Lieutenant governor candidate Raph Graybill would lower taxes, protect abortion rights

Democratic Montana constitutional attorney Raph Graybill wasn’t originally planning to run for anything in 2024. After attending a packed campaign event in Helena for Democratic gubernatorial nominee Ryan Busse, he called up his longtime friend and said, “I want to be part of it.”

Busse, a former gun industry executive, picked Graybill, who served as chief legal counsel to then-Gov. Steve Bullock, to be his running mate. The two are challenging incumbent Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte and Lt. Gov. Kristen Juras in November’s election.

Graybill has also been representing Planned Parenthood in its attempts to protect reproductive rights in Montana and groups working to pass a state constitutional amendment to explicitly guarantee abortion rights. He told the Montana Independent that the gubernatorial race is vital to protecting bodily autonomy. 

Though Montana’s Constitution already has strong protections for individual privacy, with a Republican-controlled Legislature and Gianforte serving as governor, Graybill said they have repeatedly had to go to the courts to stop abortion restrictions: “There was an abortion restriction that the government passed in 2021 and we defeated it. And they just passed the same darn thing in 2023. They just did it again. They didn’t care that we had gone through this process in court of defeating them. And it sort of struck me, watching Ryan, we’re gonna keep going round and around and around in courts. But what we really need is the veto pen back. We didn’t have these kinds of cases four or five years ago, because we had divided government and Democrats held the veto power.”

Another top priority for Busse and Graybill would be reducing the soaring property tax bills facing Montanans. 

With property values soaring in the state, many Montana homeowners are seeing their property tax bills increasing by up to 60%. “The government doesn’t need any more money, year to year.  Home values going up doesn’t make the government greedier,” Graybill said. “And so what the last four governors have all done — two Democrats, two Republicans — is when home values go up, they just lower the property tax rate. So you bring in the same amount of taxes, you just lower the rate.” 

But despite a recommendation from his Montana Department of Revenue, Gianforte opted not to do that, instead using the funds in his budget to provide corporate tax cuts and cut the capital gains tax for wealthy investors. “There’s a tax cut for railroads, for pipeline companies,” Graybill said. “Not really people that are necessarily first in line for needing tax relief. The energy monopolists here got like a $40 million tax cut.”

Graybill also noted that he previously worked as a law enforcement officer and that, if elected, he and Busse would work to make schools and communities safer by boosting pay for teachers and first responders — many of whom can no longer afford to live in or near the communities where they work.

“I think we’ve got a governor right now that is so obsessed with the cultural war and dividing people and making people hate each other, that he’s not focused on fixing our broken school funding model, which chronically underfunds schools in Montana,” Graybill said. “He sure talks a lot about backing the blue, but you don’t see him there, when it comes time to support a pay raise or when the community wants to levy money to have an appropriate number of police officers in the community. Instead, he’s made it worse. He’s turbocharged this affordability crisis.”

Graybill said he is motivated by being a parent of three young kids. “We’re not billionaires, we are long Montanan. We want a state where kids can enjoy the same freedoms that we had, and where our kids can afford to buy a house and raise a family,” he noted. “It’s tough to be away from the family. But it’s also 100% why we do it.”