Knudsen Was Right to Restore Montana’s Term Limits

Attorney General Austin Knudsen has withdrawn the 2012 opinion of then-Attorney General Steve Bullock and reaffirmed the reading of Montana’s term-limit provision set out in 1997 by Attorney General Joe Mazurek. He was right to do it.

The charge that will follow—that Knudsen invented a new rule for a particular election—has the history backwards. Mazurek, a Democrat, issued his opinion five years after Montana voters adopted CI-64 in 1992. Successive secretaries of state administered the provision that way for the next 15 years. It was Bullock who departed from that interpretation in 2012, and his departure has governed for the 14 years since. Knudsen didn’t write a new rule. He restored the old one.

The dispute turns on two words. Article IV, Section 8 bars the secretary of state from printing a candidate’s name on the ballot if, at the end of “the current term of that office,” the candidate will have served eight or more years in that office within a 16-year period. Knudsen concluded that “current term” means what the words ordinarily suggest: the term now in progress when the secretary certifies the ballot. Bullock’s opinion instead treated it as the future term the candidate hopes to win.

That reading collapses under its own weight. Applied consistently, a state senator elected to a four-year term could never appear on the ballot for a second consecutive term—because at the end of the term being sought, the senator would have served eight years. The same arithmetic would disqualify statewide officers after a single term and House members after three. Montanans were told in 1992 they were voting for two Senate terms, two terms in the covered statewide offices, and four House terms. An interpretation that quietly subtracts a full term from each limit is difficult to square with what voters approved.

Knudsen also discarded the “eight-year break in service” rule. The problem with that rule is more fundamental: it appears nowhere in the Constitution. The text asks a single question—whether a candidate has served eight years within a 16-year period. It says nothing about an eight-year sabbatical resetting the clock. As Knudsen explains, that rule follows from neither Mazurek’s interpretation nor Bullock’s. It was simply added.

The Legislature can implement Article IV, Section 8. It cannot redefine it. Montana’s Constitution is amended through the process prescribed by Article XIV—not by statute and not by an attorney general’s opinion, regardless of who signs it. Fourteen years of following an erroneous interpretation does not transform that interpretation into constitutional text.

The voters wrote the rule in 1992. Knudsen’s opinion returns to what they wrote.

By: Senator Greg Hertz

Editor’s Note: Greg Hertz is a Republican member of the Montana State Senate, representing District 7.