Blum, Ed

see pjt on fair rep

MERRI OK

see shelby

see VOTER SUPRESION shelby art'l V

COMMON THREAD RACISM?

see Affirmative action HARVARD bs ~ dei

see blum

CRC

ilya shapiro cato?

aclu mirror looks for case/client

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RawStory NO LNX $

RawStory

Secret donors paid millions to Clarence Thomas-linked law firm with Supreme Court cases

Alexandria Jacobson, Investigative Reporter

September 21, 2026

Secret donors paid millions to Clarence Thomas-linked law firm with Supreme Court cases

Clarence Thomas attends the swearing-in ceremony of Pam Bondi as attorney general at the White House. Photograph: Kent Nishimura/Reuters

A conservative law firm with deep ties to Justice Clarence Thomas, President Donald Trump and a history of arguing more than a dozen cases on hot-button right-wing causes before the Supreme Court took in more than $33.5 million from nonprofit dark money networks, according to new watchdog research.

Consovoy McCarthy, a boutique conservative law firm started in 2014, brought in more than $29 million since 2015 from nonprofits associated with Leonard Leo, a co-chair of the Federalist Society, a Project 2025 contributor and architect of the conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court, alone, according to tax filings analyzed by True North Research, a progressive investigative research firm.

Leo has a well-documented history of using his networks to funnel money to ultraconservative causes, from working to limit access to abortion medication to supporting anti-trans laws.

ALSO READ: Bombshell memo on horrific race massacre exposes complicit FBI: 'They lied like crazy'

Nonprofits do not need to disclose the identities of their donors, and when such groups support political causes without revealing the sources of their funding, it's considered “dark money.”

Consovoy McCarthy has “become a go-to for these far-right networks, especially networks tied to Leonard Leo ... who's seeking to impose his agenda on all Americans by weaponizing the court system,” said Alyssa Bowen, deputy director at True North Research.

“We've seen Consovoy McCarthy undertake a ton of cases furthering Leo's agenda as they're enriching themselves with Leo cash and cash from other far-right dark money operatives.”

Have a tip? I want to hear it.

I'm an investigative reporter covering politics and government accountability. If you have information the public should know — inside government, a campaign or anywhere power operates with too little scrutiny — I want to hear from you."

I protect sources and can communicate securely and confidentially.

Alexandria Jacobson

Investigative Reporter, Raw Story

alexandria@rawstory.com

Consovoy McCarthy took in money from nonprofits associated with other conservative activists like Edward Blum, who has brought at least eight cases to the Supreme Court, mostly about race-conscious college admissions and voting rights.

“You've got money funneled through a nonprofit organization, you don't really know if there's a wealthy mega donor or special interest helping bankroll the legal arguments that are appearing before a court,” said Michael Beckel, money in politics reform director at Issue One, a bipartisan nonprofit that advocates for reducing the influence of money in politics.

“You don't know if a wealthy donor or special interest is helping underwrite this type of legal advocacy when so much money flows through a nonprofit network.”

Consovoy McCarthy argued high-profile cases before the Supreme Court, including Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which effectively ended affirmative action in 2023 and was spearheaded by Blum.

The biggest nonprofit contribution Consovoy McCarthy took in was more than $1.8 million from Students for Fair Admissions in 2018.

In total, the firm took in nearly $8.8 million from the nonprofit founded by Blum, according to tax filings.

“There's a lot of money behind the legal challenges to a lot of these high-profile cases that we see from voting rights law to affirmative action cases, other race-conscious policies,” Beckel said.

“These are very hot-button issues right now, and where there's heat, there's fire, and when you've got the ability to bring big guns into the courtroom, there's some donors who are more than willing to have their money help pay for that type of legal representation all across the ideological spectrum.”

The firm also represented Trump in his effort to conceal his tax returns.

Six of Consovoy McCarthy’s 11 partners clerked for Thomas. Another clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts.

“When you've got many of your partners previously clerking for a specific Supreme Court justice, that can give you an edge in the courtroom. That can give you an edge in recruiting and landing new clients. It can give you an edge in landing major cases before the Supreme Court,” Beckel said.

“These are individuals who might have a particular insight into how Clarence Thomas approaches the decisions that he makes on the bench. If you've got lawyers with special insights into how a Supreme Court justice thinks, that can be very lucrative.”

Thomas McCarthy, co-founder of Consovoy McCarthy, Blum and Leo could not be immediately reached for comment for this story.

'Sad state of politics'

The 85 Fund, managed by Leo, is formerly known as the Judicial Education Project and is the oldest in his dark money network. It gave Consovoy McCarthy $5.65 million between 2016 and 2023.

America First Legal Foundation, co-founded by Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff and a recipient of funding from the Leo-connected donor-advised fund, DonorsTrust, paid Consovoy McCarthy nearly $235,000 in 2022.

Do No Harm, a medical and policy advocacy nonprofit associated with Blum and funded by Leo's network, paid Consovoy McCarthy more than $1.4 million total in 2022 and 2024. The Southern Poverty Law Center has designated Do No Harm as an anti-LGBTQ+ hate group that promotes conversion therapy.

Consovoy McCarthy was paid more than $544,000 from the Project on Fair Representation, founded by Blum.

“There's a coordinated effort by a few billionaire-backed political operatives that are throwing … their weight behind legal cases that undermine policies that help people and benefit politicians or billionaires,” Bowen said.

Speech First, which says it works to protect free speech rights on college campuses and is associated with the conservative billionaire Koch brothers, paid the firm more than $7.3 million total between 2018 and 2024.

The U.S. Chamber Litigation Center, which works on “defending Trump-era deregulation in court,” paid Consovoy McCarthy nearly $200,000.

Defending Education, formerly Parents Defending Education, which advocates for removing critical race theory and diversity, equity and inclusion from schools, paid Consovoy McCarthy $4 million total since 2021. Blum is a board member.

These nonprofits have been considered dark money networks with lack of transparency about their funders.

“Dark money has an incredible influence in the judicial system, as well as the political arena writ large,” Beckel said....

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Donor-Advised Funds And The Myth Of An Independent Sector

by JEFFREY CAIN on OCTOBER 11, 2023

PHILANTHROPY

A Conversation with the American Alliance for Equal Rights’ Edward Blum (Part 1 of 2)

by MICHAEL E. HARTMANN on OCTOBER 10, 2023

PHILANTHROPY

A Conversation with the American Alliance for Equal Rights’ Edward Blum (Part 2 of 2)

by MICHAEL E. HARTMANN on OCTOBER 10, 2023

ORGANIZATION TRENDS

Massachusetts Mapping Project Linked to Terrorists

by RYAN MAURO on OCTOBER 9, 2023

Early life

Blum was born into a Jewish family in Benton Harbor, Michigan, where his parents owned and operated the local shoe store.^[5] He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 1973. He then studied West African writers for a year at the State University of New York at New Paltz. He describes his parents as generally left-wing liberals who supported Democratic presidents like Franklin Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman and that he was, eventually, "the first Republican my mother ever met".^[6] He has said that the anti-Semitic discrimination his family experienced during his youth helped form his beliefs.^[7]^

Political interest

While working as a stock broker in Houston, Texas in the early 80s, he became involved in the neoconservatism movement. In 1990, he realized that the Democratic incumbent in his congressional district, Craig Anthony Washington, was running unopposed, so decided to run against him for the Republican Party. During that campaign, Blum and his wife Lark went door-knocking and realized that the boundaries of their district erratically divided streets based on ethnicity, with the suspected purpose to gerrymander a majority African-American district in order to grant increased voting power to minorities.^[8] Blum eventually lost the congressional race. But he and others filed a lawsuit against the state of Texas, claiming that the racially gerrymandered districts violated the Fourteenth Amendment. The case, Bush v. Vera, went to the Supreme Court, which ruled in Blum's favor.^[5]^

Activism

Blum holds a fellowship at the American Enterprise Institute(AEI). His areas of research at AEI include civil rights policy, affirmative action, multiculturalism, and redistricting. He has also written the book, The Unintended Consequences of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act (2007).

His litigation includes United States Supreme Court cases Bush v. Vera (1996), Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Holder (2009), Fisher v. University of Texas (2013), Shelby County v. Holder (2013), Evenwel v. Abbott (2016), and Fisher v. University of Texas II (2016).

In Shelby County,the Supreme Court struck down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which subjected certain states and parts of states to federal scrutiny when they tried to modify voting procedures.^[9] This scrutiny, known as "preclearance", was intended to prevent states from enacting voting procedures that disproportionately burden racial minorities. After unsuccessfully lobbying Congress to modify the preclearance rules in the Act's 2006 reauthorization, Blum set out to challenge the Act's constitutionality in court. He wanted to change or eliminate the law because it had led to the pro-minority gerrymandering which he encountered in the 1990s when he ran for Congress.^[8][10]^

In Evenwel, Blum recruited Texas voters to sue Texas in a constitutional test case. Texas, like other states, divides its state legislative districts in a way that equalizes the total population of each district. However, some districts have more eligible voters than others because they have fewer minors, non-citizen immigrants, and convicted felons. Blum and his recruited plaintiffs contended that this discriminates against voters in districts with high numbers of eligible voters, since each person's vote has less power.^[11] They wanted the Supreme Court to mandate that districts be drawn based on voter-eligible population rather than total population.In an April 2016 ruling, the Supreme Court upheld Texas's district scheme.^[12]^

The Fisher case, which challenged the University of Texas's consideration of race in its undergraduate admissions process, was decided at the Supreme Court in 2013 and again in 2016. The first time, the Court bolstered the legal standard that universities must satisfy if they wish to consider race, emphasizing that the use of race is only permissible if race-neutral alternatives would be ineffective at producing campus diversity.^[13] The second time, the Court applied the heightened legal standard to UT's admission policy, concluding that it passes muster and upholding it.^[14]^

Project on Fair Representation

Edward Blum is also challenging race-conscious admissions policies at other selective universities, claiming that they do not comply with the strict legal standard set forth in Fisher.^[15] To that end, he has founded Students for Fair Admissions, an offshoot of the Project on Fair Representation. This organization seeks to recruit students who have been rejected by selective universities and file lawsuits on their behalf.^[16] Specifically, Blum is targeting Harvard University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He set up websites called harvardnotfair.org,^[17] uncnotfair.org,^[18] and uwnotfair.org^[19] to attract plaintiffs. Students for Fair Admissions, led by Blum, filed federal lawsuits against Harvard and UNC-Chapel Hill in November 2014. (SFFA has not sued UW-Madison thus far).

On October 1, 2019 the Court ruled in favor of Harvard University. In the 130-page ruling, Judge Burroughs found that the University did not discriminate on the basis of race, did not engage in racial balancing or the use of quotas, and did not place too much emphasis on race when considering an applicant’s admissions file. She also wrote that, "Harvard has demonstrated that no workable and available race-neutral alternatives would allow it to achieve a diverse student body while still maintaining its standards for academic excellence."^[20] Other cases are pending in federal district court. Unlike the Fisher case, in which the plaintiff, Abigail Fisher, made herself public,^[21] the students rejected by Harvard and UNC have not revealed their identities because they want to shield themselves from potential retaliation.[citation ^needed] ^Rather, the named plaintiff is simply "Students for Fair Admissions", and that organization is prepared to assure the courts that it does in fact have members who were injured by the universities' use of race.[citation ^needed]

Alliance for Fair Board Recruitment

Edward Blum is listed as the President of the Alliance for Fair Board Recruitment, which is the plaintiff in lawsuits challenging diversity requirements for boards of certain publicly traded companies.^[22] The group has sued to challenge California's race and gender quotas,^[23] and Nasdaq's comply-or-explain rule.^[24]^

Works

Blum, Edward (2007). The Unintended Consequences of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. AEI Press. ISBN 9780844742571.

Abigail Thernstrom (September 14, 1936 – April 10, 2020) was an American political scientist and a leading conservative scholar on race relations, voting rights and education.^[1] She was an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute,^[2] a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a member of the Massachusetts Board of Education, and vice chair of the United States Commission on Civil Rights. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Government at Harvard University in 1975. According to the New York Times, she and her husband Harvard Professor Stephan Thernstrom, "are much in demand on the conservative talk-show circuit, where they forcefully argue that racial preferences are wrong, divisive and, as a tool to help minorities, overrated. They serve on the boards of conservative and libertarian public-policy institutes."^[3]^

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salon 11 22

"He really is the living embodiment of the Dunning-Kruger effect," a friend responded in a group text over the weekend. We had been sharing stories about the bouts of dumbassery on display, as Elon Musk starts his ill-advised reign of Twitter.And hoo boy, there was plenty to share. Did you see the one about Musk telling software engineers to print out 30 days of code, only to tell them to shred it when he likely realized this exposed how he doesn't know what he's doing? Or how he plans to take a bazooka to the content moderation team, even though doing so will likely send advertisers packing? Or how he thought carrying a sink around was a hilarious joke? Or how he tweeted an asinine conspiracy theory about the Paul Pelosi attack, only to delete it hours later?

None of this should be surprising. From day one, this entire saga has been a story of a man with far more money than brains. After all, this all started when Musk stupidly offered to buy Twitter at a price way over its valuation, for no other reason than a fit of trollish pique. It was only after he realized what a foolish idea it was to set $44 billion on fire that he started coming up with disingenuous excuses to escape the deal, only to discover that it was too late, legally, to back out.

Yet, somehow, much of this still feels surprising. The idea that Musk is "smart" has persisted through years of very public evidence to the contrary. Even now, many of his critics offer pre-emptive caveats that they don't think he's stupid, before explaining why the latest of his endless string of idiotic choices is a bad one. This notion of Musk's intelligence clings to the discourse around him for one simple reason: He is very, very rich.

The myth of the American meritocracy is a stubborn one. Americans can't help but believe that someone as rich as Musk must have something going on for him beyond dumb luck. To imagine otherwise is too unsettling. So many people block out what should be an obvious truth: You probably would have never heard of Elon Musk if he wasn't a white man from a wealthy family that literally owned an emerald mine in South Africa.

To be fair, it's entirely possible that, at one point, Musk wasn't a total birdbrain. His resume suggests there was a time when he was relatively competent at computer science, though there's no reason to think that such skills mean fluency in any other higher-functioning tasks. But regardless of what some IQ test from back in the day might have said about Musk, it's clear that in the past couple of decades, his brain has turned to total mush.

The irony is that the very wealth and privilege that tricks people into thinking he must be a genius likely contributed to the current state of affairs. Being surrounded by nothing but flattery makes it hard to distinguish between thoughts you have that are smart and useful and thoughts you have (such as right-wing conspiracy theories) that are idiotic. Either way, the people in your life — and for Musk, his legions of fanboys on Twitter — are swooning over what a super genius you are. The lack of meaningful feedback would damage most people's capacity for critical thinking. Musk's narcissism renders the diagnosis of his rational capacity terminal.

One can only hope the daily updates on Musk's antics will put some dent into the American myth of meritocracy. But then again, having to endure four years of a Donald Trump presidency didn't seem to make much difference, even as he shared moments of Trumpian wisdom like telling people to inject bleach into their lungs to cure COVID-19 and trying to "correct" a weather map drawn by actual meteorologists because he felt it would better serve his ego for a hurricane to make landfall in Alabama. Trump was elected in no small part because he had convinced large numbers of Americans that he was a successful businessman and therefore smart. In reality, he was a historically terrible businessman whose wealth exists because other rich white guys spent decades bailing him out of his self-inflicted financial woes.

The insidious nature of the meritocratic myth is on full display this week, as the Supreme Court heard arguments in a lawsuit over affirmative action at Harvard University. Unfortunately, polling shows that 63% of Americans oppose universities considering race in their admissions process, naively believing that ending affirmative action means some objective measure of "merit" will be used instead. In reality, the opposite is true: Far from being meritocratic institutions, Ivy League schools are largely devoted to elevating rich white kids at the expense of people who have more talent. As Mark Joseph Stern at Slate explains, "Harvard has a preference for four specific groups of applicants known as ALDC: athletes, legacies, those on the dean's list (frequently because of family donations), and the children of faculty." He continues:

In theory, ALDC preferences are colorblind. In practice, they operate as a massive affirmative action program for white applicants. Over a recent six-year period, 2,200 out of 4,993 admitted white students were ALDC—a figure significantly higher than the overall number of admitted students who are Black (1,392) and Hispanic (1,283). White ALDC students are not overrepresented because they happen to be more qualified; to the contrary, about three-fourths of them would have been rejected without the ALDC boost.

The existing race-based affirmative action program is mostly an attempt to make up for the diversity that is lost giving such a massive advantage to white applicants. And yet, somehow, you hear no complaints from most conservatives about the ALDC preferences. That's because they don't actually want a meritocracy. They want a system where white people can get twice as far while being half as talented. Or where the richest man in the world keeps getting called a genius, even as we can all see — if we're willing to look — that he's just another privilege-addled idiot who lost his capacity for critical thinking many billions of dollars ago.

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https://www.propublica.org/article/a-colorblind-constitution-what-abigail-fishers-affirmative-action-case-is-r

when the NAACP began challenging Jim Crow laws across the South, it knew that, in the battle for public opinion, the particular plaintiffs mattered as much as the facts of the case. The group meticulously selected the people who would elicit both sympathy and outrage, who were pristine in form and character. And they had to be ready to step forward at the exact moment when both public sentiment and the legal system might be swayed.

That's how Oliver Brown, a hard-working welder and assistant pastor in Topeka, Kan., became the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit that would obliterate the separate but equal doctrine. His daughter, whose third-grade innocence posed a searing rebuff to legal segregation, became its face.

Nearly 60 years after that Supreme Court victory, which changed the nation, conservatives freely admit they have stolen that page from the NAACP's legal playbook as they attempt to roll back many of the civil rights group's landmark triumphs.

In 23-year-old Abigail Noel Fisher they've put forward their version of the perfect plaintiff to challenge the use of race in college admissions decisions.

Publicly, Fisher and her supporters, chief among them the conservative activist who conceived of the case, have worked to make Fisher the symbol of racial victimization in modern America. As their narratives goes, she did everything right. She worked hard, received good grades, and rounded out her high school years with an array of extracurricular activities. But she was cheated, they say, her dream snatched away by a university that closed its doors to her because she had been born the wrong color: White.

The daughter of suburban Sugar Land, Texas, played the cello. Since the second grade, she said, she dreamed of carrying on the family tradition by joining her sister and father among the ranks of University of Texas at Austin alumni.

And the moment for her to lend her name to the lawsuit might never be riper: The Supreme Court has seated its most conservative bench since the 1930s. The Court is expected to issue a decision any week now in what is considered one of the most important civil rights cases in years.

On a posted by Edward Blum, a 1973 University of Texas graduate whose nonprofit organization is bankrolling the lawsuit, she is soft-spoken, her strawberry blond hair tucked behind one ear. Not even a swipe of lip gloss adorns her girlish face.

"There were people in my class with lower grades who weren't in all the activities I was in, who were being accepted into UT, and the only other difference between us was the color of our skin," she says. "I was taught from the time I was a little girl that any kind of discrimination was wrong. And for an institution of higher learning to act this way makes no sense to me. What kind of example does it set for others?"

It's a deeply emotional argument delivered by an earnest young woman, one that's been quoted over and over again.

Except there's a problem. The claim that race cost Fisher her spot at the University of Texas isn't really true.

In the hundreds of pages of legal filings, Fisher's lawyers spend almost no time arguing that Fisher would have gotten into the university but for her race.

If you're confused, it is no doubt in part because of how Blum, Fisher and others have shaped the dialogue as the case worked its way to the country's top court.

Journalists and bloggers have written dozens of articles on the case, including profiles of Fisher and Blum. News networks have aired panel after panel about the future of affirmative action. Yet for all the front-page attention, angry debate and exchanges before the justices, some of the more fundamental elements of the case have been little reported.

Race probably had nothing to do with the University of Texas's decision to deny admission to Abigail Fisher.

In 2008, the year Fisher sent in her application, competition to get into the crown jewel of the Texas university system was stiff. Students entering through the university's Top 10 program — a mechanism that granted automatic admission to any teen who graduated in the upper 10 percent of his or her high school class — claimed 92 percent of the in-state spots.

Fisher said in news reports that she hoped for the day universities selected students "solely based on their merit and if they work hard for it." But Fisher failed to graduate in the top 10 percent of her class, meaning she had to compete for the limited number of spaces up for grabs.

She and other applicants who did not make the cut were evaluated based on two scores. One allotted points for grades and test scores. The other, called a personal achievement index, awarded points for two required essays, leadership, activities, service and "special circumstances." Those included socioeconomic status of the student or the student's school, coming from a home with a single parent or one where English wasn't spoken. And race.

Those two scores, combined, determine admission.

Even among those students, Fisher did not particularly stand out. Court records show her grade point average (3.59) and SAT scores (1180 out of 1600) were good but not great for the highly selective flagship university. The school's rejection rate that year for the remaining 841 openings was higher than the turn-down rate for students trying to get into Harvard.

As a result, university officials claim in court filings that even if Fisher received points for her race and every other personal achievement factor, the letter she received in the mail still would have said no.

It's true that the university, for whatever reason, offered provisional admission to some students with lower test scores and grades than Fisher. Five of those students were black or Latino. Forty-two were white.

Neither Fisher nor Blum mentioned those 42 applicants in interviews. Nor did they acknowledge the 168 black and Latino students with grades as good as or better than Fisher's who were also denied entry into the university that year. Also left unsaid is the fact that Fisher turned down a standard UT offer under which she could have gone to the university her sophomore year if she earned a 3.2 GPA at another Texas university school in her freshman year.

In an interview last month, Blum agreed Fisher's credentials and circumstances make it difficult to argue — as he and his supporters have so ardently in public — that but for her race Fisher would have been a Longhorn.

"There are some Anglo students who had lower grades than Abby who were admitted also," Blum told ProPublica. "Litigation like this is not a black and white paradigm."

Blum started his one-man nonprofit, the Project on Fair Representation, in 2005. The organization is funded by deep-pocketed conservatives to, according to its website, influence "jurisprudence, public policy, and public attitudes regarding race and ethnicity" in voting, education, contracting and employment. To do so, Blum — who is not a lawyer — helps arrange pro bono representation to fight race-based policies that were meant to address inequalities.

According to a Reuters profile, Blum has brought at least a dozen lawsuits against such programs and laws — including four that made it to the Supreme Court. He has two on the current docket, Fisher and the Shelby County, Ala., case challenging a key provision of the Voting Rights Act.

In the Fisher case, while the young woman may have lent her name to the lawsuit, the case before the Court has very little to do with her. Her name appears just five times in the thousands of words that make up the body of the complaint. She has already gone on to graduate from Louisiana State University, her second choice, and is working in finance at a firm in Austin.

Asked by a news reporter what harm she had suffered, she cited only her inability to tap into UT's alumni network and possibly missing out on a better first job. If she wins, Fisher seeks only the return of her application fee and housing deposit — a grand total of $100 in damages.

So while the Fisher case has been billed as a referendum on affirmative action, its backers have significantly grander ambitions: They seek to make the case a referendum on the**14th Amendment**itself. At issue is whether the Constitution's equal protection clause, drafted by Congress during Reconstruction to ensure the rights of black Americans, also prohibits the use of race to help them overcome the nation's legacy of racism.

The Supreme Court has never ruled that the Constitution bars any and all laws and government programs that consider race. But Blum and his supporters, seeing an opening with the current Court, seek to overturn more than a century of precedent.

The true crux of the suit is not Fisher's failed application, but that government officials violate the constitutional rights of white Americans when they consider race in a way that might help African-Americans and Latinos.

"An argument can be made that it is simply impossible to tease out down to the last student who would have been admitted, and who would have not been admitted, had they been a different skin color," Blum said. "What we know is skin color is weighed and ethnicity is weighed by the University of Texas in their admissions process, and that alone is enough to strike down the plan."

Blum and his supporters say the reasoning is simple. The Constitution is colorblind and the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment prohibits the government from treating people differently because of race.

It's an argument first successfully championed by the NAACP and other civil rights groups, most notably in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case, in which the Supreme Court declared the notion of "separate but equal" to be a fallacy.

"In its history, colorblindness has this progressive, anti-racist push behind it," said Ian Haney-López, a constitutional scholar at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law.

But following the Brown decision, the very groups that had ardently — and violently — defended laws mandating separation by race used the notion of a colorblind Constitution to challenge court orders to integrate schools.

"They began to say, yes, the Constitution is colorblind, and so the state cannot distinguish between races when it tried to remedy segregation," he said.

As a result of Southern resistance, it would take six years after Brown before 6-year old Ruby Bridges, wearing crisp white socks and black-bowed shoes, became the first black student to attend a white elementary school in the South. The image of the diminutive brown-skinned girl who needed U.S. marshals to protect her from an angry white mob inspired Norman Rockwell to preserve the moment in a painting that now hangs in the White House occupied by the first black president.

Initially, the Supreme Court unambiguously knocked those arguments down. In a 1971 ruling, it said that government could not mandate colorblindness when doing so would defeat the integration requirement of Brown v. Board of Education. A few years later, in a ruling on affirmative action, Justice Harry Blackmun wrote, "In order to get beyond racism, we must first take race into account. There is no other way."

But as the Supreme Court's make-up has grown more conservative, it has taken up a steady stream of so-called reverse discrimination cases, in which white plaintiffs have argued that race-specific measures born of the civil rights movement discriminate against white Americans and violate the 14th Amendment.

Supreme Court decisions have eroded programs and laws that use race to remedy inequalities, but not eliminated them altogether. And in a 2003 opinion written by centrist Sandra Day O'Connor, the justices narrowly upheld affirmative action in college admissions when it is the only means to ensure diversity.

But the Court's make-up changed in what scholars consider a significant way when Samuel Alito, considered the third most conservative Supreme Court justice since 1937, replaced O'Connor in 2006. Since then, several justices have made their constitutional disdain for race-conscious programs known. In a controversial 2007 decision, Chief Justice John Roberts sent a clear message when he used the equal protection argument at play in Brown v. Board of Education to strike down voluntary desegregation plans in schools.

Evoking a colorblind Constitution, Roberts said, "The way to stop discriminating on the basis of race, is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."

And just last month during oral arguments over the constitutionality of a key aspect of the Voting Rights Act, Justice Antonin Scalia derisively called what's considered the most successful civil rights law in history a "racial entitlement."

Public opinion on race has changed over time as well. In the 1950s, surveys show, most white Americans believed that black Americans faced substantial discrimination but that they themselves experienced little. Today, despite gaping disparities between black and white Americans in income, education, health care, homeownership, employment and college admissions, a majority of white Americans now believe they are just as likely, or more likely, to face discrimination as black Americans.

Blum chose the University of Texas to mount what could be a decisive challenge to affirmative action in college admissions because it already had what was regarded as a "race-neutral" process — the Top 10 program. Since many Texas high schools remain segregated, taking the top 10 percent of students from black and Latino high schools ensured a substantial population of students of color at the UT.

As a consequence, Blum believed he could challenge whether the additional use of race to fill out the entering class passed constitutional muster.

To get standing in court, Blum needed a victim. That's when he started looking for a version of the Brown family, someone who could represent the arguable hurt caused when public officials used race.

This approach, too, mirrors an NAACP tactic from half a century ago. Then, knowing the Supreme Court was unlikely to throw out segregation in one fell swoop, the civil rights group brought a narrower challenge to segregated school facilities first.

One of those cases, ironically, targeted the same university as Blum — the University of Texas at Austin. The university, which had been closed to black students since its founding, denied the law school application of Heman Marion Sweatt because the state constitution required that black and white students attend separate schools.

Because Texas had no black law school, the NAACP sued, arguing that the state violated the constitutional mandate to provide equal facilities for black and white students. The Supreme Court ruled that the hastily put together black law school created to avoid admitting Sweatt could not possibly be equal. It ordered Texas to admit Sweatt as its first black student in 1950.

That suit launched the stone that would shatter separate but equal just four years later when the Court struck down segregation in schools in Brown.

Blum and his supporters hope to use the Fisher case, and the 14th Amendment challenge to the Voting Rights Act that Blum is also behind, in the same way.

According to Blum, the Constitution sees affirmative action policies — in college, in contracting, in employment — and Jim Crow laws as twin evils.

"I don't see the distinction," he said.

But several constitutional scholars interviewed for this piece dispute this notion. Neil Siegel of Duke University called this interpretation of the 14th Amendment "perverse." Georgetown law professor Girardeau A. Spann called it "discriminatory."

While the 14th Amendment doesn't mention race, the drafters went on to pass race-specific legislation aimed at helping former slaves and other black Americans overcome more than a century of racial oppression.

Erwin Chemerinsky, founding dean of the University of California, Irvine School of Law, said that the concept of colorblindness holds great rhetorical appeal but that "there is no basis for concluding that the 14th Amendment equal protection clause requires colorblindness." In drafting the 14th Amendment, he said, Congress recognized "an enormous difference between a white majority disadvantaging minorities and a white majority acting to remedy past discrimination."

Conservatives challenging these types of programs purport to champion the legacy of the civil rights movement, Haney-Lopez said, but the historical roots of their efforts are much more cynical.

"I think that is incredibly important that people realize that today's proponents of colorblindness pretend that they are the heirs to Thurgood Marshall and John Marshall Harlan," he said. "But that is a lie. They are the heirs of Southern resistance to integration. And the colorblindness arguments that they use come directly from the Southern efforts to defeat Brown v. Board of Education."

Ilya Shapiro, a senior constitutional studies fellow at the Cato Institute, which filed an amicus brief supporting Fisher, thinks otherwise.

"I am not going to speak to anyone else's motives. It is unfair to paint people with the Jim Crow brush because they have those kinds of arguments," he said. "I don't like people being judged based on the color of their skin." If a program "treats people different because one has a different skin color, I find that offensive and I think the Constitution does as well."

But when asked why the drafters created programs targeted to black Americans if they did not intend the Constitution to allow the government to use race to help minority groups, Shapiro said, "It was a curious period."

At the same time Congress drafted the equal protection clause, he said, it also "voted for segregated schools in the District of Columbia."

That example is the very same one that segregationists Strom Thurmond and Richard Brevard Russell used when they drafted the 1956 Southern Manifesto urging officials to resist the Supreme Court's use of the equal protection clause to overturn school segregation.

The impact of a ruling that bans all racial considerations by universities, employers and governments "could have devastating impact on the ability to overcome past inequalities," Siegel said.

Few experts think Blum and his supporters are apt to win that big a victory in the Fisher case. And so he will likely be on the hunt again for another case, and another perfect plaintiff.

Nikole Hannah-Jones covered civil rights and fair housing for ProPublica. Previously, she covered governmental issues, the census, and race and ethnicity at The Oregonian.

Nikole.Hannah-Jones@propublica.org
@nhannahjones

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https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-casemaker/special-report-behind-u-s-race-cases-a-little-known-recruiter-idUSBRE8B30V220121204

no lnx

Special Report: Behind U.S. race cases, a little-known recruiter

By Joan Biskupic

19 MIN READ

SOUTH THOMASTON, Maine (Reuters) - Sometime in the next few months, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide two cases that could fundamentally reshape the rules of race in America.

In one, a young white woman named Abigail Fisher is suing the University of Texas over affirmative action in college admissions. In the other, an Alabama county wants to strike down a law that requires certain states to get federal permission to change election rules.

If they win, the names Fisher and Shelby County, Ala., will instantly become synonymous with the elimination of longstanding minority-student preferences and voting-rights laws. But behind them is another name, belonging to a person who is neither a party to the litigation nor even a lawyer, but who is the reason these cases ever came to be.

He is Edward Blum, a little-known 60-year-old former stockbroker.

Working largely on his own, with the financial support of a handful of conservative donors, Blum sought out the plaintiffs in the Fisher and Shelby County cases, persuaded them to file suit, matched them with lawyers, and secured funding to appeal the cases all the way to the high court. Abigail Fisher is the daughter of an old friend of Blum’s - a man who happened to call when Blum was in the midst of a three-year search for a white college applicant who had been rejected despite solid scores. Blum eventually got Shelby County to file suit after trolling government websites and cold-calling a county official.

Blum introduced Fisher’s father and Shelby County officials to the same high-priced but politically sympathetic Washington lawyers, who agreed to work for a cut rate to be billed to Blum’s backers. Neither Fisher nor Shelby County is paying to fight the cases that bear their names.

Over the past 20 years, Blum has similarly launched at least a dozen lawsuits attacking race-based protections. In addition to the Fisher and Shelby County cases, two other Blum-backed cases reached the Supreme Court. One struck down majority-black and majority-Latino voting districts in Texas. The other prompted the court to suggest it might eliminate a major portion of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which the conservative-majority bench may now be poised to do in the Shelby County case.

A self-described former college liberal, Blum says that over time he came to believe that race-based policies violate the very principles of equality they were created to uphold. Affirmative action, he said, treats whites unfairly and stigmatizes minorities, and the rule that requires certain, mostly Southern, states to obtain special federal permission for electoral changes - Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act - unjustly punishes them for long-abandoned racist practices.

“The original vision has been turned upside down,” said Blum, whose Toyota minivan haslicense plates reading “1FRSTNE” - short for One First Street Northeast, the address of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C.

OPERATING FROM MAINE

Blum, who has a runner’s lean build and brown hair flecked with gray, operates from a book-lined office in his white two-story frame house on Penobscot Bay, Maine. He holds an unpaid fellowship with the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington and in 2005 formed a not-for-profit legal defense foundation, the Project on Fair Representation, of which he is the sole employee. The organization’s website says it devotes “all of its efforts to influencing jurisprudence, public policy, and public attitudes regarding race and ethnicity.”

The Project on Fair Representation, in turn, is fully financed by a tax-exempt charitable group called Donors Trust, which raises money from a variety of benefactors and directs them to conservative foundations and projects. According to Internal Revenue Service documents, Donors Trust spent about $1.2 million from 2006 to 2011, the most recent information available, on Project on Fair Representation activities. Gifts to charities such as Donors Trust are tax deductible; money given directly to a legal-defense fund that is not a charitable organization generally is not.

Donors Trust, which also handles the administrative side of the Project on Fair Representation, said most of the project’s expenses are for legal fees. Blum said he draws an average annual salary of $50,000, paid by Donors Trust from funds earmarked for his project. He said he and his wife, Lark, a retired insurance agent, also support themselves with income from savings, investments and Blum’s part-time work as a municipal-bond analyst.

Blum said contributors to his project so far this year have included the conservative Milwaukee, Wis.-based Lynde and HarryBradley Foundation, which gave Donors Trust $100,000 to support Blum’s group after Blum wrote them a pitch letter regarding the Fisher case and asking for support with costs. Bradley Foundation president and chief executive Michael Grebe confirmed the gift.

Another is the Searle Freedom Trust, a foundation of the late drug-company scion Daniel C. Searle, which gave Donors Trust gifts totaling $597,500 from 2005 to 2010 designated for the Project on Fair Representation, Searle’s IRS documents show. Kimberly Dennis, CEO of the Searle Freedom Trust, declined to comment on Blum’s project.Blum and Whitney Ball, president of Donors Trust, declined to name other backers of the Project on Fair Representation.

The practice of finding plaintiffs to tee up test cases at the Supreme Court is not new. Liberal groups such as the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and conservative groups such as the Institute for Justice have been doing it for decades. The organizers typically play prominent roles - either as counsel, as public spokespeople or by filing amicus briefs.

Jon Greenbaum, chief counsel at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a not-for-profit liberal legal-defense fund that has represented parties on the opposite side of Blum-sponsored litigation, said it is rare that Blum’s donors choose to remain anonymous. “There is an issue regarding the transparency of what’s going on” when financial backers of high-stakes cases are not known to the public, he said.

Blum and Donors Trust’s Ball say the financing of Blum’s work is similar to what is done for liberal causes, and say people have many reasons for seeking to give anonymously.

[RELATED COVERAGE

Cases Edward Blum has taken to the US Supreme Court]

SON OF A SHOE SALESMAN

Blum was born in Benton Harbor, Mich., and moved around as a child. His father, Joseph, was a salesman, mainly of shoes. During a tough time when they were living in Florida, Blum said he drove with his father up to North Carolina textile mills to buy bulk loads of women’s underwear, and peddled the packs along the road back South. “He sold them in motels, coffee shops, wherever blue-collar women would give him four bucks for a pack of underwear he bought for a buck and a half,” Blum recalled.

He speaks in plain-Midwestern tones sprinkling his conversation with the Yiddish word emes (pronounced “EM-ess”), which means “truth.” A 1973 graduate of the University of Texas, Blum said he started out as a Democrat, but by the early 1980s began reading the neoconservative Commentary magazine and changed his views. In 1984 he voted for Ronald Reagan. He soon became a successful stockbroker at Paine Webber in Houston. Then, in the early 1990s, came the “acorn that began all my activities,” Blum said.

After noticing that his heavily Democratic district had trouble fielding a Republican congressional candidate in 1990, Blum decided to enter the 1992 Republican primary. He won it, and in the general election faced an African-American incumbent Democrat. When Blum and Lark walked the district to shake hands with voters, he said, he had to carry a map because the borders zigged and zagged. “Multi-ethnic neighborhoods were split apart,” he said. “Block by block. Blacks over here. Whites over here. Hispanics over here.”

Blum lost by a wide margin. At the time, court challenges were starting to mount over “majority minority” districts like his that had been gerrymandered to consolidate minorities and maximize their voting power. In 1993, the Supreme Court ruled that districts appearing to segregate voters by race, even if designed to help minorities, violate the Constitution’s guarantee of equality. Blum decided to sue Texas officials, alleging the districts unlawfully segregated voters by race.

He enlisted five local Republicans to join him, including Al Vera, then a high school government teacher, who became the lead plaintiff. Their complaint went to the Supreme Court. That 1996 case, Bush v. Vera, struck down two majority-black and one majority-Hispanic districts in Texas and ordered the boundaries redrawn. Now retired, Vera said Blum is “like a bulldog once he attaches onto an issue he believes in.”

Blum says he personally fronted about $100,000 of the legal fees in the case, which eventually rose to about $1 million. He initially retained regional lawyers, then sought out a large Washington firm whose top partners had served in Republican presidential administrations. Blum said he and the lawyers eventually recouped virtually all their money, as winners’ legal fees are reimbursed in some civil-rights cases. Bert Rein, partner at the firm now known as Wiley Rein, said he doesn’t recall specific fees but Blum’s account sounds right.

Blum went to court to watch oral arguments. He felt so vindicated that he decided to devote himself nearly full time to the fight against race-based laws and policies. “Seeing how the whole thing can be put back together with litigation,” he said, changed his life. “It really is the emes.”

In 2000, Blum moved to Washington and began working with likeminded conservatives. He spent several years as a senior fellow with the Washington-based conservative Center for Equal Opportunity, and abruptly left in 2006 after a falling-out with Linda Chavez, the center’s president. Neither Blum nor Chavez would discuss the circumstances. By his own admission, Blum operates best solo. “With partners, everyone wants to be the shiniest apple,” he said. “Operating alone, I don’t need to address that.”

SENSING AN OPPORTUNITY

By the mid-2000s, the makeup of the Supreme Court had tilted rightward, and Blum sensed another opportunity. John Roberts succeeded the late William Rehnquist as Chief Justice in 2005, and in January 2006 the conservative Samuel Alito replaced the moderate Sandra Day O’Connor, who several years earlier had cast the crucial swing vote upholding affirmative action in college admissions at the University of Michigan.

Following the Michigan decision, the University of Texas had instituted a modified version of an affirmative action program it had previously discontinued because a lower court in Texas had blocked it. The university guarantees admission to all state high-school graduates in the top 10 percent of their class, but under the new arrangement also allows in some minorities with lower scores in an effort to enhance diversity.

Blum figured if he could find a white student who had been rejected with a record that exceeded the lower criteria used for some minority applicants, he might be able to persuade a majority of the nine justices on the Supreme Court that the practice was unconstitutional. Blum said he also wanted someone temperamentally suited to the long haul of litigation.

He set up a Web address, utnotfair.org, which asked spurned University of Texas students to contact Blum and relate their experiences. He gave speeches to the Young Conservatives of Texas and similar groups, and hounded everyone he knew in the state. “I could bump into people in restaurants and bars that I knew from high school in Houston that had kids graduating from high school,” he recalled. “And I was such a noodge: ‘If she doesn’t get in, I want to represent her.’”

He says he heard from many students, but after two and a half years, none still seemed right. Someone might have had strong grades, he said, but didn’t seem like a person he could work with for a long period or “expose to the press.”

Then, in March 2008, Blum got a call from his old friend Richard Fisher. Blum had met Fisher, an accountant, through business even before Fisher’s daughter Abigail, then 18, was born. The Blums and Fishers had socialized together over the years and Blum attended the wedding of Abigail’s older sister. Fisher, also a Republican with what he says are strong conservative views, knew of his friend’s search.

Fisher told Blum that Abigail had just received a rejection notice from the University of Texas and was heartbroken. He described her scores, and the men agreed she might make a strong candidate to challenge the Texas admissions system. Blum said he told Fisher: “I want you to prepare Abby for being under a microscope.”

Abigail, a slight, strawberry blonde, said she told her father she was willing to lend her name and story to a court case, but she wanted to go about her life privately. “I assumed that whatever would come of it would take a really long time,” Abigail said. “It would be for others.”

Blum told Richard Fisher he had financial backing and Fisher would not have to pay a cent in legal fees. Without Blum’s access to funds, Fisher said, he would never have proceeded. Blum would not discuss the cost. But lawyers who argue regularly before the Supreme Court say constitutional challenges that start in district court and wind up at the high court could cost a total $2 million or more in legal fees.

Slideshow ( 4 images )

Blum retained the Wiley Rein firm again,and within a couple of weeks, the lawsuit now known as Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin was filed at the U.S. District Court in Austin. The lower court sided with the university in 2009, upholding its affirmative action plan. A panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals later agreed. Abigail, meanwhile, had enrolled at her second-choice school, Louisiana State University.

A COUNTY IN ALABAMA

A few months after Blum snagged Abigail Fisher, he found another plaintiff to challenge a policy he abhorred as much as affirmative action: Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires all or parts of 16 states with a history of discrimination to obtain federal approval for any election-law change.

While surfing the Web one day, he saw on the Department of Justice’s site that the agency had rejected a voting map in the city of Calera, at the southwestern tip of Shelby County in central Alabama. That new map dramatically enlarged one of the city’s voting districts, diluting African-American voting strength.

Blum picked up the phone and called the attorney for Calera and greater Shelby County, Frank “Butch” Ellis. The two men immediately clicked. Ellis said he had long been chafing under Section 5 and was intrigued by Blum’s call.

At the time, another Section 5 case that Blum was helping finance was already at the Supreme Court. That case, filed by the Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District #1, claimed the South had changed, and the requirement that federal permission was needed for election changes was an anachronism. Blum told Ellis that if the Texas utility case didn’t strike down the rule, he thought the Shelby County situation might one day make a better case.

When the Supreme Court in 2009 sidestepped the issue of Section 5’s constitutionality and ruled on a narrower issue, Blum called Ellis again. Like the Fishers, Ellis was enticed by Blum’s promise that the county’s challenge would cost it nothing.Shelby County v. Holder was filed in April 2010, at the U.S. District Court in Washington. Last May, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld the lower court’s ruling against Shelby County, and in November, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case.

Bert Rein of the Wiley Rein firm, which Blum retained for both Shelby County and Fisher, declined to discuss its fees. When asked how much money he thought each case would cost, Blum said, “Low six figures.”

PLAINTIFF IN PAJAMAS

On the morning of February 21, 2012, when the Supreme Court announced it was taking the Fisher case, its eponymous plaintiff was still in bed in her Baton Rouge apartment, just a few months from graduation. Her father called to tell her the news, and Abigail began jumping up and down in her pajamas. “That was the most excited I had been throughout the four years,” she said. “My dad and Edward were way more passionate about it.”

Blum then stage-managed some publicity for Abigail, who previously had not appeared in public in connection with the lawsuit. He hired a small production company to make a YouTube video about the case, featuring critics of the university’s program and Abigail. In it she said students had been accepted with lower grades and fewer activities than she had, and the “only other difference between us was the color of our skin.”

University officials say such differences arise from their interest in bringing together as diverse a group of qualified students as possible. They acknowledge that some minority applicants with lower scores than Fisher have been admitted. But they also say that a significant number of African-American and Hispanic applicants with scores identical or higher than hers have similarly been denied admission at the highly competitive campus.

On the morning of Supreme Court oral arguments in October, Blum arranged a car and driver for himself, Abigail and her parents. When they arrived at the court building, they tried to avoid the protesters in the front, most of whom supported affirmative action and were carrying signs with messages such as “diversity works” and “expand opportunity.” Blum and the Fishers headed for a rear door, but were turned away because it was only for employees. They eventually found the proper entrance and took seats in the rear of the courtroom.

After the hearing, standing in front of the marble-columned building surrounded by her parents, lawyers and Blum, Abigail recited from memory a statement Blum had written for her.

She thanked the Supreme Court for hearing her case and the lawyers for representing her. “I hope the court rules that a person’s race and ethnicity should not be considered when applying to the University of Texas,” she said.

It did not occur to her to thank Blum, she said. He had not put that in the statement.

Reporting by Joan Biskupic; Editing by Amy Stevens and Howard Goller

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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http://www.prwatch.org/news/2013/03/11999/racial-entitlements-long-term-effort-end-voting-rights-act-and-affirmative-action

The U.S. Supreme Court may roll back two pillars of the civil rights era this term -- the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and affirmative action -- both of which have long been targeted by the right-wing and whose challenges are backed by the same set of deep-pocketed ideological funders.

Scalia Sees Voting Rights and Affirmative Action as "Racial Entitlements"

Wednesday's oral arguments in Shelby County v. Holder indicated hostility among some justices towards Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA), which requires states with a history of state-sanctioned racial discrimination to get federal pre-approval before implementing changes to their voting laws or procedures. Congress has renewed it four times since 1965 with significant bipartisan support, most recently in 2006, when every U.S. Senator voted for it.

But that support was "very likely attributable to a phenomenon that is called perpetuation of racial entitlement," Justice Antonin Scalia asserted from the bench. "Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get out of them through the normal political processes," he said, a characterization of the landmark civil rights law that was met with gasps in the courtroom.

This is not the first time Scalia has talked about "racial entitlements" -- and his perspective will almost certainly apply to another civil rights case in the Court's docket this term.

"To pursue the concept of racial entitlement -- even for the most admirable and benign of purposes -- is to reinforce and preserve for future mischief the way of thinking that produced race slavery, race privilege and race hatred," he wrote [3] about affirmative action in a concurring opinion in the 1995 case Adarand Constructors v Pena, a decision that enacted a high bar for government affirmative action programs.

Chief Justice John Roberts has expressed similar support for so-called color-blindness under the law. "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race," he wrote [4] in a 2007 case striking down the consideration of a student's race by school districts striving for diversity in schools in Seattle, Washington, and Louisville, Kentucky. Likewise, in a 2009 decision about the VRA, Roberts expressed a view that race matters less today, and therefore Section 5's federal pre-clearance requirement may no longer be justified since "things have changed in the South."

Roberts and Scalia have another bite at the affirmative action apple this term. In October, the Court heard oral arguments in Fisher v University of Texas, which challenges race-conscious university admission policies. Questioning from Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Scalia indicated the Court may have a five-justice majority to reverse parts of a 2003 ruling that allowed consideration of race in college admissions (a decision that came before President George W Bush named two justices to the court).

The statements from these justices on affirmative action and voting rights reflect a view that race plays little role in America today (! [5]), or at least that it should no longer be acknowledged under the law. In fact, "explicit anti-black attitudes" have actually increased [6] over the past four years, particularly among Republicans, according to research by social scientists at Brown and the University of Michigan.

If the Court sides with plaintiffs in Fisher and Shelby County, it would be a victory for the right, which for decades has been laying the groundwork for rolling-back these sorts of progressive gains by adopting the terminology of "color-blindness."

Long-Standing Opposition to Affirmative Action, Section 5

Both the VRA and affirmative action grew out of the civil rights struggle of the 1960s, and have been targeted for reversal ever since by generations of reactionaries.

President Lyndon Johnson's support for the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act led to realignments within America's two major political parties. Southern Democrats like "Dixiecrat" Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina defected to the Republican Party, and over time many voters who had long supported "the Party of Lincoln" shifted their allegiance to Democrats.

Ronald Reagan's opposition to civil rights programs, for example, was a key part of his effort to win the presidency by appealing to the racial views of white Southern voters. He famously kicked-off his successful presidential bid by declaring his support for "state's rights" at a Mississippi event held just a few miles from where three civil rights activists were murdered in 1964. "States rights" had been a rallying call for Southern states opposing Brown v. Board of Education and the end of racial segregation, and provided a facially neutral way to oppose the VRA's Section 5 federal pre-clearance requirements. He called the VRA "humiliating to the South" and described affirmative action as a form of "reverse discrimination" where whites are "victims." As legendary campaign consultant Lee Atwater acknowledged [7] after the campaign, the way Reagan discussed voting rights and affirmative action was part of a careful effort to garner the votes of white Southerners by using "abstract" and coded language to avoid express racism.

Once elected, Reagan stopped enforcing several affirmative action programs, and his Justice Department began filing amicus briefs in support of white men claiming injury from the programs. In 1982, when the Voting Rights Act was up for reauthorization, John Roberts was working for the Reagan Administration and argued for [8] a watered-down version of the law. After Congress rejected the administration's efforts and passed a strengthened VRA with bipartisan support, a hesitant Reagan nonetheless signed the reauthorization -- prompting Roberts to write [9] "we were burned." President Reagan also appointed U.S. Supreme Court Justices who passed the litmus tests of a narrow view of affirmative action and civil rights laws: Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy, who are still on the Court, as well as William Rehnquist and Sandra Day O'Connor.

Right-Wing Institutions Laid Groundwork

Part of the long-term success of modern Republicanism, which grew out of opposition to the civil rights gains of the 1960s, is attributable to the development of a network of right-wing funders and well-funded institutions starting in the mid-1970s. For example, in 1973, legendary right-wing activist Paul Weyrich co-founded both the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the Heritage Foundation.

ALEC, as the Center for Media and Democracy has documented, has advanced an array of policy initiatives at the state level to advance a right-wing agenda, for example by privatizing public institutions like education and prisons, and by successfully promoting efforts to restrict voting rights (some of which have been thwarted in the past year by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act). In addition to voter ID legislation [10], ALEC has adopted model bills like the deceptively named "Civil Rights Act" [11] to end affirmative action programs run by states and universities.

The Heritage Foundation has become one of the largest think tanks in the country, and has long [12] opposed [13] affirmative action and Section 5. In recent years, Heritage Foundation legal fellow Hans Von Spakovsky (who was recently profiled by [14] New Yorker author Jane Mayer in a piece crediting research from CMD) has promoted the myth of rampant voter fraud to justify restrictive state voting laws. He argues [15] that Section 5 is an outdated statute that allows the feds to trample on state liberty and has also opposed [16] affirmative action.

The last three or four decades have also seen the development of an array of legal institutions attempting to achieve right-wing political victories through the courts. The best known is the Federalist Society, which has contributed to the development of legal theories to advance preferred policy outcomes through the judicial system, and has cultivated a network of like-minded lawyers and judges, including Justice Scalia and Chief Justice Roberts.

And these groups have been funded by a shared set of wealthy donors. In the 1970s and 1980s, foundations created by the Coors and Scaife family fortunes provided the seed money for groups like ALEC and the Heritage Foundation. The Bradley Foundation and Koch family foundations also provide tens of millions to an array of right-wing organizations.

Likewise, the current Supreme Court challenges to both the Voting Rights Act and university affirmative action programs are backed by top funders of the movement and were organized by the same right-wing activist -- and are carrying forward this long-term project to roll-back the gains of the civil rights era.

Same Group and Donors Behind Fisher and Shelby County Cases

The Project on Fair Representation is a "legal defense fund" dedicated to reversing race-based legal protections, and its director, Ed Blum, coordinated the challenges in both the Fisher and Shelby County cases. Blum has likened his role in high-profile litigation to "Yenta the matchmaker."

"I find the plaintiff, I find the lawyer, and I put them together, and then I worry about it for four years," he said [17].

Blum urged Shelby County, Alabama, to bring its Section 5 challenge after the Department of Justice blocked its effort to dilute the voting power of the growing African-American population. He also connected with Abigail Fisher, a white student who was denied admission to the University of Texas at Austin and claimed it was because of her race. Blum was also behind the last Voting Rights Act challenge to make it to the Supreme Court, Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Holder.

The Project on Fair Representation's legal fees are entirely funded by the secretive Donors Trust, which has been described as [18] a "Dark Money ATM." Donors Trust funnels money from the Kochs and other funders to organizations in the right-wing network, but keeps the original donors secret.

Blum's known contributors include the Bradley Foundation, which also bankrolls groups promoting voter suppression, writes [19] Ari Berman of The Nation:

Blum's group does not have to disclose which funders of Donors Trust are giving him money, but he has identified two of them: the Bradley Foundation and the Searle Freedom Trust. The Wisconsin-based Bradley Foundation paid for billboards in minority communities in Milwaukee during the 2010 election with the ominous message "Voter Fraud Is a Felony!", which voting rights groups denounced as voter suppression. Both Bradley and Searle have given six-figure donations to ALEC in recent years, and Bradley funded a think tank in Wisconsin, the MacIver Institute, that hyped discredited claims of voter fraud to justify the state's voter ID law, currently blocked in state court.

The Bradley Foundation has also been a major funder of attacks on affirmative action. It has given millions to Ward Connerly's anti-affirmative action "American Civil Rights Institute," and it has given over one million dollars to a group that calls itself the "Center for Equal Opportunity," whose activities include traveling the country [20] urging Republican legislators to crack down [21] on affirmative action programs, which it claims constitute "reverse discrimination." In 2011, a Center for Equal Opportunity representative claimed [20] the University of Wisconsin was guilty of "severe racial discrimination." This is a difficult claim to believe given that 2.6 percent of the university's 42,180 students are African-American and 3.8 percent are Hispanic, much lower percentages than the general population.

Legal Victories May Not Help GOP's Long-Term Viability

Institutions [22] of higher [23] education [24] -- and many employers [25] -- indicate that taking race into account remains an important tool for promoting diversity in classrooms and the workplace, particularly to help compensate for the institutional forms of racism [26] that contribute to ongoing inequity.

And civil rights groups strongly contend that Section 5 remains a vital part of the VRA's goal of protecting access to the ballot box. The Act was designed to end decades of racist Jim Crow voting restrictions, like literacy tests, which might have been facially neutral but had a racially discriminatory impact. And in the past year, Section 5 has been applied to block the wave of voter ID restrictions passed in states like South Carolina [27] and Texas, as well as to stop discriminatory redistricting in Texas and to keep Florida from reducing early voting hours in certain areas. Like the Jim Crow-era restrictions, the ALEC-inspired voter ID laws and limits on early voting would disproportionately impact voters of color.

The problems of the 1960s and 1970s remain concentrated [28] in the areas covered by Section 5: six of the nine states fully covered by the provision have passed new voting restrictions since 2010, but only one-third of the rest of the country passed similar restrictions during the same period. Justice Elena Kagan noted during Wednesday's oral argument that while covered jurisdictions hold less than 25% of the U.S. population, they account for 56% of successful voting-rights lawsuits.

Although each case currently before the court asks a separate constitutional question -- for Fisher, whether considering race in university admissions violates the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection guarantees, and for Shelby County, whether requiring federal approval for changes in state voting procedures violates the 10th Amendment's protections for "state's rights" -- if the Court sides with the plaintiffs, the cases will represent major victories for the right-wing movement's effort to roll-back civil rights gains.

But, as today's Republican Party tries to lose its image as the party of white people, these potential legal wins may instead be pyrrhic victories that reinforce it.

News [32]

Center for Media and Democracy • 520 University Avenue, Suite 260 • Madison, Wisconsin 53703 • Phone: 608-260-9713 • Fax: 608-260-9714

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Source URL: http://www.prwatch.org/news/2013/03/11999/racial-entitlements-long-term-effort-end-voting-rights-act-and-affirmative-action

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https://www.levernews.com/the-paid-pundits-defending-clarence-thomas-and-his-billionaire-benefactor/

lever

after *ProPublica* reported that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas had failed to disclose two decades worth of luxury trips provided by billionaire conservative mega-donor Harlan Crow, right-wing pundits and think-tank staffers raced to defend Thomas and his benefactor — without mentioning what they all had in common: their own financial ties to Crow.

The episode is a reminder of how many conservative pundits and scholars owe their sinecures to the same billionaires who fund Republican election campaigns and efforts to influence the judiciary.

Hours afterProPublica dropped its report on Thomas, Ilya Shapiro, a senior fellow at the right-wing think tank Manhattan Institute, tweeted, “Unless Harlan Crow has some business before the Court, the @propublica report about Justice Thomas is a big breathless nothingburger.”

Unmentioned: The Manhattan Institute, where Shapiro leads an amicus brief filing program lobbying the Supreme Court to rule certain ways on issues like student debt cancellation and corporate taxation, boasts Crows’ wife Kathy on its board of trustees and has “wonderful” by Crow himself.

Many of these pundits came forward to vouch for Crow’s honor and moral character after ProPublica’s story prompted renewed scrutiny of Crow over his collection of Nazi memorabilia, which includes two paintings by Adolf Hitler himself and a signed copy of Mein Kampf.

In 2016, Supreme Court justices — including Thomas — unanimously voted to condone the practice of giving lavish gifts to public officials in exchange for access.

“There’s Not Even An Appearance Of Impropriety”

Crow, heir to a Dallas real estate empire, is the CEO of Crow Holdings, a sprawling real estate investment and private equity firm that manages retirement savings for public employees. A relatively private man, Crow has long been a major donor to Republican political campaigns and outside groups.

He’s also been a donor to tax-exempt dark money groups and charitable organizations that do not have to report their donors. In 2011, Crow told the New York Times, “I disclose what I’m required by law to disclose, and I don’t disclose what I’m not required to disclose.”

While those donations are not for the most part traceable, it’s clear that Crow has been generous to conservative think tanks, legal groups, and media outlets.

ProPublica reported last week that Crow has for years offered Thomas, the conservative Supreme Court justice, free trips on his private jet and superyacht. Those trips should have been disclosed under federal ethics rules, according to seven experts consulted by the nonprofit news outlet.

Shapiro, who joined the Manhattan Institute last summer, took time away from a trip to Legoland last week to record an audio clip defending Crow’s gifts to Thomas, in addition to tweeting his support for the justice.

“It is not against the rules to receive all sorts of gifts — even lavish gifts, even yachts, and rides on private jets, and stays at luxury resorts,” he said. “Nor do the Supreme Court ethics rules even require reporting such gifts if they’re personal hospitality — gifts from friends, things like that.”

While Shapiro suggested that maybe the rules should be changed, he asserted that “there’s not even an appearance of impropriety, unless Harlan Crow has some business before the court, which no one has alleged — not even in ProPublica’s big, breathless, nothingburger report.”

It’s an interesting argument, given that Shapiro effectively lobbies the Supreme Court for the Manhattan Institute. Last summer, Kathy Crow was added to the board of trustees listed on the Manhattan Institute’s website. Harlan Crow, for his part, on the organization during a debate at his Dallas business compound in 2021.

in his role at the Manhattan Institute, Shapiro regularly files amicus briefs attempting to persuade justices to rule certain ways on cases. Shapiro recently submitted a brief calling on the Supreme Court to issue a decision blocking President Joe Biden’s student loan cancellation plan.

Last month, Shapiro filed a brief calling on the Supreme Court to review a case upholding the constitutionality of a one-time repatriation tax imposed on foreign earnings accumulated by foreign subsidiaries of U.S. companies, which was passed as part of President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax law.

On Tuesday, Shapiro tweeted that he didn’t know Kathy Crow sits on the Manhattan Institute’s board, while downplaying the significance.

“Alas no private-jet travel here,” he wrote, “but what you’re saying is that conservative donors support conservative organizations? Amazing.”

“Deeply Honorable, Decent, And Patriotic”

As controversy mounted over Harlan Crow’s undisclosed gifts to Thomas, public attention extended to the Texas businessman’s extensive collection of Nazi artifacts — which includes by Hitler, a signed copy of Mein Kampf, a teapot engraved with Hitler’s initials, and linen napkins embroidered with swastikas.

Those items have drawn scrutiny before. In 2015, Democrats called on Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) to cancel a presidential campaign fundraiser scheduled at Crow’s house on the eve of Yom Kippur.

In 2019, after scholars who dined at Crow’s mansion were disturbed by his collection of Nazi artifacts, Crow offered a half-hearted apology to their host organization, according to a letter obtained by Mother Jones.

“I am sorry that anyone would be offended,” wrote Crow, adding: “I would very much hope it would be completely obvious that having anything that related to Nazis or slavery could not possibly be interpreted as support or glorification for those evils.”

Over the weekend, several conservative pundits came forward to defend Crow and his collectors items, without mentioning that they have benefited from his family’s financial support for their think tanks and media outlets.

Jonah Goldberg, co-founder and editor-in-chief of the conservative news site The Dispatch, tweeted, “Harlan Crow is a deeply honorable, decent, and patriotic person.” He characterized Crow’s separate garden of dictator statutes — featuring Russia’s Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Lenin — as “an attempt [to] commemorate the horrors of the 20th century in the spirit of ‘never again.’”

Goldberg later tweeted, “My conscience is clear. Harlan Crow is a good man and the farthest thing from a Nazi.”

As The Dispatch separately noted in a news article covering Crow’s gifts to Thomas, “Harlan Crow is a minority investor in The Dispatch and a friend of the founders.”

Goldberg is also a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing think tank where Crow serves on the board of trustees.

Previously, Goldberg was a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, the nonprofit affiliated with the conservative National Review magazine. The National Review Institute has regularly hosted its debate series at Crow’s Old Parkland campus.

Crow was additionally a co-chair of a 2021 National Review Institute dinner honoring Leonard Leo and Eugene Meyer of the Federalist Society, the conservative lawyers network. (Leo, also a friend of Thomas, was a key architect of conservatives’ 6-3 supermajority on the Supreme Court.)

David French, a former National Review Institute senior fellow and former senior editor at The Dispatch, defended Crow, too.

“I know Harlan also,” French tweeted. “I’ve participated in several debates at Old Parkland. The idea that he’s a Nazi sympathizer is utterly ludicrous. He abhors tyranny, from fascism to communism to everywhere in between.”

Crow’s character was also defended by Charles Murray, a longtime American Enterprise Institute scholar who’s best known for mainstreaming racist pseudoscience via his book, The Bell Curve.

“Harlan Crow surely has enemies but, as far as I can tell, they consist exclusively of people who don’t know him,” Murray tweeted. “Everyone who does know him may disagree with him on some issue, but they universally recognize his decency, integrity, and kindness. Including people of the left.”

Murray dedicated his most recent book, Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class, “to Harlan Crow.”

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