How Big Sky Country became the front line in a long battle over dark money
Jaime MacNaughton’s future in law can be traced back to the time when she was locked in the trunk of a car, sweating inside a garbage bag. She was doing a scene for a TV pilot that ended up going nowhere. It marked the nadir of the theater major’s quest to make it big in Los Angeles. “Obviously, that never panned out,” she says.
Meanwhile, her second job – the one she had gotten just to pay the bills – was taking off. After starting as a file clerk at an immigration law firm, she’d been promoted to run the department that handled green cards, helping everyone from auto mechanics to Hollywood actors get their ticket to a new life in the United States. She was hooked.
Fast-forward 15 years and Ms. MacNaughton, now a lawyer, is a key player in enforcing Montana’s strict laws against mega-spending in politics. From a humble rambler in the shadow of the grand state capitol building in Helena, MacNaughton keeps track of campaign finance violations in tiny, exquisite handwriting on a dry-erase board and digs through boxes of original documents next door to help prepare two cases under consideration by the US Supreme Court.
Seventy miles to the south, in the brick historical district of Butte, Mont., Anita Milanovich is marshaling arguments for her side of those cases. She is fighting against what she sees as Montana’s unconstitutional limits on an important form of political speech: spending money to support candidates and promote political causes.
One floor up from the chandelier-filled lobby of the old Finlen hotel, she sits alone in a spacious office with views out toward the undulating landscape once scraped and scalloped by copper barons. Ms. Milanovich,
