3 horsemen
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minoritarian tyranny,
see 6-3 scotus
see west va v epa
see roe v
gun control
see clarence
see opus dei
see leo
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dark $ launder
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==
omg
https://www.nationofchange.org**/2022/07**/07/opus-dei-supreme-indecency-extreme-deceit/
the current Supreme Court majority that just denied women a legal right to abortion (Dobbs vs. Jackson) consists of religious fanatics whose careers have been fast-tracked (so that young Justices can serve for decades) by ultra-wealthy, like-minded lobbyists and political operatives. The nexus of this activity lies with a powerful arch-conservative organization within the Catholic Church, Opus Dei, that in the U.S. operates out of the Catholic Information Center in Washington D.C.
I am not targeting Catholics but rather the Church’s reactionary, fundamentalist wing. Many Catholic organizations are dedicated to upholding the rights and lives of minorities (and majorities, such as women), victims of pedophilic priests, gays, the poor, immigrants, etc. The fundamentalist wing of any religion has more in common with other creeds’ fundamentalisms than with many of its own co-religionists, whom they often regard as enemies. Catholic fundamentalism is obviously not the only “brand” influencing American politics, but it is the one with a dominant insidious influence on the judiciary.
Opus Dei and its partner organizations have poured tens of millions of dollars into promoting the careers and appointments of Chief Justice Roberts and the five Justices who overturned Roe: Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Barrett (Roberts, an arch-conservative, nonetheless dissented on the abortion case).
Opus Dei was founded in Spain by Escriva de Balaguer in 1928 and grew in power, wealth, and influence during the Fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco who, with significant military help from Nazi Germany, overthrew the legitimate Spanish government and ruled over a police state from 1939-1975.The group extended its power throughout Latin America, supporting Pinochet’s murderous regime in Chile and other terrorizing dictatorships. It consistently opposes gay, sexual, and reproductive rights, and the Catholic liberation movements that champion the poor in Latin America. It has been involved in the Vatican’s banking scandals but still wields enormous influence over Vatican finances, as detailed by Robert Hutchison in his book, Their Kingdom Come.
Opus Dei’s assets as of 2008 were $2.8 billion, but they have undoubtedly grown since. Popes John Paul II and Francisboth elevated Opus Dei officials to the highest Church offices. One of Opus Dei’s core principles, as articulated by its founder, is to engage in “the sphere of public life”, not because they are human or Catholic rights but because “they are God’s rights…May such ‘fanaticism’ for the Faith…become stronger every day.” Opus Dei is not simply a conservative religious group, it is openly dedicated to wielding political and financial power in nations throughout the world. And that often means promoting and aligning itself with the most violent, reactionary regimes and acting in the shadow realms of political influence.
Opus Dei members were prominent in Trump’s White House, including Attorney General William Barr and Pat Cipollone, Trump’s former White House counsel. Opus Dei had access to Trump’s budgetdirector,Mick Mulvaney, along with other noted right-wing lobbyists (Heritage Foundation, Koch Industries), meetings the Trump administrationtried to keep secret. Member Larry Kudlow was Trump’s director of the National Economic Council. It may well be the most powerful political lobby in the world and yet its explicit political agenda is absolutely subservient to its extreme, authoritarian religious agenda.
A key fixer in this effort is Leonard Leo. Leo is on the board of directors of the Catholic Information Center (William Barr was a past director) and Executive Vice Presidentof the Federalist Society, a lobbying group that adheres to an “originalist” interpretation of the Constitution (more on this below). The two organizations are close political allies, as Leo’s dual role suggests. As Trump’s close advisor during his presidency, Leo was responsible for selecting and guiding the Supreme Court nominations of Alito, Barrett, Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch and was instrumental in riddling the lower Federal courts with Trump appointees.
Meanwhile, members of both Opus Dei and The Federalist Society include Alito, Clarence Thomas, and the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Chief Justice Roberts is a Federalist Society member and the Society’s members and supporters are prominent in many of nation’s top law schools and most powerful law firms, which allows it to have an untoward influence over judicial selections. When Clarence Thomas headlined a 2013 Federalist Society fundraiser, guests were seated in proximity to him according to the size of their donations. In effect, the Federalist Society and Opus Dei have become the Supreme Court of the land.
Much of Opus Dei’s influence was exerted via the Wellspring Committee, established and run by Opus Dei members Ann and Neil Corkery in 2008. The Koch brothers were instrumental in providing Wellspring with its first $10 million in seed money. According to Robert Maguire of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the Corkerys “have been the overseers of massive amounts of money that have gone into federal judicial races.”
Wellspring closed down in 2018 but not before passing its mantle to the Judicial Crisis Network (JCN); in 2017 Wellspring transferred $14,814, 998.00, or 94% of its donations that year, to JCN. JCN was formerly directed by Leonard Leo and now byCarrie Severino, who served as Thomas’s law clerk. (Opus Dei’s Roger Severino, Carrie’s husband, was Director of Trump’s Office for Civil Rights). JCN is a 501(c)(4) organization so its donors can remain secret. JCN poured millions into supporting Bush and Trump’s Supreme Court nominees (Roberts, Alito, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Barrett) and millions blockingObama’s Court nominee, Merrick Garland.
:{Given Opus Dei’s absolute anti-choice ideology, global power, and influence over the Supreme Court, it is clear the Court’s anti-choice decision was not driven by legal arguments over the right to privacy, strict or “originalist” interpretations of the Constitution, or states rights.
These were all just window dressing. The Supreme Court—and much of our judiciary—has been taken over by fanatics with a strictly theologicalagenda: to replace “separation of Church and State” with “the Church runs the state”. It is a narrow, fanatical religious ideology that decided the case.}:
The so-called “originalist” theory of interpreting the Constitution claims the Constitution only protects rights explicitly mentioned in the text. The Constitution itself rejects the “originalist” idea so central to conservative ideology. The Ninth Amendment reads, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” This clearly states that interpreting the Constitution is a living, evolving process, for how else can those “other[s]” rights be “retained by the people”? The Ninth is also a safety valve: “If we left out any important rights, sorry, our bad, it doesn’t mean those rights aren’t protected as well.” The Ninth has been used to uphold such diverse rights as teaching non-English languages, sending kids to private schools, protecting against forced sterilization, and the 1965 Griswold decision overturning bans on contraception, in which privacy was deemed a “penumbra” (also called “unenumerated”) right. The penumbra concept was then applied to abortion in 1973’s Roe decision.
Justice Harry Blackmun wrote the majority decision in Roe v. Wade, citing both the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments:“This right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment’s concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or…in the Ninth Amendment’s reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy. The detriment that the State would impose upon the pregnant woman by denying this choice altogether is apparent.” The Court also recognized that “When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary…is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.” Blackmun’s decision includes an overview of the dramatic shifts in cultural and legal attitudes towards abortion, though most views differentiated abortions in the first 12-16 weeks (before the baby is usually felt moving inside the womb) from those occurring later.
The “sanctity of the foetus”, that is, viewing abortion at any stage of pregnancy as equivalent to murder, is the linchpin of the anti-choice position and its driving emotional trigger. However, even the Catholic Church’s historical opposition to abortion had nothing to do with the sanctity of the foetus; it was aimed at the “sin” of sexual pleasure. Church policy varied over the centuries but the foetus’s life was either absent as an issue or secondary to sexual sin and other theological concerns. St. Thomas Aquinas asserted that in its earlier stages a foetus is in a “vegetal” and then “animal” state before achieving person-hood at some point, most likely at the end of the third month.It wasn’t until 1965 that the Church banned abortion on the basis of sanctity of life rather than sexual sin.However, the Bible passages used to justify this claim 1) do not really address abortion (the BIble is much more direct in advising that adulterers be stoned to death); 2) are drawn mostly from the Old Testament, a Jewish document, significant since the Jewish religion allows abortion; and 3) are in the Bible, which has no legal standing in the United States. Or didn’t.
The Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jacksonis only the beginning, as anti-abortion activists and GOP-led extremists mobilize to assault a wide range of rights. The anti-choice movement was never only about abortion. Abortion was used as the emotional catalyst for a broad attack on the values of tolerance and social commitment embodied in Federal guarantees backed by Constitutional authority. The well-being of Americans and our system of government is now in the hands of religious fanatics on a crusade against all those who do not believe in their degraded, medieval version of truth. They are welcome to their beliefs but are not welcome to impose those beliefs on the rest of us, nor to challenge the fundamental values of the United States, which holds the value of human beings above adherence to extreme and rigid political or religious ideologies.
===
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fac so index:
May 26, 2019by Facing South
Rank of Brett Kavanaugh's 2018 appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court among the reasons there's a new push to ban abortion in state legislatures across the South and elsewhere: 1
In the fiscal year before it spearheadedKavanaugh's confirmation, amount the Judicial Crisis Network (JCN)— a secret-money 501(c)(4) "social welfare" nonprofit that promotes conservative judges — received in anonymous donations, according to a tax return recently obtained by campaign finance watchdogs: $22 million
Size of a single anonymous donation JCN got during the period between July 2017 and June 2018, when abortion rights-protecting Justice Anthony Kennedy resigned, opening the door to Kavanaugh, who was backed by anti-abortion groups: $17 million
Number of other anonymous donations JCN got that year, all of them at least six-figure: 9
JCN's spending in 2017 to support the confirmation of President Trump's other Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, who has also shown hostility to the Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion: $10 million
Year in which Carrie Severino — a former law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and spouse of Catholic anti-abortion lawyer Roger Severino, who now runs the Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Civil Rights and opposes contraceptive access under the Affordable Care Act — took the helm of JCN: 2014
Among JCN's top funders, rank of the Wellspring Committee, a secretive nonprofit that serves as a conduit for anonymous contributions to conservative causes and is led by hard-line Opus Dei Catholic Ann Corkery and her husband, Neil Corkery, who has served as JCN's treasurer: 1
Amount Wellspring funneled to JCN between 2010 and 2018: more than $54.2 million
According to the newly released tax return, amount JCN paid that fiscal year to the BH Group, a Virginia limited liability company connected to Trump advisor Leonard Leo, who's also the executive vice president of the Federalist Society, an influential conservative legal organization whose current or former members include five sitting Supreme Court justices: $241,000
Decades for which Leo — also reportedly an Opus Dei member who plays a key role in hiring at George Mason University's law school in Virginia — has worked to push the judiciary to the right in order to enable an abortion crackdown: 3
According to conservative commentator Ed Whelan, number of people "more dedicated to the enterprise of building a Supreme Court that will overturn Roe v. Wade" than Leo: 0
Month in which Leo told a gathering of conservative activists in Florida that they had to mobilize in "very unprecedented ways" to finish their transformation of the U.S. Supreme Court: 2/2019
Between 2014 and 2017 alone, amount Leo and his allies raised for JCN and other secret-money nonprofits to carry out their court-transforming agenda: more than $250 million
Year since JCN has also been funneling millions of dollars to state supreme court races, money that has bought misleading or even libelous ads: 2012
===
YIKES SEE AMICUS
attempt to use NAACP v Ala/14th to make corp dark $ CONST PROTECTED?!
...
The negative effects that these new amicus campaigns have on our democ-
racy are twofold. The wealthy few fund the campaigns, excluding the majority
of Americans from the process and exacerbating preexisting countermajoritarian
and inequality concerns. And without a mechanism for disclosure, the general
public currently does not, and cannot, know how judicial reasoning is influenced
by masked private actors.
...
Donors have reaped enormous returns on their investments. As I have doc-
umented, the Roberts Court has handed down over eighty partisan Republican
5-4 decisions87 that benefit an easily identifiable Republican Party-donor inter-
est.88
These include decisions that remove constraints on anonymous giving
(e.g., Citizens United v. FEC,89 Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta90), as
well as decisions that weaken the power of countervailing institutions like labor
unions (e.g., Janus v. American Federation of State, City & Municipal Employees,
158
Council 3191), regulatory agencies (e.g., Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection
Bureau92), and the civil jury (e.g., Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis93).
The effects of this litigation strategy on our democracy are frightening: the
courts are becoming an arena for enacting policies by judicial decree that are too
unpopular to pass through democratically elected legislatures. These coordi-
nated efforts warp the judiciary toward anonymous, ultrawealthy donor inter-
ests, all without the public ever learning about the role of dark-money interests
in shaping the law. The Supreme Court was already, by its nature, an avenue for
countermajoritarian ideas and policies to prosper.
But as Barry Friedman ex-
plains, especially when the Court is acting during a period of judicial suprem-
acy—as it arguably is now—the countermajoritarian aspect of the institution will
flourish.94 Alongside those concerns, the emergence of the dark-money amicus
machine increases the probability that the Court’s rulings will run counter to the
will of the American people (i.e., counter to democracy), and instead for the
benefit of the hidden interests that had a secret hand in putting Justices on the
Court and then filed masked amicus briefs...
151
:{:{Sure enough, Chief Justice Roberts’s ruling in favor of the Koch network—a}::{6-3 decision with all Republican-appointed Justices in the majority—cast doubt}:
on the constitutionality of disclosure requirements of any kind, turbocharging
the kind of secretive influence through which the Koch operation and its allies
already dominate the public sphere.56}:
:{:{Significantly, many of the donors behind these amici lobbied for the confir-}:
mation of the Justices hearing the case. For instance, Americans for Prosperity,
the 501(c)(4) group directly affiliated with the plaintiff Foundation, spent “mil-
lions” of dollars on a “Full Scale Campaign” to confirm Justice Barrett to the
bench while AFPF’s cert petition was pending before the Court.57}:
Yet, in spite of all this lobbying on her behalf by an affiliate of one of the parties, Justice Barrett
rebuffed calls for her recusal in this matter by me and others—a recusal seem-
ingly required under the Court’s own due-process precedent58—and heard the
case anyway.59
D. Amicus Briefs and Dark-Money Influence on the Courts
Amicus briefs play an important role in the appellate process. Indeed, I have
filed many myself.60 Interested parties should be able to use amicus briefs to ad-
vance their view of the law or their conception of the public interest or to educate
...
https://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/F7.WhitehouseFinalDraftWeb_v4zwakx5.pdf
===
west va v epa
7 22 intercept
...Today’s Supreme Court decision marks perhaps the biggest payoff yet for Koch’s decades of plotting against environmental regulations — and the most devastating loss for everyone else. Three of the extremist judges who joined the decision — Gorsuch, Barrett, and Kavanaugh — wound up on the Supreme Court in large part because of Koch’s activism and contributions.
Americans for Prosperity, an astroturf political group founded by Charles Koch and his brother David, conducted extraordinary campaigns to put all three judges on the highest bench. To support Kavanaugh’s nomination, the group reached out to more than 1.2 million Americans through mail, phone calls, and knocking on doors, according to a flyer released by the organization. The group also pushed hard for Barrett, whose father worked for Shell and the American Petroleum Institute, a powerful trade group for the oil and gas industry. And it campaigned for Gorsuch, whose mother presided — disastrously — over the EPA under President Ronald Reagan. Charles Koch is also closely connected to Leonard Leo, co-chair of the Federalist Society, a conservative organization Koch has supported directly and through his family foundation.
The case itself can also be tied directly to Koch. The challengers are27 Republican attorneys general, who were supported by the Koch-funded Republican Attorneys General Association. At least four Koch-funded entities have filed amicus briefs in the case: the Cato Institute, which was co-founded by Charles Koch; the Competitive Enterprise Institute; the New Civil Liberties Alliance; and Americans for Prosperity. Another foundation that filed an amicus brief, the Landmark Legal Foundation, denied receiving Koch funding, though Jane Mayer reports in her book “Dark Money” that Koch helped subsidize it....
ref?
https://wallstreetonparade.com/2021/01/the-untold-story-of-how-the-republican-attorneys-general-association-funded-with-large-sums-from-corporate-felons-including-oxycontin-drug-pusher-purdue-participated-in-recruiting-the-mob-that-atta/
if there was ever a DEFCON 1 warning to Americans that campaign finance reform must be a top priority of the incoming President Biden administration, it is the cautionary tale of the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) and their recruitment efforts of the mob that descended on the Capitol of the United States on January 6. Five people are now dead from that siege, including a Capitol Police officer, and dozens injured. The U.S. Attorneys office for Washington, D.C. has also confirmed that two live pipe bombs with timers were found in front of the Republican National Committee and Democrat National Committee, both located near the Capitol.
When one thinks of a group with the word “Association” in their name, it invokes the idea that this is a fraternal organization or a trade association. What doesn’t come to mind is that it is a campaign financing group to elect Republican Attorneys General – the highest law enforcement officer in a state – by taking vast sums of money from the very companies committing crimes in those states. But that is what RAGA has been doing for many years now.
RAGA defines itself as follows on its website:
“The Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) is the only national organization whose mission is electing Republicans to the Office of State Attorney General (AG). RAGA collaborates with our current Republican attorneys general and recruits outstanding candidates, providing them assistance with research, message development, and financial support.”
The day after the attack on the nation’s Capitol, Jamie Corey at the watchdog group, Documented, released an audio tape of robo calls being made by a unit of RAGA. The robo call message went like this:
“I’m calling for the Rule of Law Defense Fund with an important message. The ‘March to Save America’ is tomorrow in Washington D.C. at the Ellipse in President’s Park between E St. and Constitution Avenue on the south side of the White House, with doors opening at 7:00 a.m. At 1:00 p.m., we will march to the Capitol building and call on congress to stop the steal. We are hoping patriots like you will join us to continue to fight to protect the integrity of our elections. For more information, visit MarchtoSaveAmerica.com. This call is paid for and authorized by the Rule of Law Defense Fund, 202-796-5838.”
By January 5, the date of the above robo calls to potentially thousands of people urging them to “stop the steal,” there was no evidence of any significant election fraud. No one was in a better position to know that as a fact than the State Attorneys General who had just watched their states certify the votes in early December. In addition, William Barr, the Attorney General of the United States who was selected for that position by Donald Trump, told the media on December 1 that the Justice Department had uncovered no evidence of widespread voter fraud that would have changed the outcome of the presidential election.
The Executive Committee of RAGA includes Attorneys General from nine states (see above graphic). Its Chairman is Chris Carr, Attorney General of Georgia. For RAGA to participate in fomenting a riot at the Capitol on incendiary information it knew to be false demands a thorough and formal FBI and Congressional investigation. RAGA has thrown a bone to the media by firing its Executive Director, Adam Piper. But the entire structure of RAGA needs deep scrutiny.
The Rule of Law Defense Fund is the dark money fundraising arm of RAGA and located at the same address and suite number as RAGA according to its IRS filings. Both the Rule of Law Defense Fund and RAGA were at varying times listed as “Coalition Partners” on websites set up to promote the January 6 event. While many of these websites have been taken down, we were able to access them at the Internet Archives’ Wayback Machine, which captures website content on past dates. Website names used to promote the January 6 event include: TrumpMarch.com, MarchtoSaveAmerica.com, and WildProtest.com, among others. The obvious question, of course, is why would State Attorneys General want to associate themselves as a Coalition Partner with a group calling itself WildProtest.com, not to mention a false claim of a stolen election.
The WildProtest.com website told its readers this on the day before the event:
“We the People must take to the US Capitol lawn and steps and tell Congress #DoNotCertify on #JAN6! Congress cannot certify this fraudulent Electoral College. Our presence in Washington D.C. will let Members of Congress know that we stand with Rep. Mo Brooks and his colleagues in the House of Representatives who will bravely object to the certification of the Electoral College. We’re in need of at least one Senator. We’ve identified six (seven including Senator-elect Tommy Tuberville) that could join our cause. StopTheSteal.us is working closely, whipping the vote up, with patriots in the Congress.”
Yesterday, 34 Democrats in the House of Representatives signed a letter asking for an investigation by the Capitol Police and Sergeant of Arms in the House and Senate into unnamed persons giving potentially “reconnaissance” tours in the Capitol building the day before the attack. The letter states that on the day before the attack, January 5, “there were unusually large groups of people throughout the Capitol who could only have gained access to the Capitol Complex from a Member of Congress or a member of their staff.”
The Rule of Law Defense Fund is structured as a dark money, tax exempt 501(c)(4) group so that its donors can remain anonymous. Each year it provides hundreds of thousands of dollars to RAGA, in part to pay large salaries.
Exactly why RAGA needs a dark money group is hard to say. RAGA itself is accepting millions of dollars a year in contributions from some of the creepiest corporations in America, including those that have admitted to multiple felony counts brought by the U.S. Department of Justice.
RAGA is structured as a 527 tax-exempt organization that is allowed to raise unlimited funds from individuals and corporations. The IRS requires that it file an 8872 form each quarter showing its contributions and expenditures. We’ve spent this week looking at those forms. It’s not a pretty picture.
Purdue Pharma has given more than $570,000 to RAGA in just the three-year span between 2015 and 2017. In 2007, Purdue Pharma was fined $600 million by the U.S. Department of Justice on charges that it “illegally marketed and promoted OxyContin by falsely claiming that OxyContin was less addictive, less subject to abuse and diversion, and less likely to cause withdrawal symptoms than other pain medications — all in an effort to maximize its profits.” The company clearly viewed that as a slap on the wrist. Last October, the Justice Department brought three felony charges against Purdue and $8 billion in fines. At the time of last year’s announcement by the Justice Department, Tim McDermott of the Drug Enforcement Administration said this: “This resolution closes a particularly sad chapter in the ongoing battle against opioid addiction. Purdue Pharma actively thwarted the United States’ efforts to ensure compliance and prevent diversion. The devastating ripple effect of Purdue’s actions left lives lost and others addicted.”
ADDICTION = EXTRACTION? AHA]
RAGA seems to have a fondness for companies addicting young people. Reynolds American, whose cigarette brands include Camel, Newport, Pall Mall and others, has given more than $400,000 to RAGA since 2014. Altria, parent of Philip Morris, whose brands include Marlboro, Parliament, Benson & Hedges, Virginia Slims and others, has enriched RAGA to the tune of $484,154 since 2014.
In 1999, the U.S. Department of Justice sued Philip Morris, Reynolds and seven other large tobacco companies under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). The government charged that the tobacco companies engaged in a 40-year conspiracy to mislead the public about the dangers of smoking, distort the dangers of secondhand smoke, and target the youth market as “replacement smokers.” In 2006, following a nine-month trial, Judge Gladys Kessler of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia issued a 1,683 page opinion. The Court found that “Cigarette smoking causes disease, suffering, and death.”
When we saw Big Tobacco was funding RAGA, we knewfossil fuel companies would be there also. Indeed they were, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars from Koch Industries and Anadarko Petroleum. Why did we know that fossil fuel companies would be donating if Big Tobacco was funding RAGA? Because the makeup of RAGA’s donors looks very much like donors to a Koch brothers’ front group called Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE), a 1984 group founded by the late David Koch of Koch Industries and Richard Fink, a former professor of economics at George Mason University, who had a long career at Koch Industries beginning in 1990.
In 2013 the health professionals’ journal, Tobacco Control, published a comprehensive report funded by the National Institute of Health (NIH), a federal agency. The report was titled ‘To Quarterback Behind the Scenes, Third Party Efforts’: The Tobacco Industry and the Tea Party.
The report explains that Citizens for a Sound Economy, which split into the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity (a big funder of the Tea Party movement) and FreedomWorks in 2004, “supported the agendas of the tobacco and other industries, including oil, chemical, pharmaceutical and telecommunications, and was funded by them.” The report indicates that between 1991 and 2002, Philip Morris and other tobacco companies gave CSE at least $5.3 million.
Philip Morris and other tobacco companies launched an offensive in 1994 and 1995, using nonprofit front groups including CSE, to undermine the credibility of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) which was attempting to regulate second-hand smoke. One Philip Morris memo in late 1994 indicated that CSE and other front groups were working “to define the FDA as an agency out of control and one failing to live up to its congressional mandate regarding regulation of drugs and medical devices.”
As we have previously reported, Koch Industries and its front group, Freedom Partners, have played a central role in the Trump administration. See our report here.
The largest funder of RAGA is the Judicial Crisis Network which has contributed $5 million to RAGA since 2015. The bulk of the money flowing to the Judicial Crisis Network has come from a dark money group called the Wellspring Committee, which abruptly shuttered its operations in December 2018. Wellspring has given the Judicial Crisis Network over $52 million from unknown sources. If that sounds like legalized money laundering, you’re thinking correctly.
An IRS public tax filing by the Wellspring Committee for tax year 2016 shows that it received a whopping $32 million (more than three times its prior year’s income) in dark money. According to MapLight, $28.5 million of the $32 million came from a single, anonymous donor. In 2016, Wellspring took 72 percent of its annual income and gave it to the Judicial Crisis Network, a stunning $23,454,997. In turn, the next year, 2017, the Judicial Crisis Network handed a whopping $2.9 million in a single year to RAGA. (What kind of Attorneys General group would accept $2.9 million and have no idea from whom the money was actually coming?)
The Center for Responsive Politics has connected Wellspring to Charles Koch’s network, writing: “Since Wellspring’s birth from a short-lived union of the Koch network and GOP political operatives leading up to the 2008 election, it has accounted for more than 90 percent of JCN’s [Judicial Crisis Network’s] total funding.” Charles Koch is the billionaire Chairman and CEO of the fossil fuels juggernaut, Koch Industries, one of the largest private corporations in the world, with vast interests in oil, refineries, chemicals, paper and trading.
In addition to taking money from the opioid criminals, cigarette manufacturers, and climate change denial funders, RAGA also accepted large sums from two Wall Street banks that have also pleaded guilty to criminal charges brought by the U.S. Department of Justice.
JPMorgan Chase had donated more than $86,000 to RAGA since 2017. In the span of the last six years, JPMorgan Chase has pleaded guilty to six felony counts. Throughout that period, its Board has allowed its Chairman and CEO, Jamie Dimon, to keep his job. Dimon’s annual compensation is now $31.5 million.
Citigroup has just one felony count, to which it has admitted guilt, but its long rap sheet strongly suggests a criminal enterprise. See our 2017 report: A Private Citizen Would Be in Prison If He Had Citigroup’s Rap Sheet. Since 2014, Citigroup and its subsidiaries have donated $331,745 to RAGA.
If we step back and look through a wider lens at the mob attack on the Capitol on January 6, and delve deeply into the money and groups involved, it becomes a screaming battle cry to reform campaign financing and dark money groups in America.
===
an 6 22
It’s clear the Supreme Court couldn’t care less about history, judicial precedent, basic consistency or common decency.
Rather than follow a coherent judicial philosophy, the rightwing swings wildly from one theory of interpretation to another to suit their political agenda, not legal principles.
While cases on guns strike down state’s rights and cases on abortion valorize them, there is one consistent underlying principle to the majority of decisions in the last two years.
A movement toward white Christian theocracy.
This past term the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade (removing federal protections for abortion), allowed state tuition to go to religious schools and ruled that a public school football coach had a right to pray on the school’s football field
While these cases are extreme and violate precedent, many cases in the court’s history have privileged Christianity.
Christmas trees and other Christmas holiday decorations have been treated as “secular” celebrations of a national holiday. “Blue laws” that require businesses to be closed on Sunday are constitutional (they apparently somehow have a “secular” purpose because Christian practice is secular and neutral), but laws protecting the right to take off on the sabbath (you know for those pesky non-Christian people) are not.
Time and again Christianity is treated as the default and therefore the protection of the practices as “secular” while other religious practices are treated as explicitly religious.
In the latest bad decision in a string of bad decisions issued this term, the rightwing ruled that a football coach, Joseph Kennedy, had a constitutional right to pray on the 50-yard line on a public school’s football field after the game.
The coach didn’t just quietly pray for himself after the games. Students and others joined the prayers he publicly led.
To side with Kennedy, Justice Gorsuch claimed he wasn’t acting in his role as a coach when he prayed postgame.
However, if he wasn’t acting as the coach why was he even praying on the 50-yard line after the games?
Additionally, whether students joined or not could very possibly affect the students’ relationship with their coach. So the actions necessarily relate to his professional role.
Gorsuch argued that students not only wouldn’t feel pressured to join the prayers but that “learning how to tolerate speech or prayer of all kinds is ‘part of learning how to live in a pluralistic society,’ a trait of character essential to ‘a tolerant citizenry.’” (Clearly something Justice Gorsuch thinks only needs to be learned by non-Christians and marginalized groups.)
To come to this decision, the court had to ignore precedent about the Establishment Clause in the First Amendment that prohibits the state from “establishing” a religion.
The accepted test for considering the Establishment Clause came out of Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971). The three-part test required that law have a primarily secular purpose, that it neither aid nor inhibits religion in its principal effect and that government and religion must not be excessively entangled.
A coach employed by a public school praying after football games clearly has no secular purpose and aids religion in its principal effect. However, Gorsuch dismissed the test as having been “long ago abandoned.” Instead, Gorsuch uses some vague appeal to “historical practices and understandings” to analyze the Establishment Clause.
The historical interpretations of the Establishment Clause treat non-Christian religions differently from Christian practices. Gorsuch’s suggestion to adhere to historical understandings for analysis would likely necessitate a more Christian application of the law. After all, historically, freedom of religion (especially at the state level) meant freedom of any Christian (or even just Protestant) religion.
In an earlier decision this term, Carson v. Makin, the Supreme Court ruled that a state tuition program can’t exclude religious schools. Doing so violates the free exercise of religion.
Maine has a tuition-assistance program that allows students to go to certain secular private schools, especially students in rural areas of the state where a public school isn’t close by.
The court ruled that if money is given to private schools, it can’t exclude religious ones. Makin is distinguished from court precedent that allowed federal funds to go to religious institutions that use the funds for non-religious activity.
In this case, if federal funds are being used for religious school tuition, those funds will be supporting explicitly religious activity as the education in such schools is not purely secular.
While Justice Alito’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health doesn’t explicitly cite Christian support for overturning Roe, white Christian myths about abortion are the entire foundation for the opinion. This country was built on white Christian principles so any appeal to only supporting rights that are “deeply rooted in the nation’s history” will privilege white Christianity. The entire history of reproductive control as well as the anti-abortion movement is deeply linked to slavery and the racist “white replacement theory.”
Conservatives and even justices have not been shy about their plan to use a dismantled Roe as a first step toward undoing a number of other civil-rights cases. Alito links the legal foundations of Roe to Griswold v. Connecticut (the right to birth control), Lawrence v. Texas (protection of private sexual acts concerning gay men), Obergefell v. Hodges (same-sex marriage), and even Loving v. Virginia (interracial marriage).
While Justice Alito claims this connection is not meant to suggest these cases be overturned (it's not convincing), Justice Thomas’ concurrence explicitly calls for revisiting all these cases (except for Loving). There is no justification to treat gay sex or gay marriage differently except for religious reasons (or the white Christian history of the country).
While the conservative justices and politicians typically cite Brown v. Board of Education (which overturned Plessy v. Ferguson to outlaw segregation in public schools) to justify overturning long-held precedent, overturning Loving and Brownseems to be the logical endpoint of this journey.
Some conservatives openly call for such action. Others directly link overturning Roe with racist motivations and white supremacy, like Illinois Congresswoman Mary Miller, who called the Dobbs decision a “victory for white life.”
Carsonis also a big win to chip away at Brown, as a strategy to fight desegregation in the south was to send kids to private “white” academies. The more money that can go to private, Christian schools, the more segregated public ed can be.
Most of the decisions discussed in this article have a fig leaf of justification. They aren’t explicitly racist or explicitly Christian-focused. But when analyzed together, the only logical consistency is their reliance on white Christian supremacy.
Would the court rule the same if a Muslim coach had led prayers on the field? Will they ever see a “secular purpose” in the religious practices of people who are not Christian? And how will they support the rights of nonwhite non-Christian people if such rights are not “deeply rooted” in American history?
We must call these decisions what they are – a call to white Christian supremacy – and fight them as such.
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https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/supreme-court-states-establishment-clause/
no lnx many twt
A far-right legal group believes states are exempt from the Establishment Clause. Some Supreme Court justices agree
Alex Henderson June 29, 2022
During the 1990s, Justice Clarence Thomas and the late Justice Antonin Scalia were viewed as the lunatic fringe of the U.S. Supreme Court. But their theocratic views and far-right social conservatism were balanced out by other justices, from liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to moderate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor to Justice Anthony Kennedy — a Ronald Reagan appointee and right-wing libertarian who, although fiscally conservative, was quite protective of abortion rights and gay rights.
Those days are long gone. Theocrats, thanks largely to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and former President Donald Trump, now dominate the High Court — a fact that was painfully evident when the Court announced, on Friday, June 24, that it had voted to overturn Roe v. Wade and Thomas argued in favor of reconsidering protections for contraception and gay rights as well.
Freedom of religion is guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution — specifically, the 1st Amendment’s Establishment Clause, which states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The Establishment Clause makes it abundantly clear that while people of all faiths can freely practice and promote them, the government cannot establish an official religion. This means that while Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists and Bahais are more than welcome to gather on New York City’s 5th Avenue and promote their faiths, the government itself has a strict separation of church and state.
[Read more: Columnist likens U.S. Supreme Court’s right-wing supermajority to a ‘junta in long black robes’
But in Christian Right legal circles, some theocrats, including the far-right group America First Legal, are arguing that individual states are exempt from the Establishment Clause — and Reuters reporter Lawrence Hurley notes that the group believes that states have a right to decide “whether and to what extent they will establish religion within their borders.”
Moreover, America First Legal is hoping that the U.S. Supreme Court will officially take that position in a future ruling.
According to Religion News Service (RNS) reporter Jack Jenkins, Thomas and Justice Neal Gorsuch share America First Legal’s view of the Establishment Clause — and Justice Amy Coney Barrett has “expressed interest in the idea.”
Thomas, Gorsuch and Barrett are among the justices who voted to strike down Roe v. Wade in the case Dobbs v. Women’s Health Organization.
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ref
https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/united-states-supreme-court-junta/
june 28
much of the criticism of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has been coming from liberals and progressives along with centrist Democrats. But on the right, a combination of Never Trump conservatives and libertarians have also been slamming the Dobbs ruling, which overturned Roe v. Wade after 49 years — allowing a long list of red states to pass draconian statewide abortion bans if they choose.
The naked authoritarianism of the U.S. Supreme Court’s socially conservative majority threatens a lot more than abortion rights. Justice Clarence Thomas has called for the U.S. to “reconsider” High Court rulings that have been protecting access to abortion and gay rights. Thomas specifically mentioned 1965’s Griswold v. Connecticut, 2003’s Lawrence v. Texas and 2015’s Obergefell v. Hodges.
This authoritarianism is the focus of two Washington Post opinion columnists: liberal Eugene Robinson in a June 27 column, Never Trump conservative Max Boot in a June 25 column. Robinson and Boot have their political differences, but one thing they obviously agree on is that the Trumpified U.S. Supreme Court has taken a tyrannical turn.
Robinson likens the U.S. Supreme Court’s socially conservative majority to a “secretive and unaccountable junta in long black robes.” Junta is a strong word, but considering that one-third of the justices were appointed by former President Donald Trump — the most authoritarian and dangerously corrupt president in U.S. history — it doesn’t seem like an exaggeration.
“I describe them with a term more commonly used for Latin American military regimes because, well, that’s what it feels like,” argues Robinson, who once worked as a foreign correspondent in Buenos Aires, Argentina. “They want a country where women, once again, are at best second-class citizens. Their decision Friday to strike down the landmark Roe v. Waderuling that protected the constitutional right to abortion means that women, unlike men, no longer have dominion over their own bodies.”
Robinson adds, “They want a country where every pregnancy, wanted or unwanted, is carried to full term. They want women who seek terminations, and the doctors or nurses or friends or Uber drivers who help them in any way, to potentially be subject to criminal charges or civil lawsuits.”< this “junta,” Robinson warns, “does not believe the nation’s Founders were serious about the separation of church and state” and sees the U.S. as a “Christian nation, not a secular one.”
“A ruling Monday found that it was fine for a football coach at a public high school to lead his team in prayer at midfield after games,” Robinson observes. “A decision last week decreed that if states give grants of public money for students to attend private schools, religious schools must also be eligible for those funds…. Previous Supreme Court majorities have expanded the rights and opportunities of the marginalized — women, of course, but also, racial and ethnic minorities, LGBTQ citizens, the disabled. The junta clearly sees these rights as suspect.”
Robinson continues, “Our black-robed rulers will, in the future, be asked to vote up or down on affirmative action, same-sex marriage and other questions that involve the concept of equity. I shudder to imagine what they will do.”
Boot, in his column, notes that the United States’ Founding Fathers built “many checks and balances into the Constitution” because they feared “the tyranny of the majority.” But the conservative columnist emphasizes that the Founders, including Alexander Hamilton, also feared “the tyranny of the minority,” which, Boot argues, is the problem the U.S. is facing in 2022.
“Hamilton’s nightmare has become the reality of 21st-Century America,” Boot laments. “We are living under minoritarian tyranny, with smaller states imposing their views on the larger through their disproportionate sway in the Senate and the Electoral College — and therefore, on the Supreme Court. To take but one example: 21 states with fewer total people than California have 42 Senate seats. This undemocratic, unjust system has produced the new Supreme Court rulings on gun control and abortion.”
Boot points out that the High Court “has no obligation to follow the popular will,” but he has a problem with the Court being openly contemptuous of the majority — a majority that, he notes, wanted to keep Roe v. Wade, according to polls.
“It is hard for any disinterested observer to have any faith in what the right-wing justices are doing,” Boot argues. “They are not acting very conservatively in overturning an abortion ruling, Roe v. Wade, that is 49 years old and a New York state gun-control statute that is 109 years old. In both cases, the justices rely on dubious readings of legal history that have been challenged by many scholars to overturn what had been settled law. boot argues that the United States’ “perverse political system” has “allowed a militant, right-wing minority to hijack the law.”
“In all likelihood, Roe would not have been overturned if then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) had not broken with precedent by refusing to grant President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, a vote in 2016,” Boot explains. “McConnell brazenly held the seat open for President Donald Trump to fill. Now, Trump’s appointee, Neil M. Gorsuch, is part of the five-justice majority that has overturned Roe. Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. joined with the other five justices to uphold the Mississippi abortion law but not to overrule Roe.”
Boot wraps up his column by lamenting that “public faith in the Supreme Court” continues “eroding.”
“We are experiencing what the Founders feared: a crisis of governmental legitimacy brought about by minoritarian tyranny,” Boot warns. “And it could soon get a whole lot worse. In his concurring opinion in the abortion case, Justice Clarence Thomas called on the Court to overturn popular precedents upholding a right to contraception, same-sex relationships and marriage equality. So much for Hamilton’s hope that ‘the sense of the majority should prevail.’” ...