After a long absence from politics, former legislator Jim Peterson has returned, seeking the limelight once again, this time to criticize the Montana Republican Party for amending its bylaws.
You have probably never heard of Peterson, so here is a quick refresher. Jim Peterson is a former Senate Majority Leader and President, most famous for screwing Montana landowners with an eminent domain bill that benefited a foreign corporation — a corporation that just happened to hire Peterson’s lobbyist son-in-law to represent them that same session. After months of being threatened and cajoled, Republican senators had had enough of Peterson and kicked him out of his leadership post the following session. Humiliated and defeated, Peterson essentially disappeared from Montana politics in self-imposed exile for most of the past decade.
But now Peterson is back, as a staunch defender of the Llew Jones left-wing of the Montana Republican Party. Peterson’s recent opinion piece takes umbrage with the Republicans’ efforts to create a membership structure. He bemoans the changes and claims Chairman Art Wittich is trying to turn “our party into one man’s kingdom.”
Peterson’s screed claims Wittich wants to “remove the Republican name from anyone he disagrees with,” which is, of course, silly — in Montana, the law allows anyone to run under any party label they choose, and the actual parties themselves have no ability to stop anyone from running under their banner.
The reality is the bylaws do allow the Party to terminate a person’s membership. But to do so requires a minimum of twenty members signing a complaint, a board review, written due process, and a vote of the full state committee. That is not how a king operates. That is how an organization disciplines itself when its own members ask it to.
So, what is this really all about? Well, it’s quite simple. In the 2025 session, a handful of left-leaning Republican legislators, led by Llew Jones of Conrad, repeatedly voted with Democrats to grow government and increase state spending — including creating a new billion-dollar slush fund to pay for bureaucrats’ pork projects. Those same members of the party’s left wing then teamed up with Democrat consultants to take millions from unions, trial lawyers, and other liberal special interest groups to attack incumbent Republicans in the 2026 primary election. Fortunately, their efforts were not very successful, and they only managed to win a few races.
In response, Party members sought a mechanism to prevent that kind of coordinated effort from being turned against the party’s own internal operations — and so they created an official membership structure.
What Peterson seems to forget is how the party actually works in Montana. Local voters elect precinct committeemen and committeewomen, who make up the county central committees. Those county committees elect officers who serve on the state committee. It was those duly elected representatives — not the chairman alone — who voted to change the bylaws. This wasn’t an autocratic ruling decreed from above. It was the system working exactly as intended.
By: Jake Eaton
Editor’s note: Jake Eaton is an entrepreneur, investor, and Republican political consultant based in Billings, MT. Mr. Eaton is an investor in the parent company of this site.