Horowitz, M
Senior Fellow
Hudson Institute, Washington, D.C. Headquarters
Biographical Highlights
Senior Fellow Michael J. Horowitz is Director of Hudson Institute's Project for Civil Justice Reform and Project for International Religious Liberty. He served as general counsel for the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) under the Reagan Administration, and has taught law at the University of Mississippi and Georgetown. He has also practice private law as a partner at national law firms. Horowitz joined Hudson Institute as a Senior Fellow where he has put together left and right coalitions on a wide variety of foreign and domestic isues. He has written frequently and is regularly called to testify and consult with Congress.
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Publications and Media Exposure
Horowitz is often quoted in the national press and is the author of many articles on the subjects of legal reform, religious persecution, the future of the American welfare system, federalism, and the U.S. Congress. He has been interviewed and quoted by The Jerusalem Post, Chicago Sun-Times, and Washington Post,among others. His publications include: “Can TORT Law Be Ethical?” (The Weekly Standard, 2001); “Hollowed Be Thy Subsidies” (American Outlook, 2000); and “Subsidies May Cost Churches Their Souls” (The Wall Street Journal, 1999). Horowitz has appeared on numerous radio and television shows including World News Tonight, The O’Reilley Factor, NPR’s All Things Considered, and many programs that air in Asia.
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MASTER PLAN Bonus: The Other Memo
in this exclusive MASTER PLANbonus episode, Lever Timeproducer Arjun Singh and investigative journalist David Daley discuss the rise of the conservative legal movement, including anotherlittle-known memo responsible for the emergence of right-wing groups like the Federalist Society.
Nearly a decade after the Powell memo was published, conservative legal activist Michael Horowitz was commissioned by the right-leaning Scaife Foundation to develop a ground-up strategy for enshrining conservative ideology into law. In his 1980 report, Horowitz recommended recruiting and empowering young conservative minds on law school campuses. By “captur[ing] youthful loyalties,” he argued, conservatives could “redefine what is moral in law.”
Horowitz also pressed for a rebranding of the ideological right, noting “the very decline in power of the American business community over the last decade… is perhaps the best evidence that the skills in the business community are not well correlated with the skills involved in generating idealism and enlisting the intellectual loyalties of bright young men and women.”
These writings would become the foundation of the Federalist Society, which used the strategy laid out in Horowitz’s memo to recruit and advance the next generation of conservative legal minds — including six of nine justices who currently sit on the U.S. Supreme Court.
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Bonus Episode Transcript
DAVID SIROTA:Hey MASTER PLAN listeners — first off, thanks for being a paid subscriber. Your support makes this project possible, and funds all of our investigative work at The Lever. Please enjoy this exclusive bonus episode for paying subscribers.
In MASTER PLANEpisode 7, you may remember hearing about the rise of the Federalist Society as the group worked in the early 2000s to expand its network of lawyers and launch a conservative takeover of the federal courts.
As part of our research for MASTER PLAN,we spoke with an expert on the right-wing legal movement’s expansion — David Daley, author of *Antidemocratic: Inside the Far Right's Fifty-Year Plot to Control American Elections.
You’ve learned about the Powell Memo — but what you haven’t heard about is the other secret memo directly responsible for the rise of conservative legal groups like the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, and more. This memo, written by right-wing scholar Michael Horowitz, called for a guerilla-style ideological takeover of law schools across the country and a ‘ground-up’ approach to building support for Big Business.
For the Lever Time podcast last week, Senior podcast producer Arjun Singh sat down with David Daley to discuss the contents of that other memo, the Horowitz memo — here’s the extended version just for MASTER PLAN Premium subscribers
ARJUN SINGH:Awesome. David Daley, it's great to have you here on Lever Time. It's a topic that I'm obsessed about. We at The Lever are always obsessed about it too. But you had written a book previously called Ratfuck. You had written about gerrymandering in the time that you had started writing about gerrymandering, the Shelby court case, which I want to ask you about later.
In writing your new book, which is really about the right-wing efforts to take over the court. How have your perspectives on how American democracy functions changed? Like when you were writing about gerrymandering, did it seem like this effort by the right to really control our elections was something you saw very prevalently, or was that something that changed over time?
DAVID DALEY:I think that it's something that has changed over time. I think that this is, in many ways, the product of the last 15 years, and it's really the product of the combination of the strategy that Chris Jankowski had with red map to gerrymander American state legislatures and congressional delegations, and the strategy that Leonard Leo had to take over the courts, along with the anti-democratic nature of Chief Justice John Roberts’ thoughts on voting rights, and when you mix the three of those together, what you have is a recipe for entrenched, enduring right-wing minority rule.
The gerrymanders have put really staunch conservative election deniers in control of caucuses in crucial swing states that are more than willing to pass election laws that benefit their side and suppress minority voters, the court has liberated them to do all of this with a series of cases from Shelby County on, that has taken on and effectively eviscerated the protection mechanisms in the Voting Rights Act. And when you put the two of those together, it really draws a tight knot around American democracy, and I fear we're headed towards learning just how tight that knot is.
ARJUN SINGH:This fall, you write in the book about something called the Horowitz memo, and we at The Lever, just released a new podcast series called MASTER PLAN, where we focus on the Powell memo, which was written by Lewis Powell, and it was sort of this memo to almost instruct the business community about how to better control and operate in politics. But you talked about also in a great piece in The Atlantic about another memo, the Horowitz memo. Tell me about the Horowitz memo and the role that it plays in the story that you are telling about this effort by the far right to take over our political system.
DAVID DALEY:MASTER PLAN is absolutely brilliant, by the way, so let me start there. Congratulations on it. Thank you. Fantastic piece of work. We completely agree on the importance of the Powell memo. Lewis Powell wrote what was effectively a roadmap for big business to get involved in politics, to counter what the future chief to counter what a future Justice, Lewis Powell, believed to be the insidious nature of left-wing control of American society and campus in the mass media. Sounds a lot like Leonard Leo today — doesn't he? — and he was deeply influential on the Koch brothers, on Richard Mellen scaife, on all of the conservative founders who built so much of the scaffolding of the conservative right.
One of the things that they didn't do, particularly effectively, though, was build legal institutions. What the right did… they built the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation and the Koch brothers got underway, but they also built this entire series of conservative public interest law foundations around the country that didn't have the influence that Powell suggested that they would, and donors got a little frustrated with it for about a decade, they spent tens of millions of dollars on this regional system that effectively generated a pile of amicus briefs, but didn't actually gain significant policy victories.
So there was a man named Michael Horowitz who was a real student of what the left had done with regards to public interest law, what the Nader organizations had done, for example, on really building power in Washington and working with the government and the regulatory agencies in order to bring about the environmental gains, and, you know, safer cars. And Horowitz took a look at what the left was doing and said, guys, we're doing this all wrong. On the right, we are invested in this big, sprawling regional network, and the power is in Washington, D.C., and you're trying to do this big, top down thing, when really what you've got to do is go ground up our legal power.
He said, our brain power is appallingly mediocre, and what we have to do is go into law schools. We have to win hearts and minds and convince people that they are doing something important. They're not defending DDT, they're not defending General Motors. They are part of a conservative movement that can actually affect hearts and minds.
And so when the donors are asked around the same time to give money to this new entity called the Federalist Society, all of these big organizations had read and digested the conclusions of the Horowitz report, and when he brought around these young conservatives like Lee Lieberman, Otis and Gene Meyer to the foundations for the grants that would launch the Federalist Society, which is probably the greatest return on investment of any nonprofit in American history, they were primed and ready because of what Michael Horowitz had done. He set out a different direction for the conservative legal movement, a course correction.
ARJUN SINGH:So what was the ideology that they were trying to push? What did they want law students to take away from this, and how did that differ from, I guess, the conventional wisdom of what was being taught in law school at the time?
DAVID DALEY:I think the conventional wisdom of what was being taught in law school at the time, I mean, law school at the time may well have been the kind of more liberal hegemony that some conservatives would like to say is right. When you talk to these conservatives who are at the elite law schools, they felt radically outnumbered. You know, they talk about on the day after election day of 1980 Ronald Reagan is elected, and their law professors asked for a show of hands for who had voted for Ronald Reagan, and maybe two or three hands would go up in a room of 150 people. So they felt beleaguered and outnumbered.
Now, the right often feels beleaguered and outnumbered, even in institutions that they actually really control. So I think it's, you know, I don't think that these Ivy League law schools, by any stretch of the imagination, were turning out young radicals, but they were feeding into sort of the cool culture. And the cool culture was the public interest law firms that groups like Nader and Charlie Halpern were running that were having a real impact in Washington and elsewhere, and yet the country was changing, right?
I mean, Ronald Reagan had been elected president, and when they wanted to try to staff conservative administrations, when they wanted to appoint conservative judges, they didn't have any infrastructure to go to for reliable people. So what they wanted to do really was build that bench. What they intended to do with the Federalist Society is exactly what it has become. They wanted to build a careerist organization that they would get to know young people. They would be able to advance those people into positions of power, and they would be able to trust on their ideologies as they move them along the path.
ARJUN SINGH:And I imagine part of this too, is that if you educate a generation, starting with lawyers, and you know, people within academia, you're also going to eventually spread not just to the court system, but eventually into general politics, Republican politics as well.
But this idea of like a conservative judge, I think, if you think about it now, there is an image I certainly have, which is, you know, a conservative judge is like a Scalia, Amy Coney Barrett, but you know, they would overturn Roe v. Wade. Increasingly, it seems to be they have no limits on presidential authority and power. But when the Reagan era. That early Federalist Society era. What did they mean by a conservative judge? Was it that, like judges were too hard on business? Was it culture kind of stuff? What was kind of the ideal conservative judge to them?
DAVID DALEY:I think much of this was a backlash against the Warren Court and what followed. So the idea that they were opposing was this idea that judges were making up the law and legislating from the bench.
ARJUN SINGH:And this was Chief Justice Earl Warren from California, right?
DAVID DALEY:That's right. So, Chief Justice Warren from the late 1950s into, boy, the late 1960s or so, and this is the great era of rights expansion on the U.S. Supreme Court. You are, you are talking about the apportionment revolution, that the great one person, one vote revolution, but also the expansion of the right to privacy of birth control later that would blossom, not under Warren, but under many of those judges into Roe v Wade.
And this court really was what conservatives and the fledgling Federalist Society grew in order to oppose and they used the birth of originalism. Here you can track originalism's birth all the way back to the days after Brown v. Board of Education and those who were opposed to that decision.
ARJUN SINGH:What is originalism? Again? It's like a strict reading of the Constitution?
DAVID DALEY: The idea that judges are only going to use the original intent of the founders in order to make decisions, which sounds pretty good, right? Oh, we don't want judges who are making up the law. We want judges who are going to support a reading of what's actually in the Constitution.
Except that when you go back and find their memos, as I have and other reporters have, they understood full well that originalism was a fig leaf for getting to conservative results through the judicial process while pretending that you were still sort of wearing the robes of the founders, right?
ARJUN SINGH:I mean, it was, yeah, “this is what the founders wanted you to do.”
DAVID DALEY:Originalism is like founders cosplay and that's what they were up to creating. Because when judges went before Congress, like Robert Bork and others and said, “well, we're going to overturn Roe v. Wade, or we don't believe in the Griswolddecision. They were not confirmed.
So they needed a way to talk about all of this that would get their judges and justices confirmed without scaring America. And so this idea of originalism comes forth as such common sense that Rush Limbaugh could talk about it on the radio, and Americans could say, Yes, I believe that this ought to be the way that we interpret the Constitution. In reality, it was a Trojan horse.
ARJUN SINGH:I feel like, you know, there has been so much attention rightfully put on what happened when Donald Trump tried to overturn the election, but in the years preceding that, there felt like there was quite a bit of anti-democratic effort. You talked about it in one of your books, Ratfucked, which is about gerrymandering –– we were talking about that at the top.
Before we get to the kind of 2016, 2020 Trump era, when you have after, say, the 2000s after Bush v. Gore. What are some of the ways that anti-democratic attempts take place via the court system? And I guess one that I'm thinking about a lot is a Supreme Court case, Shelby v. Holder. I think that John Roberts is, by this point, Supreme Court Chief Justice — he's been appointed by George W. Bush, and that was a big one about voting rights, and it felt like in addition to gerrymandering, there was a big effort to really dismantle voting rights. But can you talk a little bit about that? And were there other kinds of efforts, not necessarily even on Supreme Court level, but on lower court levels, to start to dismantle the voting rights system that we have?
DAVID DALEY:Yeah, dismantling voting rights has really been John Roberts’ life's work. You can go back to his days in the Reagan administration as a young person in Washington in the early 1980s but certainly by the time he is Chief Justice in Shelby County v. Holder, he eviscerates what had been known as preclearance, which was the crucial enforcement mechanism that prevented the states with the worst histories of racial prejudice and voting from enacting any changes to their laws without preapproval of them, and that had worked for 50 years to hold back the worst instincts of these states to keep them in check.
And John Roberts in 2013 insisted that things had changed in the South. Congress thought otherwise, right when Congress reauthorized the Voting Rights Act in 2006 — a Republican Senate, unanimously, 98 to nothing. A Republican House, 390 to 33. A Republican President, George W. Bush, signing it into law, along with a 16,000 page report documenting exactly why preclearance was still necessary in all of these states.
Example after example, canceled elections and moved precincts and just all the same old poison in new bottles. And Roberts, the humble caller of balls and strikes, ignores all of this, just thrusts it aside and says, Well, I think things have changed. He does this in the most dishonest way you can possibly imagine, first, by misreading census data on race that actually says the opposite of what he proclaims it does in his decision. And second, by just making up the law he makes up. Right, again this school of thought that says judges are going to simply interpret the law, not make up the law.
Roberts makes up the idea of equal sovereignty among states, which he takes from the equal footing doctrine, which has nothing to do with voting rights or any other rights, but has to do with the admission of new states. And he takes a couple of sentences from a previous court case on voting rights that mention the idea of equal sovereignty and how it doesn't apply here, and slices the crucial part out with an ellipsis, deletes it as if it was never there, and says, voila, look at my standard of equal sovereignty. And he even calls it a traditional theory. And then says, I'm going to put an end to this. You can't treat Alabama and Texas any differently than you would treat Iowa and Montana and Connecticut.
The trouble with this, and the trouble with the new day of racial kumbaya that Roberts tried to declare in June of 2013, is that if things had actually changed in the South, that very day was the day that Texas enacts its draconian voter ID bill that preclearance had stopped and that 700,000 Latinos — this isn't me saying this, this is the state of Texas admitting that it knew — that 700,000 Latinos citizens lacked the act the specific papers that the law now required to vote. One group that didn't lack those actual papers, gun owners, because they were allowed to use their gun license, but if you had a student ID or a public housing ID, not so much.
And so Shelby County kickstarts — it liberates all of these legislatures across the South to suddenly do their worst. The prison guard has been removed, and all of those evil, dark forces in American politics are free to burst forth again. And so they do. So when Roberts gets rid of Section 5, effectively, of the Voting Rights Act by freezing the formula that was in Section 4, he says, well, we don't really need this, because we still have Section 2 as a protection. And then the court has gone to work over the last decade in scaling back Section 2, and they've since torn that in half and in half and in half again.
And I think the other crucial case here is the partisan gerrymandering case,Common Cause v. Rucho, back in 2019, in which a number of states had gone to the court over time and said, we've been gerrymandered into oblivion. We need help from the neutral federal courts. And the neutral federal courts had devised several nonpartisan standards that all pointed to when the gerrymander had gone too far.
And John Roberts calls all of this sociological gobbledygook. Says, “Gosh, I can't possibly understand this.” Him with his elite private school degree and Harvard Law degree and Harvard degree, and he closes the federal courts to partisan gerrymandering claims and effectively green lights not only the gerrymanders that had been in place, but the maximal ones that we saw in the 2021 cycle.
And of course, those gerrymanders help create more conservative MAGA caucuses that then pass more insane election laws that the court then blesses as perfectly fine under its interpretation of the Voting Rights Act, and how lawmakers ought to be perfectly free to do whatever they want if they think they're fighting voter fraud — voter fraud that they can't actually identify, but as long as they say it's voter fraud, then they're perfectly fine with this court. And all of it works together. So you know, it's all of these decisions at once that have created such an anti democratic cocktail of minority rule.
ARJUN SINGH:I feel like the way that John Roberts calls himself an umpire, which is clearly not true — maybe to be fair, referees in the NBA and in baseball should just start calling themselves John Roberts when it's very obvious they've made horribly bad calls. How does this kind of culminate in, you know, in 2020 we saw Donald Trump's effort to overturn the election, one of his leading supporters — one of his lawyers, John Eastman was a Federalist Society member, ran a federal society study or debate group at one point in time — the Federalist Society is all over this effort.
And I feel that if you tried to make an argument, which I'm sure John Roberts will, which is, you know, look, I've created a very fancy doctrine and document, and I've cited whatever, you know, I made some effort to make it look like this is this makes sense based on my role as the Chief Justice. This effort by Donald Trump totally blew open, you know, any of that, any semblance of that, and yet, you did have these lawyers all over the place supporting it, supporting different candidates for office who were in favor of it. What did, what did you make of the 2020 effort. And I guess I will just leave it at that. What did you make of that entire effort? Having been reporting on this stuff for such a long time?
DAVID DALEY:I thought it was really predictable, right? I mean, there were a lot of us, I think you all as well, who started reporting in March of 2020 This is how they're going to do it. The plan is going to involve gerrymandered state legislature and tweaking the rules and slowing down the process of certification and trying to send alternate slates of electors and creating a constitutional crisis. I mean it these guys. These guys are smart, but they're not so smart that we can't look ahead and see what they're up to. They're up to the same thing right now. We all see it coming. It's the slow motion car crash.
They were not able to get away with it in 2020 for a handful of reasons, the general election, popular vote was too big in too many places. But also the legal work was really shoddy. It's Rudy Giuliani, you know, half in the bag at the, at the Four Seasons landscaping. You know, it's, you know, it's a clown car. And they filed all these cases too late, right? They brought them all after the election. And if you look at what most of these courts said, they said, Why are you bringing us this now?
And so what I think happened in 2020 is not so much that the courts stepped up and saved American democracy, but that conservatives learned, oh, if we want to do this, we have to do this a little bit differently. We have to bring the cases earlier, and we have to have control of these other boards that handle certification in advance. And so this time around, you've got the white shoe, DC, Constable McCarthy firms and others handling these cases. The adults in the room have got it. They will dress them up with the appropriate Federalist Society hothouse theories.
And the cases have been brought. There's already more than 75 cases in 16 states that the RNC is as either broader as an amicus party too, and you have events unfolding like we see in Georgia right now, right where the state election board, filled with MAGA enthusiasts is trying to slow down the process of certification. And those five weeks between Election Day and the Safe Harbor Day effectively — when you know are crucial — and if you can slow those that process down, if you can kick it into the courts, you can create all kinds of constitutional mischief. I mean, there's any number of scenarios you could see in which the U.S. Supreme Court is, is, is brought into play. And I mean, I, and one could say that it's almost as if they wanted it this way, because this election board in Georgia that is causing this whole mess wouldn't be able to do this if preclearance was still in place.
So, you know, obviously things have not changed in the South, but if we still had preclearance, this board would have to send its changes to the Department of Justice, which would say, “yeah, no.” So this entire threat is not something any of us would have to lose any sleep over. It would just, it would just be wiped away instead, because of John Roberts, it exists, and it's a way of getting the election back to the Supreme Court and John Roberts.
And so 180 million of us are going to vote on November 5, and yet, is it still possible that nine of us end up deciding — the six conservative supermajority on the court, five appointed by presidents that lost the popular vote. I mean, it's not crazy to look at this. It's not crazy to look at everything that they've done over the past couple of decades and say, this is where it's pointing to, and we better be careful before it all slides off the rails.
ARJUN SINGH:Yeah. I mean, that's exactly what I have been thinking about. And then you look at some of the previous things that have come up, the elimination of the Chevron doctrine, which you know required them to defer to federal agencies, and you especially the overturning of Roe v. Wade. I mean, just overturning precedent. And now you have the six people who have a total lock on the Supreme Court.
And so, you know what I mean, what is the safeguard against that? Then, because you do have Democrats, some of them trying. But Joe Biden in particular was, you know, really saying, “well, if I get elected, it will be the safeguard of democracy. It will be this.”
But in a lot of ways, it feels like the master plan. The plot worked. They got the 6-3 on the court. They've given presidents full immunity. That was very clearly directed at Donald Trump, and I'm not, you know, a legal scholar. I didn't go to law school, so I guess I'm wondering, how does this story end? Does it just end with the essentially, six people for until they die, telling us how we're going to be able to do and, you know, invalidating our Congress and our political will? Or is there some mechanism that it doesn't rectify it, but it at least pushes back against that?
DAVID DALEY:No matter where your politics lie, I would think that all Americans would be deeply uncomfortable that any nine Americans should hold this much power in a representative democracy. And indeed, I think the polls show that people are… if you look at the polls, on term limits, on a real ethics clause for these justices, it's upwards of 70 to 75 percent of Americans backing this, including upwards of 70 percent of Republicans.
So this is popular, and we are going to have to reform this court or accept that it intends to rule over our lives. I mean, if Vice President Harris is elected, she's going to have to decide between having an agenda that she can enact through Congress or having an agenda that is blocked by this court every step of the way. She's going to have to step up and fight this court that has become a real renegade, runaway, anti-democratic menace to American democracy, and that, if left unchecked, will continue this way for some time.
So this is a moment for us to be thinking about dramatic Supreme Court reform. We have to be thinking about how we strip a jurisdiction on some cases from these judges. We have to be thinking about how we expand and right size this court, we need to be thinking about real ethics responsibilities that stop these justices from being corrupted and paid by those who have interests before them. It is time to think big and immediately and urgently about all of this.
I mean, Lincoln, in his first inaugural, says the candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the government upon the vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by the decisions of the Supreme Court. The people will have ceased to be their own rulers, and we're dangerously close to that moment right now.
DAVID SIROTA:That was author and investigative journalist David Daley. If you’re not already following our weekly news podcast,Lever Time, you should. It’s already part of your paid subscription to the Lever! Just email us at support@levernews.com and we’ll get you set up.
There will be plenty more MASTER PLANbonus content throughout the season for premium paying subscribers like you. This episode was produced by Ronnie Riccobene with help from Jared Jacang Maher. Thank you so much for supporting MASTER PLAN. Rock the boat.
defund:
The Reagan administration moves to muzzle non-profits
In 1981, the Heritage Foundation, the dominant conservative think-tank at the time, published Mandate for Leadership, a comprehensive conservative agenda with over two thousand policy recommendations for the incoming Reagan administration.
One challenge, as Heritage saw it, was to counter the rise of its ideological opponents by whittling away their status as 'public interest' organisations and eliminating federal financial support for 'liberal' groups. "Unless conservatives can break the moral monopoly still enjoyed by persons indifferent to the well-being of the American private sector and by proponents of expanded government power, any effort to reform federal domestic policies is likely to be reduced to the level of tinkering," they wrote.
According to OMB Watch, a non-profit group that has tracked attempts to constrain non-profit groups, the Heritage Foundation's 1981 proposals comprised three key changes. (OMB is the acronym for the Office of Management and Budget). Firstly they wanted to "impose some sort of lobbying and advocacy restrictions on any organization receiving federal funds", even if any lobbying was funded by funds raised independently by the organisation itself. Secondly was to "specify the type of such 'informational' activity that can be done with federal grants". Thirdly Heritage sought to "limit the circumstances under which grants and contracts can go to groups organized primarily for lobbying and advocacy."[1]
The Heritage Foundation's proposal was quickly translated into a proposed Presidential Executive Order, named A-122 Cost Principles for Non-Profit Organizations, by the Office of Management and Budget general counsel, Michael Horowitz. The draft order defined the freshly minted term "political advocacy" as comprising any action "attempting to influence a government decision." Any organization engaging in political advocacy would not be eligible for federal grants irrespective of whether the advocacy was paid for by other sources of fundraising revenue or federal funds.
The proposals prompted a massive backlash with a three year campaign, led by the National A-122 Coalition comprising non-profit, religious, and other charitable organizations, defeating the proposals. Horowitz recounted over a decade later being rebuked by Reagan's Chief of Staff James A. Baker III. "The leader of the free world has come to me and said that all he has been hearing is this business about A-122," he said. (After working for the Reagan administration Horowitz went on to become a senior fellow at the Washington office of the conservative think tank, the Hudson Institute).
While the A-122 proposals were defeated, they still had the effect of chilling both non-profits and some foundations. Nor had the conservative movement given up on the notion of 'defunding the left'.
In 1984, the Capital Research Center (CRC) was founded by former Heritage Foundation senior Vice-President and Reagan administration staffer Willa Johnson. CRC was established with seed funding from Richard Mellon Scaife, Adolph Coors and John Olin foundations. The role of CRC was to erode the standing of those it viewed as 'liberal' non-profit advocacy groups and foundations.