat checks in these campaigns, just sometimes for willful reasons, but a lot of times for investment reasons. >> i think the first wave we're getting the accentric ones. right now it's the loopy and we'll get more of the strategic. >> here's the thing we haven't been talking about so much. we saw this unload in the republican presidential primary, which is quite expected. where this will make a difference is in the low-inco low-information races. an immense amount of money comes in the race in the lastç two, three, four weeks and people aren't paying attention, then those negative ads really work. i had a couple colleagues that were extremely and both of them were subject to late, super pac massive expenditures and went from winning their races a few years ago by like 83% to barely hanging on and these were popular, hard working on the ground people. the apprehension i have is that this will have a potential huge effect on congressional races. >> montana attorney general was on rachel's program this week talking about the decision and he made this point about local races where the state, where the dollar figures involved are even smaller. take a look. >> citizens united dealt with federal elections and the presidential election. it doesn't take a copper king to buy a $17,000 state legislature race. there is a whole lot of different offices. county assessor, a local judge, our judges at the state level are elected. it really can, just the amount of money and also the different offices that are up, you know, that can be elected, unlike the federal system. it can really impact all of it. >> the court in citizens united was more or less balancing to competing interest, right? the first amendment right to free speech and there's a line of cases beginning with vallejo that says money is speech for these çpurposes. and then minimizing the corruption or the appearance of corruption and the court's finding in citizens united is this first amendment interest trumped that interest partly because of essentially finding a fact that it did not, these c contributions did not. there is a small group of people on the left who defended the citizens united ruling, you were one of them. i am wonder if you're thinking, if you still feel that way and how you respond to how it's playing out post-decision. >> so many misconceptions swirling around citizens united, more so than any other issue. i don't think it's really accurate to say a small group of people on the left, voices on the left that have defended citizens united on first 3íçmi!1 amendment grounds including the authoritative defending the bill of rights, which is the aclu. >> not looking as the campaign finance -- >> on the first amendment and free speech, generally. as well as the only political official in the united states in the last two decades and corporate america who is elliio spitz spitzer. no corporate stooge wwho took t position. had so, there's a very substantial political free speech issue that comes from empowering the government to say that you are not permitted to engage in certain kinds of political speech surrounding an election. american liberalism has always been about opposing efforts to say that the g]vernment should be able to constrain free speech on the grounds and compelling interest that justify it. terrorism, communism, this whole history that a lot of people people on the american left have looked at and said, we don't want the government to the solution to what is unquestionably the greatest problem democracy faces and using the restrictions on free speech, as the solution. the other issue that i think is so important to note here is that, you know, peter talked about these loopy individuals, but if you look at what citizens united actually did, it didn't have anything to do with the ability of foster freeze or all those other gop suger daddies to fund elections. the ability of corporations and unions to spend money. >> out of general treasury. >> long before citizens united individuals could advocate elections. montana's law doesn't do anything about. citizens united. huge corruption before citizens united. >> i think people make this argument and i think if you're looking at what happened post citizen united, alter the norms. the decision has altered the norms of conduct. they do matter. there is a reason when you look at the charts of these sorts of guys. yes, sheldon addison could have done it before and the thing that has changed in the intervening years. the other important point and the bizarre thing about the way this election is being run, a major ruling citizen united and then another court ruling speech now which is essentially controlling this entire area of law right now. the constitution of super pacs comes from the speech uncertainty and a tremendous uncertainty about what the law does and does not allow you to do. >> i was talking to a political analyst in preparation for the show and they rolled it back and said, look, if you think about what happened with the obama election and the fact that that really democratized people giving money and suddenly the republicans were looking at this and say, oh, my god, wait a second. look at the amount of money he did basically with small democracy donations. we have to do something that will give us back some power and the power is going to be in the corporate giving. and that that's part of why this happened. i'm fascinated about the fact that while in montana a, you know it was 1907 when the raderal republicans in the state of montan gnaw, not on our state. you're not going to come in here and throw your money around, no. at this point, a century plus ahead and being rolled back again, it's fascinating. >> wall street backed the obama campaign in 2008 much more aggressive than they did the mccain campaign. received huge amounts of wall street money and corporate money and does not break down that cleanly. >> it does now. >> now it does. >> wasn't there an issue about the fact that suddenly with social media and with the web, you were able to donate in a way that wasn't possible before. >> there is also the fact, we should also mention, in the defense of the good faith of the folks on the court, which is naive on my part. there has been a bunch of ideological warriorsç in this fight in this respect, not just on first amendment grounds but just broadly as an ideological disposition. it created for republican party operatives to see what had happened. >> the issue of corruption, i think, has to be, we have to pave a little way at that. not so much about paying out a politician and the corruption of only t on only the interests that are paying off the funding. so, in like the montana situation, some of those legislatures were paid off, but, basically, turning the whole legislative process into a servant of the mining industry at the expense of everyone else. we'll talk about wall street, they'll be glad to support democrats who are willing to get rid. they're equal opportunity givers to folks who support their agenda. the vote corruption issue here is oftentimes mistaken in my view with personal corruption when it's about narrowing of what legislative issues. the biggest challenge in a legislature to get the issue you care about on the table for active and serious consideration. >> you know, lawrence has this great distinction between good soul corruption and bad soul corruption. he also makes this point, if you show up in congress on your first day and the two things you really care about are helping out mothers on welfare and regulating the telecom industry so as to benefit big cable, right? you're going to get a lot of support for that ladder. even if you care about them equally, you go to bed at night wanting to help mothers on welfare. suddenly you'l priorities over time as the checks come in be destroyed. >> this is this issue around free speech which i really don't understand. whose speech are we talking about? in that open marketplace, the mother on welfare, where is her speech? how powferal can her speech be on a $5 donation when you have a $5,000 donation a $5 million donation from a telecom ceo? >> i want to get your response to that and keep sorting through citizens united and bring in the governor of montana, right after this break. have our fridges cater our parties. and tell our ranges to whip up dinner. let's plug in to summer savings before they're gone... ...without wasting an ounce of energy with smart machines that turn housework into house play. more saving. more doing. that's the power of the home depot. right now, save $600 on this maytag french door refrigerator, just $1,598. high schools in six states enrolled in the national math and science initiative... ...which helped students and teachers get better results in ap courses. together, they raised ap test scores 138%. just imagine our potential... ...if the other states joined them. let's raise our scores. let's invest in our teachers and inspire our students. let's solve this. discussing the supreme court's ruling this week on montana's corrupt practices act which is a law in contributions in montana to what was and we'll hear one of the most corrupt states in the union and, glenn, you were defending the jurisprudence and the kind of free-speech body and heather made a point about this, this is the fundamental thing. when liberals think about speech, is money speech and, if it is, it doesn't seem to operate in the way we normally think of speech which is, everybody has a voice and everybody can speak and not everybody has money. when we come down to it and we'll deregulate this region i think categorically a little ambiguous we end up with welfare moms on one side. >> my issue with this is, that is a huge problem and it's the central issue, but, for me, you know, citizens united has taken on this biblical meaning before and after we have this pristine system. this problem that you just alluded to has been xl@guing our political system as a poison way before citizens united in a fundamental and radical way in 2009. dick durbin said that banks own the place. so, for me, whatever you want to have a debate about the scope of the first amendment, you'll always have free speech if you approach this problem by trying to restrict the spending of money and political speech and have huge loopholes and they have been doing that for decades and that's why i think the much better approach, you mentioned professor earlier, what he has is proposals for campaign finance so -- >> public finance. >> public finance. so, welfare others even if citizens united went the other way, would not be able to compete. but if you have robust public finance, that's how you start to level the playing field. >> i think, i want to talk more about solutions and bring in montana governor joining us this morning. governor, i want to get first your reaction to ruling because, obviously, this is grounded in a specific history of montana politics, which doing a little cursory research around is pretty eye opening. i would like you to give us a little sense of what the rationale was for the original vision of this law. >> well, 120 years aaago, a couple of the richest people were the copper kings. and, look, they owned everything. they owned the mines and they owned the newspapers and they bought the legislature outright. in fact, when we first sent a u.s. senator to washington, d.c., william a. clark, one of the two copper kings, he advertised in his newspapers that heç would pay $10,000 cas money to any montana legislature who would send him to u.s. senator. remember, we didn't directly address those senators at that point. standing just off the lench slachive floor and in every one of those envelopes ten, $1,000 bills. he went off to washington, d.c., and those senators refused to see him. they said, my god, you can't advertise and you can't open daylight and you just can't give $10,000 to become a u.s. senator. now, they all bribed their way into the u.s. senate, but smaller sums of money and dark and giving it to their girlfriend instead. simon clemens said that william a. clark was the biggest scoundrel to ever serve the united states senate and he went on to say, that is saying something. william a. clark himself, he said, i never bought a man that wasn't for sale. so in 1912, finally, the citizens, not the legislature, they were all owned by the copper kings, the legislature wouldn't move on this because they were paid for. it was the referendum that people of montana, 1912, we passed the anti-corruption act. we said, look, we're not going to allow these corporations to continue to loop our land and kill the miners that are working in them, we're going to have a legislature that works for the people. so, for 100 years we did. we had a pure democracy. we had legislatures who were farmers and lawyers, they're doctors and nurses. they would serve just 90ç days every other year and they would raise $3,000 to $6,000, maximum contributions is $160. so, we had a system that actually worked. and the supreme court, in washington, d.c., a place where nothing works, they've told us, no, we don't like your system, we think you ought to go to the corrupt system that we're using in washington, d.c. what could go wrong? >> governor, i want to read this mark twain quote. he said of clark, he has said to have bought legislatures and dges by other food. by his example, he has so excused and sweetened corruption that in main tanna, it no longer has an offensive smell. >> good old days. >> that's mark twain on senator william corporal. but i guess the question here is how much of that was the context of the time? you made a key point that gets into the discussion we're having. he went to the senate and the senate refused to see him and, of course, all those other senators bribed their way into the senate, as well, though with slightly more obscure and tactical means. i think the debate we're having at the table is precitizens united to post-citizens united is it a difference in degree or a difference -- >> guilded age? you're calling that the guilded age and this is not? they were pipers compared to what we're doing now. in 1977 congress passed legislation the ford act. walmart got into big trouble because they went down to mexic could build a walmart where people were buried or something. they didn't get in trouble mexico, but in the united states. if you're going to bribe a politician and you're an american company or an american individual, you have to give it to american politicians, you can't give it to a foreigner. what kind of system is this? >> governor, i want you to stay with us because i want to get the panel in on this. lots to say right here. we'll take a quick break and be right back. how does this thing work? oh, i like it! 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[ male announcer ] one pill each morning. 24 hours. zero heartburn. governor from the great state of montana. in the wake of the supreme court striking down a corruption law that had stood for over 120 years in montana. glenn, do you have a question for the governor? >> i think most people are horrified by the corporate politics and one of the controversies over the republican primary campaign is you had these extremely wealthy billionaires pouring unlimited sums of money into legislatures. iffluencing your state and local races? >> it absolutely did. we had limits on how much money could be used in these campaigns. and it kept third parties out. so, our state elections stayed clean and then the federal elections, we were watching incrementally as these congressional races, they ; incrementally allow more and more of this outside money and so-called advertising that was just informational, call your congressman and tell him to start squeezing the life out of kitty cats. that sort of thing started coming in. you didn't see that in state elections. you saw it federal elections. >> but was there anything in the montana law that prevented individuals fromç coming in an call your state legislature and ask them to stop doing these horrible things because that kind of expending, hasn't that been constitutionally protected before citizens united and weren't they able to do that even with the validity of the montana law if. >> i think theyed and have probably been able to do it but they weren't doing it because the limits we had for the candidates were so low that they didn't bother to come into those races. i don't know. it could well have been that ten year s ago it could have starte with wealthy individual and not a corporation to do to the montana people, but it didn't happen. >> two points here just to your response. one, i said it before, these norms matter and there's been a shift in norms that has changed behavior of the accentric billionaire class. but having the protection, even if it's paper thin protection of some organization that is running the ads, as opposed, which doesn't seem to us to make that big of a difference because everyone is still reporting on sheldon addleson, but it does make a big difference in the court of cost benefits. >> maybe with their $10 million, this is an interesting character. freedom loving americans for freedom that's running the ad and they never hear about the donors behind it. >> i was in montana in 2006 doing the story a about howard rich who was funding all of these out