webodec3ARCHIVEPreview
Open in TheBrain

LEGAL / JUDICIARY

---

COURTS 2 1/17

capt 918

only functioning branch in trump prez? key ctr-balalce --> targety McConnell pack, calls judges racists [bibi]

see ct judic capt takeover mcconn

see stack pack

SEE LEGAL FDNs

SEE RULE OF LAW

SEE BALANCE OF POWERchecks 2

SEE FASCISM SEE AUTHORITARIAN/dictator playbook eg Bibi

see LEGAL SUPPRESSION

SEE LIE POWER ANY MEANS

see state scotus eg WI

SEE JUDGE DEATH THREAT POL VIOLENCE TRUMP RETALIATION

html teles Comparative

see also judicial tag (orphan 315) legal tag

important source of moderation, eg

http://www.alternet.org/fracking/two-small-towns-win-huge-legal-case-fracking-will-many-others-follow

NY court

see Jud Conf Network, RAGA tort reform, defund the left

"rule of law"

see xian legal shop

===

Political scientist Adam Bonica describes "the authoritarian script:

  1. Court rules against leader
  2. Attack judges as biased/dangerous
  3. Delegitimize judicial system
  4. Create permission for threats
  5. IF NO MASS RESISTANCE → Purge the courts
  6. IF MASS RESISTANCE → Forced to retreat."2

Bonica warns, "Every authoritarian who successfully destroyed judicial independence did so because civil society failed to unite in time. The key difference? Whether people mobilized."3

---

an 3 26

President Donald Trump’s proposed law to “crack down on rogue judges” and his rhetoric toward judges who rule against him — such as calling them “criminals” and “a disgrace to our nation” — is a “breathtaking” danger to the Constitution, according to an expert.

“Demanding that the legislative branch enact laws that punish the judiciary is a breathtaking breach of the president’s oath to support and defend the Constitution, which creates our three separate — and coequal — branches of government,” lawyer and former US attorney Barbara McQuade wrote in a recent editorial for Bloomberg. “Trump’s recent attacks came after the Supreme Court struck down his tariffs, which he has used to wield economic power against foreign governments, last month. By a 6-3 majority, the Court held that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act did not authorize the president to impose tariffs, a power otherwise reserved for Congress. Among the justices joining the majority were two of Trump’s own appointees, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett.”

Trump, who said Gorsuch and Barrett “sicken” him because they dissented, is doing something “different” with his attempts to cower judges, McQuade wrote.

“His proposed legislation would target the judges themselves for punishment,” McQuade said. “It seems likely that Trump knows he will not get his wish. Even a Congress that has been largely submissive during his second administration would surely not go so far as to retaliate against judges based on their case decisions, a move that would wreak havoc on the separation of powers. But the president’s public statements nonetheless risk the independence of the judiciary, an essential pillar of democracy. By attacking judges and justices who rule against him, Trump is sending a message to the others: Rule my way or else you’ll be next.”

McQuade is not alone in criticizing Trump’s attacks on the judiciary. Earlier this month The New York Times reported that judges themselves are “quietly” saying that it is concerning how much “risk” is involved in speaking out against the president.

"Judges are turning up the volume" in their rulings against Trump, eschewing the judiciary’s traditional “restrained” tone in favor of "an emotive, populist approach" which permits them to give "full vent to the intensity of their concerns about cases flooding their dockets since President Trump returned to office."

The Times added, "One compared her district’s ballooning caseload to a demigod’s battle against a mythological monster. Another sought to buttress his argument against National Guard deployments to U.S. cities with a YouTube link to a 1970 protest song. A third compared the Trump administration’s rewriting of American history to the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s novel '1984.'"

Trump’s intimidation of the judiciary extends to the jurists he has appointed in his second term, many of whom have been required to avoid telling the truth about Trump losing the 2020 presidential election while under oath.

Senate Judiciary member Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) typically ended each hearing for a judgeship with the question, “Who won the popular vote in 2020?”

He always received variations on the same reply, namely that “President Biden was certified and served four years as president.” By using the word “certified,” they curry favor with the president who nominated them by refusing to flat-out say that Trump lost.

“There is a special peril when federal judges, who serve for life if confirmed, agree to demean themselves in this fashion,” legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin said at the time.

---

---

AN 2 26

President Donald Trump is crossing “a dangerous line” by attacking the Supreme Court for overturning his controversial tariffs, according to America’s most distinguished organization of lawyers.

“The recent remarks by the president of the United States, leveling personal criticisms against members of the U.S. Supreme Court, are not acceptable and cross a dangerous line that threatens the safety of the judiciary and our judicial process,” declared American Bar Association (ABA) President Michelle A. Behnke in a statement.

“Vigorous debate over policy is a strength of our democracy, but attacks that demean the judiciary are not,” Behnke added. “Incendiary rhetoric has helped contribute to the alarming increase in attacks on and threats to our judges. It must stop.”

The ABA head is referring to Trump’s criticism of the six Supreme Court justices who ruled against his emergency tariff authority, including two jurists — Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett — that Trump himself appointed. Deriding them as “fools and lapdogs for the RINOs and the radical left Democrats,” Trump said Gorsuch and Barrett are “an embarrassment to their families. You want to know the truth, the two of them.” He also said the liberal justices were loyal to the Democrats, which he admired, but added that he believes they are a “disgrace to our nation.” The president also claimed those judges were motivated by foreign powers, although did not provide evidence for this assertion.

“Personal attacks against individual justices, particularly allegations that they are influenced by ‘foreign interests,’ are wholly inappropriate,” Behnke criticized Trump in that statement. “Such statements risk undermining the rule of law and the public’s faith in an impartial judiciary, foundational pillars of our democracy that have guided our nation since its founding.”

She added, “The men and women of the Supreme Court, regardless of who appointed them, deserve respect for exercising their duty to interpret the Constitution faithfully and independently. The health of our constitutional system depends on maintaining that independence, free from political intimidation or retribution.”

Perhaps anticipating Trump’s lashing out, Gorsuch explained in his opinion that the president’s seeming desire to bypass the legislature to more effectively achieve his policy goals is dangerous to the American system of government.

“Yes, legislating can be hard and take time,” Gorsuch said. “And yes, it can be tempting to bypass Congress when some pressing problem arises. But the deliberative nature of the legislative process was the whole point of its design. Through that process, the nation can tap the combined wisdom of the people’s elected representatives, not just that of one faction or man.”

In addition to the ABA, one of the most prominent Republicans currently holding elected office also criticized Trump for his words about the Supreme Court. Former Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), who told Trump in a statement that "Congress is not an inconvenience to avoid." The conservative publication The Wall Street Journal similarly argued that Trump’s language was “ugly,” adding that “this is the same Court that ruled Mr. Trump’s way on presidential immunity, which was more personally consequential for this President.”

---

RWW

11/13/2025

by

Kyle Mantyla

Fascist Christian nationalist pastor Joel Webbon calls on Trump to become "the American Caesar" and start arresting and imprisoning judges, mayors, governors and any other elected official who opposes his deportation policies: "He must cross the Rubicon."

---

AN 10 25

A New York Timessurveyof 50 members of the Washington legal establishment show deep pessimism on how President Donald Trump has taken a "wrecking ball" to the legal system.

"What’s happening is anathema to everything we’ve ever stood for in the Department of Justice,” said a former official who served in both Democratic and Republican administrations, including Trump’s first term.

And although 42 of those surveyed—former attorneys general, solicitors general, former U.S. attorneys and retired federal judges from across the country—were previously surveyed before Trump took office for his second term, many did not want to speak on record, because, theTimesexplains, "they’re worried about retribution, for their law firms or their family members, if they draw Trump’s ire."

The new survey, the Times says, "channeled their collectively grim state of mind. All but one of the respondents rated Trump’s second term as a greater or muchgreaterthreat to the rule of law than his first term."

Respondents say this second term is "far worse than they imagined," and all agreed that "Trump and his attorney general, Pam Bondi, have used the Justice Department to go after the president’s political and personal enemies and provide favors to his allies."

IFrame Content

IFrame Content

IFrame Content

IFrame Content

Contrasting Trump's first term, during which time safeguards were held because "there were lawyers in the room;" this time is different, the Times reports.

I still think we get through it,” a former official who served in several administrations said, “but I’m less certain of that each passing day.”

Trump'sbullying of law firms has raised deep concern among the group as well, with one former Republican-appointed judge saying, “Whatever happened to the bedrock principle that everyone deserves the best lawyer they can find? My firm is scared to death.”

The firing of the Jan. 6 prosecutors, the resignations over Trump's dismissal of corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams, the conduct of Trump's U.S Pardon Attorney Ed Martin, who promised to smear the reputations of any targets he couldn’t indict, and the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey"corroded the Justice Department in the eyes of our respondents," the Times says.

“It’s all about dismantling the institution,” said the former official who served in multiple administrations. “And the message to everyone in the department is that if you speak up, something could happen that has never happened before. Maybe you’ll only be demoted or fired. But maybe it will be worse. Either way, you’d better bow to the emperor.”

---

---}:

AN 9 25

In an article for The Hill published Sunday, Kellye Y. Testy, executive director of the Association of American Law Schools, and Austen Parrish, dean of the University of California, Irvine School of Law, argued that the U.S. judiciary faces a growing crisis of legitimacy, driven by increasingly intense threats, political attacks, and efforts to delegitimize judges.

They warned that these pressures aren’t just parties complaining about decisions, but rather a deeper assault on the independence of the courts — something essential to democracy.

"American judges are under attack. Approximately one-third of the federal judiciary have received threats over the last year, and the U.S. Marshals Service reports more than 500 threats were made against federal judges over the past 11 months, with a noticeable spike in recent months. The sheer number of threats, including to judges’ families, are unprecedented," they wrote.

READ MORE:How Christianity’s 'kook' fringe went mainstream in Trump's MAGA world

Testy and Parrish argued that many of the attacks come from high‐ranking executive branch officials when courts rule against administration policy, and from Democrats and Republicans alike when they believe justices have acted beyond their preferred political lines. These attacks, they insisted, are not just garden‐variety political heat, but part of a darker escalation in rhetoric, public delegitimization, and disregard for constitutional limits.

IFrame Content

IFrame Content

IFrame Content

IFrame Content

They further argued that the implications go far beyond the most visible federal or Supreme Court cases. They pointed out that tens of millions of cases are handled each year in state courts and family courts, contract and property disputes, criminal law, wills, insurance, traffic violations — matters that touch almost every American’s life.

The authors noted that when the judiciary is seen as politicized, under attack, or as lacking legitimacy, trust erodes even in those local and everyday contexts, with ripple effects for individuals, businesses, governments, and for social order more broadly.

To counter this trend, Testy and Parrish urged not just condemnation, but active defense of judicial independence. They called on lawyers, legal educators, bar associations, law firms, and legal organizations to more forcefully correct misinformation, reject ad hominem attacks and violent threats, emphasize competence and integrity rather than ideology in judicial appointments, and help law students and the public understand the importance of courts operating impartially under the rule of law.

READ MORE:'Deciding his own fate': Trump and the GOP want to banish this one Republican

The legal experts argued that ongoing attacks discourage qualified people from seeking the bench, worsening vacancies and undermining fairness of outcomes.

"Make no mistake: what’s occurring in high-profile cases risks having ripple effects in other federal, state and local courts. Our legal system depends on judicial independence and integrity, and it doesn’t function if judges are targets of crass political opportunism. Attempts to intimidate and undermine judges threatens a crisis of legitimacy even on issues that have nothing to do with national politics, jeopardizing well-functioning courts serving families, local governments, organizations and businesses of all sizes," they wrote.

---

OMFG

On Friday, April 25, far-right FBI Director Kash Patel announced that Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan has been arrested on federal obstruction charges for allegedly helping an undocumented immigrant "evade arrest."

On X, formerly Twitter, Patel posted, "We believe Judge Dugan intentionally misdirected federal agents away from the subject to be arrested in her courthouse, Eduardo Flores Ruiz, allowing the subject — an illegal alien — to evade arrest…. Thankfully our agents chased down the perp on foot and he’s been in custody since, but the Judge’s obstruction created increased danger to the public."

A law enforcement official told ABC News that Dugan was arrested at the courthouse.

READ MORE:'Afraid' Trump 'will lose': Lawyers blast firms capitulating to Trump in scathing letter

According to MSNBC, Patel's tweet on Dugan was removed from X.

IFrame Content

IFrame Content

IFrame Content

During an MSNBC appearance, attorney Temidayo Aganga-Williams told host José Díaz-Balart that the arrest of a judge was "unusual" but added, "I think it's going to be a pattern going forward…. I think it's only going to pick up."

Dugan's arrest is receiving plenty of reactions on X, formerly Twitter.

Some MAGA Republicans are applauding the arrest.

READ MORE:How to prepare for the uprising

John Fabbricatore, a former field officer for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), tweeted, "Judge Hannah Dugan arrested by FBI for allegedly helping illegal alien 'evade arrest' by ICE. 'Lawfare' by these judges has to stop. This is a good start!"

Far-right MAGA radio host Benny Johnson posted, "Another rogue judge down. FAFO."

But others see Dugan's arrest as MAGA ramping up its authoritarian disdain for the rule of law.

Journalist Kristian Ramos tweeted, "I see we are now at 'arresting judges' on our path to autocracy.

"On Democracy" host Fred Wellman noted, "Marshalls appear to be confirming she was arrested and other news outlets are picking it up now."

X user Iron Goodman wrote, "This is a chilling escalation of federal overreach and raises serious questions about the scope of executive power versus judicial independence."

Another X user, Laura Okazaki, posted, "We must not look away while the feds take us another step into authoritarianism."

X user Hannah Martinez tweeted, "This is a deeply unsettling development with huge implications for the rule of law and potential abuses of power. The optics are disastrous."

READ MORE: 'Obama 2028' trends after official Trump store starts selling $50 'Trump 2028' hat

---

---

MMA

Newt Gingrich calls for Congress and Trump to “abolish” federal judges

06/04/25

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/newt-gingrich-calls-congress-and-trump-abolish-federal-judges)

---

---

an 6 25

Since returning to office, Donald Trump has often called the US legal system into question. He has criticised judges as activists, challenged the role of the courts and insisted some firms do free legal work in support of his administration’s causes to make up for working for some of his political opponents.

Meanwhile, Vice-President J.D. Vance has advised US Supreme Court chief justice John Roberts that he ought to be “checking the excesses” of the lower courts.

And Stephen Miller, deputy White House chief of staff, said: “We are living under a judicial tyranny,” after the US Court of International Trade ruled the president didn’t have the power to impose international trade tariffs. Meanwhile, judges are asking for more security to protect them from threats.

Trump’s federal investigations and volley of executive orders (presidential directives that don’t require legislative approval by Congress) have also put enormous pressure on law firms. And a recent report shows that both trust in law firms’ independence, and even the rule of law itself, is perceived as under threat in the US. But what does this mean, and why is it important?

The president has taken action against law firms in two prominent ways:

First, by federal investigation. Specifically, letters to a group of 20 law firms from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. These demanded information about their diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) policies, based on the proposition that any sort of treatment of underrepresented groups that appeared preferential to them in policy, or practice, was unequal treatment for other groups, and, consequently, discriminatory.

Second, the president has passed numerous executive orders introducing punitive measures on specific law firms that previously represented clients opposing his administration, or employed attorneys involved in past investigations against him. His administration has also revoked government contracts and suspended security clearance from buildings. In practice, the orders would prevent attorneys from accessing from where they work, such as courthouses and federal agencies.

In response, some prominent law firms have sought to mitigate the fallout with the Trump administration by entering into agreements with it. These have included pledging US$1 billion (£730,000,000) in pro bono (free) legal services supporting causes aligned with Trump’s agenda.

For example, support for veterans, representing police officers, and antisemitism prevention. Noteworthy is that law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison have now agreed to discontinue certain DEI policies, in addition to committing US$40 million (£29.4 million) in pro bono work for the president’s causes. In response the Trump administration has now lifted restrictions against them.IFrame ContentJudges say they are under threat.

More broadly, it has been reported that 70% of the US Justice Department civil rights division’s attorneys are leaving their posts. The mass exodus is believed to be part of attempts to reshape the division into one focused on enforcing executive orders.

The consequences of these developments are that the president’s actions have led to a significant realignment in the legal professions. Some US attorneys have reported that law firms are now more hesitant to engage in pro bono workthat could be viewed as opposing the administration’s policies.

By contrast, some lawyers are now trying to establish independent firms aimed at defending civil servants and challenging federal overreach, ensuring at least some, albeit less resourced, support for underrepresented groups.IFrame ContentTrump criticizes judges and legal activists.

Other lawyers have sought legal action against the orders as unconstitutional interference. Some of these have led to success. For example, Perkins Coie challenged theirs and got it struck down. The concern here centred around their representation of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. In arriving at the decision, the district judge ruled the president’s actions to be an “overt attempt to suppress and punish certain viewpoints”.

Why this matters

These developments call into question the balance between governmental influence and the independence of lawyers in upholding the rule of law. Lawyers must be impartial in representing their clients in order to effectively represent their interests, and allow the judiciary to fulfil their duty of checks and balances on the government’s decisions.

When unfettered power is wielded by the government, and the law is undermined, scope for monitoring the constitutionality of decision making is compromised.

The rule of law is a foundational principle of western democracies. It means that everyone is subject to the law, including governments. Laws must be applied equally, fairly and consistently, and no one is above them.

In essence, laws govern the nation, not arbitrary decisions by individuals in power. In that sense, following the rule of law helps prevent tyranny, protect people’s rights and liberties, and ensures a stable and predictable society.

In order to deliver these objectives, an independent legal sector is needed. Trump’s actions are a threat to achieving this cornerstone US constitutional principle. Some have gone as far as to suggest that by entering into agreements with Trump, law firms have become subsidiaries of his administration.

A recent study on trust in the rule of law found that Americans’ trust in lawyers was already undermined, even before the second Trump administration.

The results, based on public attitudes in 2024, compared public perceptions in Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Norway, the UK and the US. Norway and the UK ranked highest in respect of trust in the rule of law (81% and 74% respectively), and Spain and Italy were least trusted (49% and 43%).

The results for the US are interesting. Around 71% of American respondents stated that they had a high level of trust in the rule of law. Yet the country came third from the bottom under the metric “you feel like you are in good hands in US courts”.

The reasons for this are implied in the responses to the other questions in the survey. The US performed second worst (just behind Spain) in respect of belief that judges could be biased. The US also performed worst of all in the category where the public were asked if lawyers were impartial (just 41% agreed).

In interpreting these results it is important to note that the survey was conducted in 2024, prior to Trump’s second term. But anti-elite and anti-judge rhetoric pointing to arguments for more presidential power and less judicial oversight had already been prominent in the first Trump term, and the 2024 campaign.

The results expose the already fragile nature of trust in the legal sector in the US, and underline how this could be ramped up further after the announcements in recent weeks.

Stephen Clear, Lecturer in Constitutional and Administrative Law, and Public Procurement, *Bangor University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

---

---

an 525

President Donald Trump's critics, both left and right, often use the word "unprecedented" to describe his actions. No previous president in U.S. history — not even Richard Nixon — contemplated deporting U.S. citizens to foreign prisons or took aggressive action against law firms for having clients he didn't like.

They typically mean "unprecedented" in the United States, not unprecedented elsewhere.

In an article published by The Atlantic on May 14, Andrew O'Donohue — a political scientist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts — warns that Trump is employing a legal strategy used by despots in other countries.

:{READ MORE:'Dangerous and disgraceful': Michigan Republican busted for 'racist statements'

"Donald Trump’s attacks on the courts lack recent precedent in the United States," O'Donohue explains, "but they follow a clear pattern seen in backsliding democracies around the world. In many countries, when political leaders challenge the courts, the end result isn't merely a win in a single policy dispute. These attacks have a deeper, more destructive effect: They systematically weaken the courts as a check on the executive's power — opening the door for governments to abuse that power to target opponents and endanger democracy."

IFrame Content

IFrame Content

IFrame Content

The Harvard political science expert continues, "This fight takes place both inside and, importantly, outside the courtroom, in the arena of the public’s opinion. Even though citizens generally agree that governments should obey court orders, several would-be authoritarians — such as those in Turkey, Mexico, and El Salvador — have managed to defy the courts, while keeping the public on their side.

O'Donohue describes the "pattern" he has "studied" in "democratic backsliding globally" as "court-baiting."

"To understand this dynamic, consider a textbook example from Turkey," O'Donohue writes. "When Turkey’s long-serving leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, first rose to power in 2003, he initially faced powerful constraints from the judiciary. Whereas Erdoğan's party was religiously conservative, Turkey's courts were staunchly secular and issued dozens of decisions during Erdoğan’s first term to limit the government's sway over historically secular state institutions. To take down the judiciary, Erdoğan used the court-baiting playbook."

READ MORE:'Soft spot for despots': How conservative intellectuals set the stage for Trump

O'Donohue continues, "He proposed a constitutional amendment perfectly designed to galvanize public support — and trigger a showdown with the judiciary. In Turkey, the courts had repeatedly upheld a ban that prevented Muslim women from wearing the Islamic headscarf at universities in the name of upholding the constitution’s strict commitment to secularism."

Trump, O'Donohue argues, is using the "court-baiting playbook" in a similar fashion to Erdoğan in Turkey — and the goal is an "erosion of checks and balances."

"The experiences of other democracies offer a warning: Court-baiting starts by expanding executive power on a popular issue," O'Donohue writes, "but it can end with an unconstrained executive who destroys the cherished institutions of a free society."

*Andrew O'Donohue's full article for The Atlantic is available at this link (subscription required).

---

---

an 3 25

Trump, much to the frustration of Democrats, returned to Washington on January 20 with GOP majorities in both branches of the Congress. But they're small majorities.

In the U.S. Senate, Republicans have a 53-47 majority — which is large enough to get Trump's most controversial nominees confirmed, but not enough to overcome the 60-vote demand of the filibuster. Nor is it enough to get a "guilty" vote in an impeachment.

Trump and some of his allies, including billionaire Tesla/SpaceX/X.com leader Elon Musk, are calling for the impeachment of federal judges who are blocking, at least temporarily, some of the president's executive orders. But if federal judges were to be indicted on articles on impeachment in the U.S. House of Representatives, Republicans wouldn't have enough votes for a "guilty" verdict in the U.S. Senate.

READ MORE:'Clear and present danger': Experts alarmed at 'insanity' of Musk getting secret war plans

According to Politico reporters Meredith Lee Hill, Hailey Fuchs and Jordain Carney, however, GOP lawmakers are thinking about ways to attack federal judges other than impeachment.

"Top Republicans are likely to put at least one bill, California Rep. Darrell Issa’s 'No Rogue Rulings Act,' on the floor in early April, according to two people granted anonymity to discuss scheduling plans," the journalists explain in an article published on March 21. "The legislation would crack down on the ability of lower-court judges to issue far-reaching injunctions. That is seen by Speaker Mike Johnson and other House Republican leaders as a viable outlet as they sort out the way forward on the judicial impeachments that have been endorsed by Trump and his billionaire ally Elon Musk. A spokesperson for Johnson said the speaker and the Judiciary Committee are reviewing 'all available options.… to address this urgent matter.'"

Hill, Fuchs and Carney continued, "House Republicans have filed impeachment resolutions targeting four district judges, including one this week targeting the jurist who sought to block Trump's effort to deport alleged gang members to El Salvador.… But there is widespread recognition inside the House GOP that impeachments — besides being costly in time and political capital — do not have the votes to succeed given Republicans' narrow majority. That has prompted GOP hardliners to back-channel with Trump allies on alternatives they could push across the House floor."

House Republicans, according to the Politico journalists, "are also discussing one-off resolutions condemning recent judicial rulings against Trump."

READ MORE:Sabotaging Social Security: Behind the leaked memo to cut agency staff and critical services

"House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan's team has privately advised that members' offices are free to share their opinions on legislative strategy around the courts but that Jordan himself intends to stick to a more vague approach, saying everything is on the table, according to one Republican Hill aide," Hill, Fuchs and Carney explain. "There is, however, a particular interest in restricting the authority of federal district judges to hand down nationwide injunctions, according to four Republicans familiar with the matter."

READ MORE:'Clear and present danger': Experts alarmed at 'insanity' of Musk getting secret war plans

*Read the full Politico article at this link.

---

Johnson demands all Trump prosecutions cease, vows to use Congress 'in every possible way' - Alternet.org

---

May 2, 2024 rww

True North is issuing a new research report shining a light on those men–Leonard Leo, Dick Uihlein, Charles Koch, and Jeff Yass–and right-wing groups targeting state courts and other levers of power to change the rules and limit our freedoms. This new report also documents how Leo used the Federalist Society to target state supreme courts and the judicial selection process in order to advance his agenda, and more.

---

===

an 3 24

Earlier this week, CNN reported that the Judicial Conference of the United States announced a new rule that would that would shut down "judge shopping" — a tactic conservative attorneys general and conservative litigants have used to file challenges against liberal policies and laws.

The new policy requires federal district courts to "randomly assign a judge to a lawsuit if the suit aims to block any federal or state law, executive order or regulation," the Hill reports.

"I’m really proud that we did this," 6th Circuit Chief Judge Jeffrey Sutton said in response to the announcement.

READ MORE:**Judiciary enforces new policy restricting GOP from using 'judge shopping' to block Dem policies**

However, according to the Associated Press, two days later, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) condemned the move "on the Senate floor and joined with two other GOP senators to send letters to a dozen chief judges around the country suggesting they" ignore it.

In a Sunday, March 17 op-ed published by MSNBC, University of Texas School of Law professor Steve Vladeck points out the hypocrisy in not only McConnell's — but US Senator John Cornyn's (R-TX) and Thom Tillis' (R-NC) — opposition to the rule, too.

"So why are these three Republican senators so upset by the proposed reform?" Vladeck asks. "The answer is obvious: because it will make it harder to guarantee that specific judges will hear specific lawsuits — whether individual Republican appointees hearing challenges to Democratic policies, or vice versa."

Vladeck writes:

Plaintiffs have increasingly taken advantage of these 'single-judge' divisions to steer nationwide federal policy challenges to specific, ideologically sympathetic judges. For example, the nationwide challenge to the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone (one of two drugs used in the most common and safest abortion procedure) was filed in Amarillo, Texas — not a courthouse with any specific connection to mifepristone, but one in which it had a 100% chance of being assigned to a certain Trump-appointed district judge, former anti-abortion advocate Matthew Kacsmaryk. Kacsmaryk remarkably, if predictably, ruled against the FDA’s approval of the drug — an approval that occurred 23 years ago.

READ MORE:**Study cited by Texas judge in abortion pill case retracted**

Another example the Just Security blog co-founder notes:

A nationwide challenge to Biden administration efforts to combat social media disinformation was filed in Monroe, Louisiana — where it had a 100% chance of being assigned to Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty. And the state of Texas, which has filed 37 different lawsuits in Texas district courts challenging Biden administration policies*, has filed a majority of them in single-judge divisions — and none in Austin (where the Texas government is actually located) or Houston or Dallas or … you get the point.

Vladeck emphasizes, "The charge from McConnell, Cornyn and Tillis that the Judicial Conference is engaged in 'partisan' behavior rings more than a little hypocritical. The whole point of the proposal is to reduce the appearance of partisanship on the part of the federal courts."

READ MORE:[GOP represents 'most significant threat to basic constitutionalism since Civil War': historian

*Vladeck's full op-ed is available [at this link.]

===

OMG

an 6 23

no lnx

for decades, Florida had a reputation for being an incredibly volatile swing state. Floridians often split their tickets, and President George W. Bush won the state twice before it went to President Barack Obama in both 2008 and 2012. Democrats and Republicans had to work extra hard with Florida voters because the Sunshine State was neither ultra-Democratic Massachusetts nor ultra-Republican Alabama.

But that was before the Ron DeSantis era, which has found Florida moving way to the right. Republicans now dominate all three branches of Florida's state government: executive, legislative and judicial.

In a report published on June 20, Washington Post reporters Beth Reinhard and Josh Dawsey describe DeSantis and his allies' campaign to push the Florida Supreme Court way to the right.

READ MORE: Ron DeSantis accuses teachers of 'forcing' students to pick pronouns

"For decades, the ambitions of Florida's Republican governors were stymied by the liberal-leaning (Florida) Supreme Court," Reinhard and Dawsey explain. "That is, until Ron DeSantis was elected. The Court let him erase a congressional district with a large Black population. It opened the door to a law making it easier to impose the death penalty. Now, it's poised to rule on the governor's plan to outlaw most abortions in the third-most-populous state."

:{

}:

The reporters emphasize that the Florida Supreme Court's "hard-right turn" was "by design" —and encouraged by the right-wing Federalist Society.

"DeSantis seized on the unusual retirement of three liberal justices at once to quickly remake the court," according to Reinhard and Dawsey. "He did so with the help of a secretive panel led by Leonard Leo — the key architect of the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority — that quietly vetted judicial nominees in an Orlando conference room three weeks before the governor's inauguration."

Leo, known for his many years as vice president of the Federalist Society, played a major role in the demise of Roe v. Wade. And Reinhard and Dawsey stress that Leo helped give Florida "one of the most conservative state supreme courts in the country."

READ MORE: Ron DeSantis vows to 'destroy leftism' and 'woke ideology' if elected president

"(DeSantis) repeatedly points to his overhaul of the state court as a sign of how he would approach the (federal) judiciary if elected (president)," the reporters note. "He has called Justice Clarence Thomas 'our greatest living justice' and pledged to move the U.S. Supreme Court even further to the right than President Donald Trump did."

READ MORE: 'Boxed in': Why Trump’s 2020 fixation is a 'fundamental problem' for Ron DeSantis

Read The Washington Post's full report at this link (subscription required).

https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/American_Juris_Link

american Juris Link (AJL) is a right-wing, Arizona-based 501(c)(3) litigation center that has been tax exempt since 2019.[1] AJL’s founder and president Carrie Ann Donnell describes AJL as “basically like the SPN for litigators.”[2]

AJL advertises on its site that it provides local counsel, organizes amici briefs, and offers personalized services.[3] AJL tracks and supports right-wing legal challenges to upend COVID-19 health restrictions, fight workers’ rights to unionize, and coordinate legal strategies and amici.

AJL was incubated by and is an associate member of the State Policy Network (SPN), a group of right-wing think tanks and other politically-active nonprofits.

News and Controversies

Fighting COVID-19 Public Health Efforts

Since the beginning of the pandemic, AJL has assisted numerous organizations in filing lawsuits to upend public health restrictions put in place in order to stop the spread of COVID-19. It holds a “regularly scheduled COVID Litigation Roundtable” for strategizing and collaborating against COVID orders, and has partnered with Ballotpedia to create a COVID-19 lawsuit tracker of every court case challenging public health orders due to the pandemic, funded by a $41,000 grant from DonorsTrust, the Koch political network’s preferred donor conduit.[2]

AJL also touts that it helped find local counsel for “COVID-related lawsuits.”[2]

Supporting Union Crushing Efforts

In 2020, AJL worked to support SPN’s Ohio affiliate, the Buckeye Institute, in its unsuccessful attempt to get the U.S. Supreme Court to take an appeal in Reisman v. Associated Faculties of the University of Maine. The case had attempted to overturn the longstanding practice of allowing democratically elected public-sector unions to exclusively represent employees in negotiations over pay and working conditions. [2]

The group “recruited” the Maine Policy Institute (formerly the Maine Heritage Policy Center) to file a supporting brief and “secured” 12 additional amicus groups, many of which are SPN members, to sign on, according to a March 2020 newsletter. [2]

AJL also helps match groups working to convince union members to drop out of their unions with lawyers aligned with their mission.[2]

Ties to the Bradley Foundation

The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation provided American Juris Link with $100,000 "for start-up support" in 2020.[2] Bradley has long emphasized the funding of litigation efforts as part of its larger strategy to weaponize philanthropy to build up a right-wing infrastructure.[4]

Bradley Files

In 2017, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), publishers of SourceWatch, launched a series of articles on the Milwaukee-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, exposing the inner-workings of one of America's largest right-wing foundations. 56,000 previously undisclosed documents laid bare the Bradley Foundation's highly politicized agenda. CMD detailed Bradley's efforts to map and measure right wing infrastructure nationwide, including by dismantling and defunding unions to impact state elections; bankrolling discredited spin doctor Richard Berman and his many front groups; and more.

Find the series here at ExposedbyCMD.org.

Ties to the Koch Brothers

The Charles G. Koch Foundation contributed $20,000 to AJL "for future payment" in 2019.

Ties to the State Policy Network

American Juris Link was incubated by the State Policy Network and is an associate member of SPN. SPN's Executive Vice President, Tony Woodlief is on AJL's board. The organization has also worked together with other SPN Members to oppose COVID-19 public health measures and oppose unions.[2]

SPN President and CEO Tracie Sharp praised the new partnership with AJL as “a durable freedom infrastructure…where you have think tanks…locking arms with litigators to really press forward to be strategic, to be agile.”[2]

“This is how we are going to have state solutions, national impact in both the short term and the long term,” Sharp said.[2]

At SPN's 27th Annual Meeting, AJL sponsored a litigation network reception. The description read, "Celebrate your victories and deliberate over your hardest legal questions while you share a drink with attorneys from some of the 50+ nonprofits litigating for freedom and the rule of law. Catch up with old colleagues, meet new allies, and learn how a new nonprofit network for litigators can offer free services and connect you with other professionals to maximize your impact and efficiency."[5]

SPN is a web of right-wing “think tanks” and tax-exempt organizations in 50 states, Washington, D.C., Canada, and the United Kingdom. As of January 2021, SPN's membership totals 163. Today's SPN is the tip of the spear of far-right, nationally funded policy agenda in the states that undergirds extremists in the Republican Party. SPN Executive Director Tracie Sharp told the Wall Street Journal in 2017 that the revenue of the combined groups was some $80 million, but a 2019 analysis of SPN's main members IRS filings by the Center for Media and Democracy shows that the combined revenue is over $120 million.[6] Although SPN's member organizations claim to be nonpartisan and independent, the Center for Media and Democracy's in-depth investigation, "EXPOSED: The State Policy Network -- The Powerful Right-Wing Network Helping to Hijack State Politics and Government," reveals that SPN and its member think tanks are major drivers of the right-wing,American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)-backed corporate agenda in state houses nationwide, with deep ties to the Koch brothers and the national right-wing network of funders.[7]

In response to CMD's report, SPN Executive Director Tracie Sharp told national and statehouse reporters that SPN affiliates are "fiercely independent." Later the same week, however, The New Yorker's Jane Mayer caught Sharp in a contradiction. In her article, "Is IKEA the New Model for the Conservative Movement?," the Pulitzer-nominated reporter revealed that, in a recent meeting behind closed doors with the heads of SPN affiliates around the country, Sharp "compared the organization’s model to that of the giant global chain IKEA." She reportedly said that SPN "would provide 'the raw materials,' along with the 'services' needed to assemble the products. Rather than acting like passive customers who buy finished products, she wanted each state group to show the enterprise and creativity needed to assemble the parts in their home states. 'Pick what you need,' she said, 'and customize it for what works best for you.'" Not only that, but Sharp "also acknowledged privately to the members that the organization's often anonymous donors frequently shape the agenda. 'The grants are driven by donor intent,' she told the gathered think-tank heads. She added that, often, 'the donors have a very specific idea of what they want to happen.'"[8]

A set of coordinated fundraising proposals obtained and released by The Guardian in early December 2013 confirm many of these SPN members' intent to change state laws and policies, referring to "advancing model legislation" and "candidate briefings." These activities "arguably cross the line into lobbying," The Guardian notes.[9]

AJL Collaborators

The Center for Media and Democracy identified the following organizations that have received assistance from AJL through February 2021:[2]

Funding

American Juris Link is not required to disclose its funders but major foundation supporters can be found through their IRS filings. Here are some known contributors:

Core Financials

2019[11]

Personnel

Staff

As of February 2021:

Board of Directors

As of February 2021:[13]

Contact Information

American Juris Link

:{7000 N 16 St, Suite 120-155

Phoenix, AZ 85020}:

EIN: 84-2191039

Website: americanjurislink.org

Email: info@americanjurislink.org

Articles and Resources

Related SourceWatch

....docs 990

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/william-barrs-bogus-voter-fraud-claims-are-part-of-a-long-history-of-republican-voter-suppression-reporter

alex h

With one national poll after another showing President Donald Trump losing to former Vice President Joe Biden in November, the president and Attorney General William Barr continue to obsess over "voter fraud." They baselessly claim the crime is promoted by mail-in voting, despite its history as a reliable practice. Journalist Pema Levy pointed out that Barr's actions are part of a long a seedy history in an article published in Mother Jones this week, describing them as thinly veiled attempts at voter suppression.

"A pattern has emerged in recent years that's easy to spot," Levy explains. "Right before an election, Republican officials in battleground states announce voter fraud investigations. The goal is obvious: suppressing turnout. But what's new this year is that this underhanded tactic is being employed by the president and the Justice Department."

Levy cites Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp as an example of a Republican who has used bogus voter fraud claims to suppress turnout, recalling that only two days before the 2018 midterms, Kemp — who was Georgia's secretary of state before becoming governor — "came out with an explosive announcement: he was investigating the state Democratic Party for attempting to hack into the state's voter registration system."

"At the time, Kemp was both the state's top election official and the Republican nominee for governor in a dead-heat race against Democrat Stacey Abrams," Levy notes. "Kemp had a history of bogus voter fraud allegations against his political opponents, and many recognized the brazen tactic this time. Election law expert Rick Hasen called it 'perhaps the most outrageous example of election administration partisanship in the modern era' and 'banana republic stuff.'"

But in May 2020, Levy adds, Georgia's Republican attorney general "confirmed what was suspected all along: there was no evidence of any crime." Republicans, Levy stresses, "have a long history of making false allegations of voter fraud, only to see their accusations fall apart once scrutinized. But airing such charges right before an election threatens to destabilize and delegitimize it."

This year, according to Levy, one is seeing "an increase in fraud allegations from the Justice Department itself — and it appears to be part of Barr's ongoing effort to transform the (DOJ) into an arm of the Trump campaign, ready to engage in a longstanding GOP voter suppression tactic."

Barr, Levy warns, is showing that he is ready to "possibly aid the Trump campaign's legal efforts to get ballots tossed during the vote-counting process."

When the U.S. Senate confirmed Barr as U.S. attorney general in 2019, Levy recalls, he was hailed as "by-the-book institutionalist" — only to show how much of a Trump loyalist he was when he "misrepresented" the findings of former Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation and "interfered" in the DOJ's investigation of long-time Trump ally Roger Stone. And during this year's presidential election, Levy predicts, Barr will to do whatever he can to help Trump win reelection.

"Since Barr has torched his credibility," Levy writes, "any allegations of fraud emanating from the Justice Department in the coming weeks should be viewed skeptically. Barr is using an old playbook. You've been warned."

jig up wht pwr

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/the-supreme-court-is-finished-republicans-have-killed-it/

...They've turned the courts into a kennel for right-wing puppies, willing to sit there with floppy ears and their tongues out, panting and waiting to decide cases in favor of the billionaires who put them there. That's why there is a cottage industry of right-wing legal groups like Judicial Watch, Alliance Defending Freedom, Claremont Institute and the Center for Individual Rights, all of them funded by tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions in right-wing money. They make no bones about the fact that their job is to go out looking for plaintiffs to sue on behalf of big business and right-wing political interests to overturn laws they don't like. They have been behind the challenges to the Affordable Care Act and every anti-abortion lawsuit ever filed, not to mention suits against immigrant rights, civil rights, LGBT rights — you name it. And waiting in federal courthouses all over the country are Trump and Mitch McConnell's judicial poodles....

==

BO commented on in con call]

lock her up, rule of law

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/its-not-just-a-chant-at-trumps-rallies-or-lame-wordplay-in-his-tweets-its-his-call-to-fascist-rule/

aha hmmn, does djt hijack of law = evil perversion? also pseudo-populism by billionaire to line own pocket and corrupt cronies?

see roy cohn for full txt

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/sadism-crime-and-a-love-of-lies-what-3500-lawsuits-reveal-about-trumps-true-nature/

no lnx

Sadism, crime and a love of lies: What 3,500 lawsuits reveal about Trump’s true nature

Written by History News Network April 11, 2020

American presidents before Donald Trump had some record of public achievement in politics, government or the military before they were elected. Donald Trump lacked any of those credentials, but brought his astounding history of involvement in thousands of lawsuits to the nation’s highest office. This trove of cases from more than 45 years reflects Trump’s contempt for ethical standards and for the US Constitution and the rule of law, the foundation of American democracy.

As a perennial litigant, Trump weaponized the law to devastate perceived enemies, to consolidate power, to frustrate opposing parties, as former federal prosecutor and acclaimed author James D. Zirin illuminates in his compelling and disturbing history of Trump’s use and abuse of the law, Plaintiff in Chief: A Portrait of Trump in 3,500 Lawsuits (All Points Books)....

see roy cohn for full txt

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/sadism-crime-and-a-love-of-lies-what-3500-lawsuits-reveal-about-trumps-true-nature/

no lnx

Sadism, crime and a love of lies: What 3,500 lawsuits reveal about Trump’s true nature

Written by History News Network April 11, 2020

American presidents before Donald Trump had some record of public achievement in politics, government or the military before they were elected. Donald Trump lacked any of those credentials, but brought his astounding history of involvement in thousands of lawsuits to the nation’s highest office. This trove of cases from more than 45 years reflects Trump’s contempt for ethical standards and for the US Constitution and the rule of law, the foundation of American democracy.

As a perennial litigant, Trump weaponized the law to devastate perceived enemies, to consolidate power, to frustrate opposing parties, as former federal prosecutor and acclaimed author James D. Zirin illuminates in his compelling and disturbing history of Trump’s use and abuse of the law, Plaintiff in Chief: A Portrait of Trump in 3,500 Lawsuits (All Points Books)....

James D. Zirin: He has continued and I think he will continue. And I think the rule of law has been seriously undermined.

:{

}:

Our democracy has been seriously compromised because the framers of the Constitution never thought the system would work this way. Republican senators deserve part of the blame because of their need to retain power or whatever, they did not respect the oath they took to be fair and impartial judges of the facts and the law, but instead voted along party lines to acquit him.

Robin Lindley: Trump said sometime in the 90s, as you note in your book, that “I love to have enemies.” I think most of us wouldn’t feel that way and it seems pathological to me. What did you think when you found that quote from him?

James D. Zirin: Most politicians are controversial and have political enemies. I think Trump relishes that perhaps more than others and he loves to attack them personally. We know Biden is “Sleepy Joe” and Elizabeth Warren is “Pocahontas” and Bernie Sanders is “Crazy Bernie.” He has nicknames for everyone and he revels in trashing them rather than addressing the merits of anything they propose.

Robin Lindley: The mentality of an eight-year-old bully, it seems. You write that Trump’s experience in lawsuits reflects “his inmost ulterior motivation.” This comes out in your responses, but could you sum up your sense of his character, motivation, and morality based on your extensive research?

James D. Zirin: His virulent combination of anti-science, anti-law, ignorance, irrational conspiracy theorizing, instability, narcissism and vindictiveness has led us to national catastrophe. If he is re-elected, I fear for the republic and the American people.

Robin Lindley: As you demonstrate, Trump is an anomaly in terms of the adversarial system. Do you have anything to add on his abuse of legal process?

James D. Zirin: Look, the adversary system is the crown jewel of our legal system. We got it from the British. The idea is that you had lawyers on both sides who were partisan, who were like the Knights Templar who rode into battle on behalf of somebody or other in the Middle Ages. That has been the best way of getting at the truth. In contrast, in civil law countries like France or Germany, the judge conducts the inquiry. The judge might ask questions of the lawyers, but the lawyers don’t develop the evidence on both sides.

But adversary doesn’t mean enemy. What Trump has demonstrated is that we have a great legal system and we all have the benefit of it. But there are also limitations for the law and those limitations can be exploited by someone determined to beat the system, and that’s what Trump has done.

Robin Lindley. Thank you, Mr. Zirin and congratulations on your groundbreaking and compelling book on the life of Donald Trump through the perspective of his thousands of lawsuits. It’s been an honor to talk with you.

This article was originally published at History News Network

==

dn 220 also XR win?

https://www.democracynow.org/2020/3/2/headlines/climate_activists_win_landmark_victory_in_oregon_after_presenting_necessity_defense

In  a victory for climate activists, a Portland, Oregon, jury refused to convict five Extinction Rebellion members for blocking railroad tracks used to transport oil by Zenith Energy Corporation and other oil companies. The activists were acquitted after presenting anecessity defense. Valve turner Ken Ward — one of the “Zenith 5” — said of the landmark victory, “When citizens are told the truth about the climate crisis — which is the first of Extinction Rebellion’s demands — they take appropriate and responsible action, as our jury did, and we thank them.”

In other environmental activism news, police arrested members of Extinction Rebellion NYC as they blocked construction of a National Grid fracked gas pipeline in Brooklyn.

TOPICS:

==

YIKES MODERATION BUFFER ERODING IN REAL TIME?!

==

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/trump-and-mcconnell-just-took-over-the-nations-most-liberal-court-report/

no lnx omfg

Trump and McConnell just took over the nation’s most liberal court: report

Written by Tom Boggioni / Raw Story December 22, 2019

Lost in all of the attention being paid to the impeachment of Donald Trump has been the packing the courts with conservative justices by the president with the full support of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).

Worst of all, reports Politico, the Republican majority has taken over the traditionally liberal 9th Circuit, long a bastion of fending off conservative initiatives

The report states, “The Senate confirmation of Lawrence VanDyke and Patrick Bumatay to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals this month brought to nine the number of appointments President Donald Trump has made to the 29-member bench that serves as the last stop for nearly all legal complaints lodged in nine Western states.Democratic-appointed judges now hold a three-seat majority, compared with 11 at the start of Trump’s presidency.”

According to Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), the transition to a conservative majority court could have devastating consequences for liberal initiatives — including health care reform.

“The 9th Circuit is a very important circuit, and the presence of more conservative judges puts in peril all of American health care reform,” the state attorney general explained.

“If the trend continues, it represents a major shift in the liberal wing of the judiciary, meaning lawsuits for progressive causes won’t find a friendly ear as easily as they have. The circuit has been the go-to venue for activist state attorneys eager to freeze Trump policies on health care, immigration and other social issues. It ruled against Trump’s weakening of Obamacare’s contraceptive mandate, as well as multiple versions of his travel ban,” Politico reports before adding, “Trump has called the 9th Circuit ‘a complete and total disaster’ and a ‘big thorn in our side,’ and some congressional Republicans still threaten to break up its jurisdiction. But its changing ideological makeup could wind up giving states like California less legal elbow room to challenge Trump policies and go their own way in areas like reproductive rights and LGBTQ issues.”

The report also notes, “The 9th Circuit isn’t the only court whose makeup has changed through Trump’s conservative nominees and McConnell’s singular focus on confirming judges. The 1st Circuit in Boston and 3rd Circuit in Philadelphia now have Republican-appointed majorities. But the 9th has outside importance as the biggest circuit in the country and a jurisdiction with more than 60 million people.”

You can read more here.

==

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/republicans-dont-even-pretend-to-care-about-laws-now-what-they-unleash-after-impeachment-will-be-really-ugly/

===

authoritarians have to undermine ct rule of law:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/environmental-activists-have-higher-death-rates-than-some-soldiers/

Claudelice Silva dos Santos was shocked but not surprised when her brother and his wife were murdered. For years José Cláudio Ribeiro da Silva and Maria do Espírito Santo da Silva had been on the receiving end of death threats and attacks for their work combatting illegal logging and deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon rain forest, where they lived. “We knew that there was a high risk that it could happen,” Santos says. “But we always believed that it never would happen, that the resistance, the visibility of our fight—all the things we did to prevent the killing—would work out.”

Santos’s relatives were among more than 1,500 people across 50 countries to be murdered in retaliation for protecting land, water, forests and other natural resources between 2002 and 2017. The annual death toll doubled over that 15-year period, and the killings tended to take place in countries with high levels of corruption and weak rule of law,according to study findings published Monday in Nature Sustainability. As the authors report, in that period, murders of environmental defenders outweighed the combined deaths of soldiers from the U.K. and Australia deployed to overseas war zones.

“These cases include everything from award-winning people who were successful in garnering international support to others who were very much operating at the local level,” says Mary Menton, a research fellow in environmental justice at the University of Sussex in England and a co-author of the new study. “Oftentimes it’s individuals killed, but there have also been cases of massacres.”

==

YIKES TOTAL RW TAKEOVER

==

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/fundamentalism-and-authoritarianism-how-the-party-of-law-and-order-become-the-party-of-crooks-and-crime

no lnx many

Fundamentalism and authoritarianism: How the party of ‘law and order’ became the party of crooks and crime

Written by Paul Rosenberg / Salon November 24, 2019

Whatever happened to the Republicans as the “party of law and order”? True, Richard Nixon, who first branded the party that way, was lying when he famously said, “I am not a crook.” Both Watergate and the Iran-Contra scandal rank among the most notorious examples of executive branch lawlessness in our nation’s history. But through it all, the narrative commitment to the brand never wavered. It was a source of moral and political strength, always to be contrasted with “soft on crime” Democrats, however contrary the front-page facts might be.

But not anymore. As noted here by Jennifer Mercieca, a historian of rhetoric whose book, “Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump” (table of contents here), will be published next year, it’s the Democrats who are the party of law and order in the impeachment drama, while the GOP is the party of conspiracy:

Democrats, led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, are betting that public opinion will move toward impeachment and removal once more information is made public. To try to shape public opinion they are relying on a law-and-order frame that tells Americans that the impeachment inquiry is legitimate and legally justified.

Democrats are positioning themselves as the only ones willing to uphold the rule of law and the Constitution.

Republicans, led by President Trump, are counting on their power to frame reality to prevent the public from moving toward impeachment.

The GOP is relying on a conspiracy frame that tells Americans that the impeachment inquiry is illegitimate and part of a plot to destroy America.

Of course the rhetoric of conspiracy isn’t entirely synonymous with that of crooks and criminals — but when you start to insist that career law-enforcement officials are all in on it, and you’ve abandoned the “law and order” frame to the Democrats, the crooks and criminals stench is difficult to dispel. And it’s not happening in isolation, either — above and beyond the plethora of scandals Trump generates, and the lockstep support Republicans are giving him.

That lockstep support is perhaps the most striking difference between now and Watergate-a difference most readily understood via the role of asymmetric polarization and negative partisanship, which cautions us not to expect the kind of gradual but inexorable opinion shift seen 45 years ago in response to the buildup of evidence.

In turn, dramatically increased polarization is a predicted result of historical trends described by structural demographic theory (SDT), which I wrote about previously in October 2016, reviewing “Ages of Discord,” an analysis of American history by evolutionary anthropologist Peter Turchin. SDT identifies three underlying factors contributing to increased levels of political instability: mass immiseration (stagnant or falling wages, worsening health, declining well-being), elite overproduction (increased competition for wealth and power), and fiscal distress (a product of both public debt and trust in public institutions). Mass immiseration helps fuel elite overproduction, since stagnant or falling wages leaves more money for elites, and the increased competition that results reduces broad cooperation and intensifies elite fragmentation (which also contributes to fiscal distress). In America, political polarization is a prime indicator of that fragmentation.

The fact that polarization has been asymmetric deserves special attention, as it’s not yet implicated in SDT. But it can be credibly explained. In “The AuthoritarianDynamic,” Karen Stenner presented compelling evidence that expressed intolerance resulted primarily from two factors: an innate predisposition to intolerance, demanding obedience and conformity, (“authoritarianism”) interacting with increased societal threat, particularly dissension in public opinion and loss of confidence in political leaders. Thus, there is both a logical reason for the expression of authoritarianism to increase as political instability rises, and motivation for either authoritarian or opportunistic elites to strategically manipulate conditions to intensify this process.

One can read “The Long Southern Strategy” (Salon interview with co-author Angie Maxwell here) as a coherent history of how GOP-affiliated elites have pursued just such a strategy over the past 50-plus years.

“Authoritarian attitudes peak not only when social conditions change, but also if folks are made to feel like social conditions are changing (even if they aren’t),” Maxwell said. “The threats are recycled, renewed with a sense of urgency, stoking a fire that is always smoldering. It isn’t a natural rise in authoritarian attitudes, it is an orchestrated rise in authoritarian attitudes.”

SDT suggests that it may be both, but without the orchestration it would be much more manageable, and much less prone to produce lawless behavior.

One can also view conservative legal activism as a key component in that process, as well as a profound influence on elite politics as a whole. At the time of Watergate, authoritarians were more evenly divided between the parties, but they’ve become much more concentrated in the GOP since then. As their experience of threat has risen, they’ve become more inclined to lawlessness — although it’s not tolerated on the part of others, of course!

In short, the lawlessness at the top of the GOP isn’t new — just vastly more blatant than it was during Watergate.  But the infrastructure supporting, defending and excusing it is dramatically more powerful and robust, and the authoritarian mass base is much more consolidated within their voter base.

Aside from impeachment itself, three other developments this month underscores the GOP’s broader embrace of lawlessness, in contrast to its decades-long self-branding. First, there is Trump’s pardoning of three war criminals, burnishing his brand of support for official lawlessness and thuggish brutality. He may mistakenly believe this endears him to  the military — which wants nothing to do with them — but it’s also meant to hype authoritarian support among his most rabid supporters.

Second, hisRoy Cohn-style attorney general, William Barr, delivered a widely criticized authoritarian screed to the Federalist Society, portraying the impeachment inquiry as dangerous to the rule of law, rather than warranted by Trump’s self-professed crimes. Third, legal scholar Steven Calabresi, chair of the Federalist Society’sboard of directors, wrote a pair of opinion articles accusing Democrats of violating Trump’s rights, one of which, according to Steven Mazie, the Economist’s Supreme Court correspondent, “reads like the first draft of an op-ed by a MAGA middle-schooler who was inspired by Jacob Wohl’s erstwhile Twitter account.”

The combination of Trump’s blatant endorsement of lawlessness and the double-whammy high-profile embarrassments of Calabresi and Barr reflects something much broader and profoundly troubling. The latter two offer striking indicators of just how seriously this is impacting establishment conservatism, in a way that can’t be fobbed off on Trump alone, while Trump’s pardons of war criminals — following earlier pardons, including that of ex-Sheriff Joe Arpaio — not only enable brute lawlessness in uniform, but points towards outright valorization in the future, especially if performed in direct support of Trump himself.

To better understand the role of the conservative legal movement, I turned to two law professors I’ve interviewed before: Eric J. Segall, author of “Originalism as Faith,” to help illuminate the role that faith has played in this process, and David Pozen, co-author (with Joseph Fishkin) of the paper, “Asymmetric Constitutional Hardball,” which starts making sense of how the political asymmetry discussed above impacts norm-violating practices, with profound systemic results. In that paper, Fishkin and Pozen write:

The “restorationist” constitutional narratives and interpretive theories promoted by Republican politicians and lawyers, [this] Essay suggests, serve to legitimate the party’s use of constitutional hardball.

While this has surely been the elite focus of the actors involved, movement conservatives have also made remaking the Supreme Court and the entire judicial branch central to their politics in ways progressives have not, and this means engaging in authoritarian mobilization via threat manipulation, as described in “The Long Southern Strategy.”

Originalismplays a key role in this, but the meaning of that term shifted sharply in the process. At first, Segall told me, the originalist position argued that judges shouldn’t be engaged in moral reasoning:

It’s not for judges to select the best moral position for a country, it’s for people who are elected to do it. Unless judges can point to something in the text of the Constitution or something clear in the history, then judges should say look, the Constitution doesn’t speak to this, vote on it.

Originalism, at first, “was inextricably tied to deference. That’s the only way that works.”

But that all changed when conservatives gained control of the court in the late ’80s and early ’90s, Segall says: “After 12 years of Reagan-Bush judges, the people who embraced originalism dropped the deference part.” That meant a return of moral reasoning, “because history cannot answer modern problems,” and while conservatives won’t admit that, “it’s true and they act that way.” The Constitution is silent about the rights of transgender people or the definition of marriage, to cite obvious examples....

quite long]

==

==

McConnell is trampling the rules of the Senate to keep Trumpism alive — no matter what voters say in 2020

Tom Boggioni / Raw StoryMay 20, 2019

Political insiders claim that Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell is trampling all the rules of the Senate to get as many of Donald Trump’s court nominees approved as quickly as he can.

==

note that authoritarian/fascism req take out legal system

c de v

Donald Trump is not an ideologue or a person who possesses a coherent or sophisticated understanding of political theory, history or philosophy. He is all impulse and id, a man gifted in manipulating the fears of ignorant and insecure white people in the service of expanding his power and his fortune. Trump’s enforcers, including Attorney General William Barr, White House senior adviser Stephen Miller and the right-wing media machine, are then tasked with transforming the president’s most base impulses into public policy.

As we have seen throughout Trump’s presidency — and as we see now in Robert Mueller’s report, with its extensive litany of borderline corruption and its numerous instances of blatant obstruction of justice — the president and his allies disregard the law whenever it is inconvenient, and enforce it with callous cruelty when it serves their goals. This strategic arbitrariness weakens and delegitimizes the rule of law until, at some point, it can be totally rejected and dispensed with. The Trump administration’s ultimate goal is a “permanent state of exception” in the service of racial authoritarianismThis administration’s collective assault on nonwhites — in particular refugees, migrants and immigrants from Latin America — as well as Muslims and other groups deemed to be “un-American” is one of the principal areas where its contempt for the law and democracy is most apparent.

Last week Trump fired Kirstjen Nielsen from her position as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security because she was not cruel enough to immigrants, refugees and migrants — apparently breaking up families and putting people in concentration camps was insufficient for Donald Trump and Stephen Miller. Even more troubling, Trump fired Nielsen because she was not willing to violate the law at his command.

Trump also reportedly told Kevin McAleenan, who was then head of the Border Patrol and is now acting DHS secretary, to break the law by denying asylum seekers entry to the United States. It has also been reported that Trump promised McAleenan a pardon if he find himself in legal trouble for following Trump’s orders.Trump also told U.S. soldiers at the Mexican border that they should brutalize immigrants, refugees, and migrants. This too is a violation of civilian law, international law, as well as the U.S. Code of Military Justice. >Donald Trump’s handpicked attorney general, William Barr, has decided that refugees can be held in detention indefinitely. This appears to be a violation of federal law and constitutionally protected rights to due process.Trump has also suggested using human beings as political weapons by transporting migrants, refugees and immigrants from Latin America — a group of people Trump has slurred as a “race” of rapists and murderers and a human infestation — to “sanctuary cities” as a way (as he sees it) to punish Democrats Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor at New York University and an expert on fascism, authoritarianism and propaganda, explained the danger of Trump’s recent actions to me in a recent email:...This latest threat, and asking officials not to obey the law, and assuring them of a pardon, is just a new threshold of the contempt for law and democratic norms Trump has always shown, and an escalation of his white nationalist ideology and governing-by-vendetta leadership style. He wants to put mayors on the defensive, and create “crises” about immigration on city peripheries — migrants will pay the price....istorian Richard Frankel, an expert on modern Germany and the rise of the Nazis, provided additional context for Trump’s new initiative, also by email:...When Trump thinks of migrants he thinks of criminals, rapists, drug dealers, thugs, carriers of disease, people so fundamentally alien that they could never assimilate into American society and, in fact, threaten to destroy the country. And when you add his anti-Semitism to the mix, then the problem is not just that they’re coming to destroy America, but that they’re actually being sent by Soros, the “International Jew,” to destroy it.

When the history of Trump’s presidency is chronicled by some future scholar, these events over the last few weeks — including Barr’s partisan whitewashing of the Mueller report — will likely be described as some of the most ominous and important in America’s surrender to authoritarianism and fascism.

Unfortunately, said events have already been thrown down the memory hole, both by the public and the corporate media, who have been trained and conditioned like Pavlov’s dogs by the orchestrated chaos and confusion of Trump’s regime. As historian Gore Vidal observed back in 2004 about the George W. Bush presidency, “the ‘United States of Amnesia’ will be worse than an amnesiac; it will be — have suffered a lobotomy. There will be no functioning historical memory of our history.” What has transpired under Donald Trump is far worse.

This behavior feels new to most Americans. But in reality, such an assault on the rule of law, and the elevation of a man and a movement above the normal political process, are common around the world in failing democracies. Moreover, Trump’s regime is echoing one of the most grotesque examples of a failed democracy in modern history: the fall of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Third Reich and the Nazis.

There is overwhelming evidence to support such a claim.

In addition to the examples of lawlessness and cruelty detailed above, the Trump administration has conducted a campaign of “soft” ethnic cleansing against nonwhite immigrants, refugees and migrants. In a ruling last Friday, a federal judge in New York described the administration’s efforts to deport Haitian refugees as evidencing “a discriminatory purpose of removing non-white immigrants to the country.”

Trump’s regime has threatened to remove judges who will not follow his orders.

Trump has not appointed permanent replacements for key cabinet positions in order to subvert the congressional approval process. This allows Trump to undermine checks and balances on his power by putting his hand-picked minions in control of federal departments and agencies on a temporary, rotating basis. Trump has also chosen to leave senior positions unstaffed as a way of extending his ability to rule by fiat.

Trump and his supporters in the news media routinely use eliminationist and genocidal language to describe nonwhites and others whom they view as a type of enemy Other in America.

Much of Trump and his allies’ rhetoric directly channels that of the Nazis and the Third Reich, used to described Jewish people and others who would be annihilated during the Holocaust.

The Trump administration is ordering the United States military to build more concentration camps for nonwhite immigrants, migrants, and refugees.

In their fundraising emails and other materials, Trump describes his supporters as constituting a “movement” that will somehow “restore” and “protect” America against liberals, progressives, Democrats, nonwhite people, and others who are a threat to his American Apartheid “renewal” project. Absolute devotion and loyalty to Donald Trump is required for this plan to be successful. Trump is now offering membership cards to his supporters to cement their cult-like devotion to him.

Because they see it as their natural home, neo-Nazis and members of other right-wing hate organizations are running for public office as Republicans.

There has been a documented increase in right-wing political violence–some of it lethal –both during Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and now through to his third year in office.

Investigative journalist Andrea Pitzer, who is the author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, told me via email how the Trump administration’s new plans to abuse nonwhite immigrants, migrants, and refugees are a violation of international law that will likely end in violence and death.

She explained how, “This idea that there have been discussions of setting up dedicated trains for migrants whose humanity the government disputes and shipping them to designated cities they’re not allowed to leave–especially as some kind of political stunt–is beyond disturbing. And talk of the military running detention camps for migrants on American soil is also horrific. Even the shameful detention program for Japanese Americans during WWII was run by a civilian agency.”

Pitzer warns that:

The current administration seems bent on finding a way to use old and discredited forms of civilian detention against vulnerable groups–the kind of detention we’ve seen degenerate into atrocities again and again worldwide. The schemes emerging from the White House are a threat to our democracy as a whole and can’t be squared with either the Constitution or our obligations under international law.

As new public opinion research by PRRI and Pew shows, the American people are extremely divided between those who understand the value of a more cosmopolitan, forward-thinking, “racially” diverse, and inclusive society and those others (mostly white Republicans and other Trump supporters) who want America to be a white conservative Christian country where other people are subordinated to second-class citizenship, and thus considered peripheral to and therefore outside of the national community.

Donald Trump and his allies are warping and breaking the law to advance this grotesque vision of the American democratic project by mining white rage and white backlash identity politics for personal financial and political gain.

In that same email conversation, professor Frankel describes what Trump’s version of America, when fully realized, will look like:

Trump clearly sees the law as an impediment to achieving his goals. He believes he knows what’s best for the country (at least for those people he considers to be members of the real national community) and so anything he does in the service of the nation is (or should be), by definition, legal. The promise of pardons for those who work toward his goal indicates the extent to which he’d go to undermine the current legal system in favor of one that is in tune with his will. As Goering put it, “The law and the will of the Fuehrer are one.” Trump’s vision of America is a white Christian male-dominated Herrenvolk democracy. How to make that vision real is up to those below him, and no law should stand in the way.

Once the law is transformed into the expression of the leader’s will, there’s not much we can do to stop him.

The myth of American Exceptionalism will not save American democracy or its citizens from Trump’s machinations and the global dystopia his agents are so feverishly working to create. In 1935, Sinclair wrote his famous novel “It Can’t Happen Here” about the rise of authoritarianism and fascism in the United States. His warning was eight decades prescient about the Age of Trump. But unfortunately Sinclair’s question is being asked too late, the tragedy is already unfolding and the answer is a plain and clear “yes”. William Barr’s distorted version of the Mueller Report is all just scribbling on the epithet of America’s democracy and empire. The American people decided to be bystanders to their own history and destiny. This is very pathetic. It is also the truth and a tragedy.

==

http://documentedinvestigations.org/2018/07/12/janus-decision-rooted-koch-wishlist/

With last month’s monumental Janus decision by the Supreme Court, the Koch family won a major victory in their multi-generational attack on unions.

The ruling spreads to the entire public sector one of the laws the Koch fortune first helped push through in Kansas 60 years ago: “right-to-work.” And in doing so it enshrines the union-busting agenda their fossil fuel money has helped advance for decades.

(This story was first published by In These Times.)

Through a single vote, the Court’s 5-4 Janus decision reverses decades of legal precedent that had obstructed part of the Koch’s pro-corporate agenda. That vote was secured with the Kochs’ help in bankrolling efforts that include: helping to maintain a GOP Senate majority; helping the Senate block President Obama from filling the February 2016 Supreme Court vacancy; and helping to win the confirmation of right-wing corporate activist Neil Gorsuch.

Janus helps cement the nation’s highest court as the Koch Court, and Charles Koch wants to keep it that way.

As Documented first detailed in partnership with the Intercept, for months the Kochs had been investing heavily in anticipation of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement from the Court, which was announced on June 27, the same day as Janus. Earlier this year, the Koch group “Americans for Prosperity” (AFP) hired Sarah Field from the Koch-funded Federalist Society to spearhead its campaign to extend the Koch hold on the Court for perhaps a generation or more.

Despite claims by AFP that helping to seat Gorsuch was their “first” foray into Supreme Court nominations, the Koch effort to influence who becomes a judge and how they interpret the law goes back much further.

In fact, the Kochs have been investing in reshaping the law to suit their personal agenda for decades.For example, the Koch group Citizens for a Sound Economy, AFP’s predecessor, backed Clarence Thomas’ controversial confirmation to the Court more than 25 years ago.

The Kochs’ long-term agenda to remake the United States in their image is a multi-pronged effort that includes changing both the law and who makes or interprets the laws, including the anti-union Janus decision.

THE SEEDS OF JANUS

The effort to roll back union rights actually began almost a century ago, as wealthy industrialists objected to the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, known as the Wagner Act, which enshrined the right to collective bargaining in the United States.

Many tycoons of the time, like Alfred Sloan, head of General Motors, opposed those rights along with other business reforms of FDR’s New Deal.

Fred Koch, co-founder of the corporation that later became Koch Industries, harshly criticized American workers under New Deal policies in 1938. He extolled the economic policies of Emperor Hirohito and fascists Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini:

Although nobody agrees with me, I am of the opinion that the only sound countries in the world are Germany, Italy, and Japan, simply because they are all working and working hard… The laboring people in those countries are proportionately much better off than they are any place else in the world. When you contrast the state of mind of Germany today with what it was in 1925 you begin to think that perhaps this course of idleness, feeding at the public trough, dependence on government, etc., with which we are afflicted is not permanent and can be overcome.

Only recently, through the investigative work of Jane Mayer, has the public learned that the Koch fortune was actually built in part on directly aiding Hitler by building the oil-cracking factory that became “a key component in the Nazi war machine.” As Mayer noted in her 2016 book Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, that factory refined high-octane fuel needed for the Luftwaffe, which targeted, terrorized, and killed many thousands of innocent civilians. Fred Koch’s praise of Germany came after Hitler’s air bombers helped murder 136 men, women, and children in Guernica in the Basque region, a tragedy made famous by the mural painted by Pablo Picasso.

Meanwhile, industrialists like Sloan pursued efforts to undo New Deal reforms. In 1947, Congress amended the Wagner Act with the Taft-Hartley Act. It gave states the power to pass “right-to-work” laws that undermined collective bargaining by not requiring workers who benefit from bargained rights to pay dues to the unions that secured and enforced them.

HOW THE KOCHS FERTILIZED “RIGHT-TO-WORK”

As Mayer noted:

[Fred Koch] was an early and active member of the Wichita-based DeMille Foundation for Political Freedom, an anti-labor group [founded in 1945] that was a forerunner of the National Right to Work Defense Foundation. In a revealing private letter, one of its staff members explained the group’s ‘Astroturf’ strategy. In reality, he said, big-business industrialists would run the group, serving as its ‘anonymous quarterbacks,’ and ‘call the turns.’ But he said they needed to sell the ‘yarn’ that the group was ‘composed of housewives, farmers, small businessmen, professional people, wage earners-not big business industrialists.’ Otherwise, he admitted, the movement was ‘almost certainly doomed to failure.’

By 1954, an engineer from Wichita, Kan., Reed Larson,took a leave from his job at the Coleman Company, to launch Kansans-for-the-Right-to-Work. The following year, former Rep. Fred Hartley, Jr., (R-N.J.) co-founded the National Right to Work Committee (NRTWC). By 1958, the NRTWC was targeting six states to adopt right-to-work laws but it failed in every place, except Kansas.

“Fred [Koch] co-led a referendum drive to alter the state constitution in order to make it harder for unions to take root in Kansas,” Duke University Professor Nancy MacLean noted.

On Nov. 9, 1958, the New York Times reported that right-to-work won in Kansas because anti-union views had taken hold, noting:

More campaign efforts and more money were expended on the emotion-provoking issue than on the campaigns of all Republican and Democratic state and Congressional candidates combined. … For the last 10 days or so before Election Day an organization called Kansans-for-the-Right-to-Work flooded newspapers, television channels and other advertising media with appeals to ‘vote yes.’ These by far outnumbered the ‘vote no’ advertisements of unions opposing the amending.

A month later, Fred Koch joined Robert Welch and ten other men in Indianapolis to found the extreme rightwing group dubbed the “John Birch Society” (JBS).

As the Washington Post noted in its 1961 profile of JBS:

At the top of the Society’s structure in Wichita are several very wealthy industrialists. Oil engineer Fred Koch is president of the Rock Island Oil and Refining Co. A millionaire several times over, he is on the Society’s national council. … Wichita is the John Birch Society’s center of strength in Kansas, and one of its greatest in the country. … The leadership of the Birch Society overlaps heavily with the leadership of the organizations that successfully campaigned in 1958 for a right to work amendment to the State’s Constitution.

As detailed by Group Research Inc. in its 1962 history of JBS, Koch worked with both NRTWC and the Christian Crusade in arguing against union dues like those at issue in the Janus case.

A History of Hostility

In 1959, Fred Koch joined the Executive Committee to plan the JBS strategy to push back against what it viewed as communism in nearly every American institution.

In 1960, Koch published his polemic “A Business Man Looks at Communism” and distributed it to JBS chapters across the country. That pamphlet makes a variety of hysterical claims against unions, including:

Labor Unions have long been a Communist goal. How far they have been penetrated by Communists I have no idea, but it must be very far indeed, judging the hatred andvenom poured out in some labor papers….

Koch also accused the U.S. Supreme Court under former Gov. Earl Warren (R-CA) of issuing pro-Communist decisions, the universities of having thousands of Communist professors, the United Nations of being subversive, and former GOP President Dwight Eisenhower of being soft on Communism.

Similar sentiments were expressed in numerous other publications the JBS also pushed. The organization pitched a screed against the union workers who organized against Kohler fixtures in Wisconsin. It pushed attacks on the UAW’s Walter Reuther, who was posthumously awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

It published and peddled right-wing writer Rosalie Gordon’s attack on the U.S. Supreme Court for decisions enforcing collective bargaining rights as protecting the “labor-union monopoly,” along with what she called the “plague” of desegregation caused by Brown v. Board of Education.

The JBS also pushed reprints of tomes by Ludwig von Mises attacking unions as illegitimate intervenors in the “free market,” artificial inflators of wages for workers, and thieves of the profits of tycoons. It promoted F.A. Hayek’s vilification of government regulation of corporations as leading to fascism and Hilaire du Berrier’s conspiracy theories that American labor unions were supposedly using union dues to finance communist terrorist violence abroad.

Fred Koch’s son Charles urged visitors to the John Birch Society bookstore in Wichita to read copies of JBS pamphlets, including those by anti-labor writers from the Austrian School of Economics, like Mises.

Indeed, as the present author first documented for the Center for Media and Democracy, Charles Koch became active in JBS after returning home to Wichita to help with the family business. Charles was a leader and fundraiser for JBS, including underwriting its publications and national radio network, while it attacked collective bargaining and leaders of the civil rights movement such as the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks.

CHARLES KOCH IN ACTION

Though he left JBS in 1968, Charles Koch never abandoned its core anti-union agenda and the lessons of his father’s commitment to right-to-work. He did try to shed some of the rhetoric around communist conspiracies, though of late he was painted by Koch political strategist Richard Fink as a martyr against “collectivism,” in audio obtained by the Undercurrent, which also included outlandish claims linking fascism and the minimum wage.

It was Charles Koch’s investment in lifting up the work of Mises and Hayek, who made similar claims, that helped preserve and extend their legacy. As Stephen Moore noted in a 2006 profile on Charles for the Wall Street Journal:

The authors who have had the most profound influence on his own political philosophy includeF.A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Simon, Paul Johnson and Charles Murray. Mr. Koch says that he experienced an intellectual epiphany in the early 1960s, when he attended a conference on free-market capitalism hosted by the late, great Leonard Reed.

Charles brought Mises to Wichita to speak and deployed F.A. “Baldy” Harper’s Institute for Humane Studies (IHS) to promote Mises and his protégé Hayek. As lauded by Reed’s Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), Hayek argued that unions violated the very idea of the “rule of law” and that the Wagner Act was central to that violation, a sentiment he promoted in numerous writings.

Charles Koch is deeply devoted to an alternative universe in which collective bargaining undermines the rule of law and is not a major cause of increased wages.Moore noted in his interview:

As we continue, Mr. Koch becomes increasingly animated. He discusses another seminal work in his collection, F.A. Harper’s 1957 Why Wages Rise. The book demonstrates ‘that wages rise not because of unions or government action, but because of marginal productivity gains — people get more money when they produce more value for other people.’ Then he confides, “I was so thrilled by this revelation that I had what Maslow called a ‘peak experience.’'”

Koch has also supported the NRTWC, which “sought to put a new face on the anti-union campaign by building its rhetoric on the arguments of Hayek, Mises, and others with a ‘respectable’ pedigree.” The NRTWC argues that:

Compulsory unionism itself violates the dignity of the individual worker, regardless of how the forced union tribute is spent. As the late Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich A. von Hayek wrote: “[T]he coercion which unions have been permitted to exercise … is primarily the coercion of fellow workers.

Deep Devotion and Investment

Hayek and Mises are not the only two virulently anti-union economists Charles Koch backed. As Nancy MacLean documented in Democracy in Chains, one of the key architects of the Koch agenda domestically and internationally,James Buchanan, also railed against the so-called “union monopolies” for distorting “free market” wages.

And, as UnKoch My Campus has detailed, Koch money has funded scores of academics to push their agenda at universities, buying control over content and personnel with restrictive dictates attached to their donations.

Many of the rightwing groups Charles Koch is known to have made a major investment in since the 1970s have pushed right-to-work or attacked collective bargaining rights. These include Reason magazine, the Cato Institute, Americans for Prosperity, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the State Policy Network and many more.

During David Koch’s 1980 bid to become vice president, running on the ticket of Libertarian Ed Clark—which was pushed by Charles and fueled with Koch cash—the campaign platform included making right-to-work the law of the land:

[W]e urge repeal of the National Labor Relations Act, and all state Right to Work Laws, which prohibit employers from making voluntary contracts with unions. We oppose all government back-to-work orders as imposing a form of forced labor.

That is, there would be no need for state right-to-work laws if there were no NLRA that protects collective bargaining rights. As a result, right-to-work would be effectively nationalized at the determination of the employer.

After badly losing that election, the Kochs have invested heavily in changing the culture—and courts of America—to make their anti-union vision a reality.

Right-to-work is part of that vision.

MILLIONS SPENT

A leak of the Kochs’ summer retreat in 2010 revealed that they featured NRTWC leaders at their gathering of billionaires to plot plans for that year’s midterm elections.

In 2012, before most of America even knew that the Kochs had branded their billionaire conclave as “Freedom Partners,” that group injected $1 million directly into the NRTWC among the more than $200 million of its known spending that cycle.

In 2016, they focused much of their known political spending on keeping a GOP majority in the Senate, and they influenced the make-up of the U.S. Supreme Court by helping to block Judge Merrick Garland’s confirmation.

For the 2018 election, they’ve pledged to spend more than $400 million through the Seminar Network, the latest rebranding of their network of tycoons.

To be clear, the Koch family fortune is not the only one that has been expended pushing right-to-work laws to try to weaken the power of ordinary people to negotiate through unions. A major funder of right-to-work effort has been the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, along with Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, which Mother Jones has dubbed “the ATM” of the right wing.

Collective bargaining has provided women with greater economic opportunities and job security. Right-to-work laws also have a disproportionate impact on people of color, who are union members at a higher rate than whites. Black women will likely be the group most adversely affected by the Janus case. Notably, workers in right-to-work states also have lower wages than in states that have rejected this agenda.

UNDERMINING PROGRESSIVES TOO

The spread of right to work through Janus also will affect our elections.

As In These Times has documented with the Center for Media and Democracy,the national push for right-to-work is designed to undermine the power of unions and to “defang and defund” them as a way to weaken the chances for progressives to win in politics and policy.

The Koch investment in making right-to-work a national reality represents one of the longest and deepest commitments to this agenda, aside from NRTWC itself.

And this year marks the 60th anniversary of Fred Koch’s victory of making right-to-work legally binding in Kansas.

Now, six decades later, Charles Koch has helped make his father’s wish binding on the rest of America through helping to make the Janus ruling a reality.

Lisa Graves

===

AN 918

...Hill wrote as if it were possible for Republicans to act in good faith, when we know for a fact they cannot — a point driven home by Paul Krugman, in a recent column entitled “Kavanaugh and the Politics of Bad Faith.” Sherman gives good advice for how Democrats should fight this battle, but does not say enough about the war. It’s a war we have to fight and win, in order for Hill’s lessons to be learned.

Krugman’s discussion of bad faith is a helpful starting place. Bad faith is more than just hypocrisy, he notes:

“Bad faith” is, by the way, a legal term, referring to “entering into an agreement without the intention or means to fulfill it, or violating basic standards of honesty.” In politics, it usually means pretending to be committed to principles you abandon the moment they become inconvenient. And bad faith in this sense pervades almost everything the modern G.O.P. says and does.

Kavanaugh is a poster boy for GOP bad faith, but bad faith is just one part of the picture. Krugman clicks through several examples (Paul Ryan’s claims to fiscal responsibility vs. his deficit-exploding tax cut, attacks on Obama’s patriotism vs. quiescence about Trump) before summing up:

In fact, what’s really hard is to come up with significant areas of politics or policy where Republicans are acting in good faith. ... Mainly, I suspect, because its core policy agenda of cutting taxes on the rich while slashing social programs is deeply unpopular. So to win elections it must obscure its true policies.

There’s nothing new in this. More than 50 years ago Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril wrote a landmark book, “The Political Beliefs of Americans: A Study of Public Opinion.” One of the book’s key findings was that almost two-thirds of the American people were “operational liberals,” in the sense that they supported more social spending for a list of specific needs, while almost half were “ideological conservatives,” in the sense that they supported "limited government" and "the free market." This disconnect represented a significant problem which the authors addressed by arguing that “the time has come for a restatement of American ideology to bring it in line with what the great majority of people want and approve.”

This restatement never occurred, obviously. Instead, we got the opposite: an increasingly powerful, rigid and extreme conservative movement, which paid less and less attention to facts over time as reality stubbornly refused to conform to its beliefs. The ideological/operational divide they described can also be characterized as a mythos/logos divide (see Karen Armstrong’s introduction to "The Battle For God," for example.) Logos deals with practical matters, while mythos is concerned with meaning.

In the judicial realm the conservative mythos is easily expressed: timeless justice, unswayed by the mood of the moment — or even the age. This is what Antonin Scalia’s supposed “originalism” offers, for example, even though it falls to pieces on close inspection. And that’s also what defines the essential liberal/conservative divide: Whether or not one allows for close inspection of handed-down “eternal truths.”

But conservatives don’t have a monopoly on mythos, even though it sometimes seems that way. And no one seriously argues we should be bound to the “justice” of the past: upholding slavery, denying women the right to vote, outlawing Red Lobster.

None of America’s great progressive movements — abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, the LGBT movement, etc.— would have been conceivable without the organizing and unifying power of mythos. All these movements made appeals to timeless, universal truths: Truths not yet fully recognized by flawed humanity, no doubt, but truths that activists could justly claim as timeless and universal nonetheless, whose recognition could help us all to become more fully human. That is precisely what distinguishes the liberal or progressive vision of justice in America today. It’s what distinguishes the #MeToo movement. It’s what distinguishes Black Lives Matter. It’s what distinguishes the March for Our Lives. It’s what distinguishes the Fight For $15.

These are all, in different ways, movements of the powerless to claim justice as a birthright — not a commodity or a privilege. A 15-year-old girl who was nearly raped decades ago belongs in that tradition. We can all see ourselves in her — not just women, all of us. Her story is our story, and ours to prevent from happening over and over again.

Conservatives have spent the last half century waging a one-sided war to take over America’s courts. Liberals have fought back only sporadically in comparison. That has to end. Whatever happens with Kavanaugh’s nomination, whatever happens with the 2018 midterms, those are only battles. We need to fight them with everything we’ve got. But we need to fight them as battles in a larger war, or else we’ll always be at a disadvantage.

Consider the Supreme Court itself. If Kavanaugh is confirmed, there will be as many sexual abusers (and perjurers) on the Court as there are women. If he’s not, and Trump appoints someone else in his place, there will still be four justices appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote. (Remember that George W. Bush was also elected in 2000 while losing the popular vote.) Even worse, Bush's electoral victory in 2000 only occurred because conservative Supreme Court justices intervened, and effectively selected him. (See “Jews for Buchanan” for all the gory details).

In total, Republicans have only won the national popular vote once since 1988, and that happened in 2004, when Bush ran for re-election as a "war president." Yet they’ve appointed half the sitting justices, and Kavanaugh would make that a majority. Americans oppose overturning Roe v. Wade by more than two to one, but Kavanaugh would be poised to ignore them. Roe is only the most high-profile example of how the court is increasingly out-of-touch with the American people. Citizens United’s roll-back of campaign finance regulations is another prime example. Kavanaugh might even mean the death knell of the Affordable Care Act,  at a time when public opinion is moving sharply the other way, with a large majority now supporting Medicare for All.

I'm not arguing that the Supreme Court should slavishly reflect every aspect of public opinion. But neither should it be a rear guard, constantly fighting against the tide. It's only like that because conservatives have made the Supreme Court central to their politics for 50 years, using any means at all to achieve their ends, and even refusing to allow an elected president fill an open seat simply because he was a Democrat. To take the Court back, the rest of us need to be willing to do just the same: Make it a top priority, and recapture it by any means necessary.

“Playing nice” by accepting the rules that conservatives lay down — and set aside whenever it pleases them—is no longer an option. Consider how Republicans are treating Christine Blasey Ford even worse than they treated Anita Hill 27 years ago. The lesson should be clear. AsMalvina Reynolds sang long ago, “It isn’t nice to block the doorway/ It isn’t nice to go to jail/ There are nicer ways to do it/ But the nice ways always fail.”

Republicans stole the Merrick Garland seat. There's a clear remedy: As soon as they have the power to do so, Democrats should expand the Supreme Court to 11 seats and appoint two liberals to offset that theft. Yes, that would break with tradition, but there is nothing in the Constitution to prevent it, and in our current situation, it's high to time get over handwringing about breaking norms. As Harvard Law professor Jack Balkin wrote last year:

The Democratic proposal for changing the small-c constitutional norm about the Court's size would be an offer of a new norm -- "You can't steal a Supreme Court seat and expect to get away with it." Seems like a good new norm to me.

==

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/politics/trump-federal-judges

 Kevin Schaul and Kevin Uhrmacher Sept. 4, 2018

As his second appointment to the Supreme Court begins Senate hearings on Tuesday, dozens of President Trump’s picks for lower federal courts have already been installed, leaving a conservative imprint on the nation’s judiciary.

In particular, the White House has filled the influential circuit court judgeships — the second-highest courts in the U.S. and last stop for many major cases — at a faster pace than his recent predecessors.

More Trump picks to the circuit courts, also known as the U.S.Courtsof Appeals, have been confirmed, 26 so far, than any recent president at this point in their first term. Another 13 of the 179 judgeships on the courts are vacant.

Trump’s appointments to the lower district courts have fallen short of all but President Barack Obama, though more than 100 of those positions are available to be filled by Trump-selected judges.[charts]

... no lnx

The Supreme Court gets the bulk of the attention, but the circuit courts decide the bulk of the cases,” Arthur D. Hellman, a University of Pittsburgh law professor who studies the federal judiciary, told The Post in August. “Because the Supreme Court these days is taking so few cases, the law of the circuit is, on many, many issues, the final law for the people who live in that circuit.”

Several Senate moves have made it easier for Trump to fill the courts.

The 2013 Democratic majority, facing Republican opposition to Obama judicial picks, lowered the number of votes needed for presidential appointees and lower-court judges from 60 to 51 votes, a simple majority. This eliminated a need for bipartisanship on those nominations. (Republicans have since extended that to Supreme Court justices.)

But when Republicans regained the chamber in 2015, confirmations slowed significantly. At the time, Democrats said the GOP, led by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), was refusing votes on dozens of judicial nominees to run out the clock on their confirmations.

In 2016, Trump was elected with a high number of vacancies waiting to be filled.

Number of judicial vacancies in district and circuit courts

Major increases in

authorized judgeships approved

Senate lowers confimation threshold

GOP gains

control of Senate

...

With little fanfare, Trump and McConnell reshape the nation’s circuit courts

The lower vote threshold and the decision by Republicans in the Senate to sidestep blue slips, which allow senators to block a judge from their state, have made it easier for confirmations to proceed.

The rules changes have also made it easier to install justices favored by conservatives at groups such as the Federalist Society and Heritage Foundation.

Ilya Shapiro, a constitutional lawyer at the Cato Institute, the libertarian think-tank, praised concerted efforts by White House lawyer Donald McGahn and others to fill the courts with qualified originalist judges.

“Certainly at the circuit court level this has paid dividends,” he said.

The impact could be extended by the fact that Trump’s picks are generally younger than his predecessors.

The median age of Trump’s circuit court judges is about 49 years old, younger than the judges put forward by the past five presidents.

...

==

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive:{/2018/07/:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:how-conservatives-won-the-battle-over-the-courts/564533/

zelzier

As Democrats await to hear whom President Donald Trump will pick on Monday to fill the vacancy left by Supreme

Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, many have a feeling of pure dread.

While activists are mobilizing in the states of so-called moderate Republicans like Senator Susan Collins of Maine, hoping to sway their vote against a potentially ultraconservative replacement, there is a widespread feeling in liberal circles that the effort will fail. Even if Democrats can figure out some kind of Hail Mary move to prevent the most extreme pick from being seated, Trump will certainly be able to solidify a conservative majority on the high Court one way or another. The only real question is just how far right the court will move. The ghosts of the liberal Supreme Court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren will officially be vanquished.On a number of crucial issues—abortion rights, voting rights, gay rights, partisan gerrymandering, civil liberties—a conservative majority will have immense influence on American policy for decades to come.

How did conservatives finally win the battle to shape the character of the Supreme Court to have a rock-solid ideological majority that has not been seen since the days of Warren? The answers go far beyond the luck that Trump has experienced with vacancies.

As described by the political scientist Steven M. Teles in his book The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement, the strategy began in the 1980s, when conservatives realized that they would have to play the long game. Focusing on each individual judicial nomination from Democratic administrations was a fool’s errand—even after Republicans finally gained control of the Senate in the 1980 election. Conservatives invested heavily in organizations that would nurture and support lawyers and justices who stuck to an “originalist” interpretation of the Constitution, which means that their understanding is theoretically derived from the original meaning of the Constitution at the time it was written.

-

A consortium of students and professors based at Yale Law School founded the Federalist Society in 1982, which would prove to be the most influential originalist organization. The society helped recruit the brightest legal minds and supported them as their careers unfolded. The Federalist Society was careful to find people who could be counted on as solid conservative picks for the courts. It offered a social-professional network to connect young law students with influential senior mentors, such as the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Attorney General Edwin Meese provided support from within Ronald Reagan’s administration, encouraging the group’s efforts. Meese headed much of the administration’s selection of 400 federal judges, introducing a type of ideological profiling of potential nominees that made conservative criteria a determining factor. Meese’s insistence on the “jurisprudence of original intention” influenced many important figures, including Chief Justice John Roberts.

As Lawrence Tribe, a Harvard Law professor,told :{The New York Times:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: in 2005, “Meese was successful in making it look like he and his disciples were carrying out the intentions of the great founders, where the liberals were making it up as they went along.” The marriage of Federalist Society ideas and Republican Party politics would continue. Lee Liberman Otis, a co-founder of the Federalist Society, gained a key role in George H. W. Bush’s White House Counsel’s Office and influenced judicial picks.The Federalist Society was not alone. Other organizations, such as the Institute for Justice and the Center for Individual Rights, joined this effort. Rightward philanthropists and organizations (Joseph Coors, Charles and David Koch, the Olin Foundation) poured money into certain law schools, such as George Mason University, whose faculty members were supportive of conservative ideas in their research and would train their students accordingly.

But President George W. Bush was the first Republican president to really elevate the Federalist Society to being the prime source of advice in his judicial selections. Although Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society’s executive director, who was deeply influenced by Meese, supported Bush’s 2005 nomination of his personal attorney Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, most members of the society attacked the selection and successfully pushed for the nomination to be withdrawn. Her successor was Judge Samuel Alito, a favorite of the Federalist Society. “The Federalist Society was, when it got started, a wonderful idea,” Steven Calabresi, a law professor who worked forPresidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush, recounted to :{The New York Times:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: in 2005. The organization achieved its goal in making “a lot of conservative thought seem as respectable and attractive as it is.” Trump’s famous list of potential candidates from the 2016 campaign, which he is also using to make his choice for Kennedy’s replacement, was formed in consultation with the Federalist Society.

Conservatives did not rely on networking alone. The right realized that outside the presidential power to appoint, the Senate’s control over the confirmation process is essential. They learned this lesson the hard way in 1987, when Reagan’s pick for the Court, Robert Bork, a Yale Law School professor who had worked with the Federalist Society, was defeated, as Senate Democrats, who held the majority, portrayed him as an extremist.

Because 60 votes were needed at the time to confirm an appointee, Bork had no chance, and Reagan was forced to go with his second choice, Douglas Ginsburg, who withdrew after admitting to smoking marijuana, and then finally with Anthony Kennedy. Republicans never forgot this lesson, and ever since, they have been willing to ruthlessly use their legislative power to influence the confirmation process.

During President Barack Obama’s tenure, Republican Leader Mitch McConnell and his caucus delayed and obstructed a historically unprecedented number of judicial appointments. The obstruction became so great that Democratic Senator Harry Reid took the historic step in 2013, when his party controlled the chamber, of jettisoning the filibuster against non–Supreme Court appointments as well as Cabinet officials. But Republicans regained control of the Senate in the 2014 midterm elections, allowing them to block Obama’s judicial picks entirely. According to Sarah Binder, a political scientist at George Washington University, “GOP foot dragging on Obama nominees for both appellate and district court vacancies has far outstripped Democrats’ slowdown of Bush nominees between 2003 and 2008 (under both unified and divided party control).” Neither record, she added, was as great as the Republican delays on nominations by Bill Clinton’s administration.

In the 114th Congress, Senate Republicans confirmed the lowest number of judicial nominations since the final year of Harry Truman’s presidency, filling only 22 of Obama’s nominations from January 2015 through December 2016. “There was an almost total breakdown of confirmations once the Republicans took control of the Senate,” argues Russell Wheeler, a Brookings Institution expert on the U.S. judicial system. After Scalia’s death in 2016, McConnell revealed how far Republicans would go to influence the Court when his party refused to even meet with Merrick Garland, Obama’s selection to fill Scalia’s seat. The pick received no hearings, no vote, nothing. McConnell’s office announced that the majority leader would noteven hold a “perfunctory meeting” with Garland, but wished him well. “It is a president’s constitutional right to nominate a Supreme Court justice, and it is the Senate’s constitutional right to act as a check on a president and withhold its consent,”McConnell boldly stated in face of criticism.

[NUCLEAR OPTION]

Republicans would simply wait until a Republican president was in office. Then in 2017, when Democrats filibustered President Trump’s nomination of Neil Gorsuch, Reid’s party paid the price for his decision. Despite the Republicans’ age-old talk about the importance of protecting minority rights in the Senate, McConnell eliminated the filibuster on Supreme Court nominations to push Gorsuch’s nomination through. “This will be the first, and last, partisan filibuster of a Supreme Court justice,” the Kentuckyconservative said on the floor. The Republican Senate has also approved the president’s appellate nominees at a faster rate than all other recent presidents. Under Trump, there has been much more consent from the Republican Senate than advise.

Republicans realized that conservative organizations and hardball legislative politics were not enough on their own. Certain landmark decisions would be extremely difficult to overturn given stare decisis, the doctrine that means, generally, that prior decisions by the Court should be adhered to. Regarding abortion, for example, Republican legislators have been much more focused on slowly gutting the ability to get an abortion than on attempting to overturn Roe v. Wade altogether. Republican Representative Henry Hyde of Illinois was one of the architects of this strategy. In 1976, he successfully added an amendment to legislation that prohibited the use of Medicaid funds to pay for an abortion, except when the life of the mother was in danger or in cases of incest and rape. This strategy has been replicated numerous times as Congress has expanded the reach of the Hyde amendment beyond Medicaid, while Republican legislatures have enacted similar restrictions on government funding for abortion on the state level.

The strategic move by conservatives away from overturning Roe v. Wade and toward death by a thousand cuts has allowed conservative justices to uphold legislation that undercuts the right to get an abortion without restrictions. Most recently, Justice Gorsuch was one member of the five-person majority that voted to uphold a California law stipulating that pregnancy crisis centers that do not provide abortions don’t have to tell patients they can obtain the procedure elsewhere and that the centers don’t have to disclose whether they have a medical license. When Republicans like Senator Collins or Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina promise that they won’t vote for a nominee who would overturn Roe, their statement is somewhat meaningless, because the real action has been on legislation that gradually erodes the meaning of the right to get an abortion rather than on simply overturning the decision itself.

To reach the point where conservatives are today, they also had to swallow some of their principles. One of the most important and influential decisions that conservative organizations and Republican politicians have made along the way to Monday’s pick has been supporting a president who will follow through on their judicial agenda. Evangelical organizations, which have historically been politically pragmatic when deciding which politicians to support, and their Republican allies took the most strikingly hypocritical stand by working for the candidacy and presidency of a person whose personal behavior contradicts so much of what they claim to stand for. As candidate, Trump made a very clear promise that he would appoint nominees they supported, and he followed through on his promise with Gorsuch.

Evangelical activists are not the only conservatives to live by this whatever-it-takes principle. Republican Senators have been doing the same since 2016. The #NeverTrump movement within the GOP has turned out to be one of the greatest fantasies of American politics. Congressional Republicans have been willing to stand by and support Trump, aside from few verbal reprimands, as long as he does what they want. Appointing conservative justices has been a central goal for the GOP. Trump is delivering, so they, too, are willing to withstand controversy and instability.

Reshaping the Supreme Court, one of the most consequential accomplishments that a president and his or her party can achieve, is a massive political undertaking. Conservatives have demonstrated that winning this kind of institutional battle takes years, even decades, and requires a ruthless disposition.

Frustrated with their inability to maintain solid control over Congress, and convinced that liberals influence most key institutions, including universities, conservatives set out to do what was necessary to build a court system that would protect the constitutional values of the right. Assuming that President Trump follows through on his promises to them on Monday, and that Democrats can’t block the nomination, they are about to enjoy the fruits of their efforts.

==

nb blue team truce?

https://www.ecowatch.com/nyc-divestment-2524285373.html

'Tide Is Turning': Cheers Erupt for NYC's Suit Against Fossil Fuel Giants and for Divestment

By Andrea Germanos

Climate advocates hailed what they say is a "watershed" moment on Wednesday following two announcements by New York City: that the city would seek to divest its pension funds from fossil fuels within five years, and that it filed suit against give five fossil fuel giants for their role in driving the climate crisis.

"This is a first-in-the-nation step to protect our future and our planet—for this generation and the next," said Comptroller Scott M. Stringer.

Stringer announced last month that he would soon bring a proposal to the trustees of the pension funds that included divestment. Following through on that promise, a statement from the city released Wednesday says that he and Mayor Bill de Blasio "will submit a joint resolution to pension fund trustees" to begin the steps needed to purge the funds from the dirty industry, which will first entail an analysis on the financial impacts to be carried out by the City Comptroller's Bureau of Asset Management.

350.org co-founder Bill McKibben said in a tweet responding to the news that it was "One of the biggest days in 30 years of the climate fight."

The city's five pension funds hold $189 billion in assets, and roughly $5 billion of that amount are held in the securities of over 190 fossil fuel companies, the city said.

The new lawsuit names BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shelland seeks billions of dollars in damages for harm already inflicted on the city as a result of the climate crisis as well for preparing for effects yet to come, including "imminent threats to its property, its infrastructure, and the health and safety of its residents."

New York's lawsuit follows similar suits filed by seven cities and counties in California.

The city's statement references the industry's deliberate misinformation campaign to cover up the effects of fossil fuels.

...

==

==

ICN portal

https://insideclimatenews.org/content/choke-hold

This yearlong investigation explores the ways the fossil fuel industry has fought to protect its central role in providing America's energy. Each Choke Hold article examines one particular front in the industry's battle to block stronger environmental regulation and action on climate change—its litigation fights, campaign contributions, public relations, control over science and more. Together these articles tell the story of the fossil fuel industry's inordinate influence across society.

big win gop:  pence tie break

Senate voted Tuesday night to kill a controversial rule that would have allowed Americans to file class-action suits against banks instead of being forced in many cases into private arbitration.

The move by the Senate followed a similar action by the House in July to rescind the rule. President Trump is expected to sign the repeal legislation, providing a major victory for the financial industry.

Vice President Mike Pence cast the deciding vote after the Senate tied 50-50. All but two Republicans — John Kennedy of Louisiana and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina — voted to repeal the rule. No Democrats or independents supported the move.

The White House said Trump “applauds” Congress for voting to repeal the rule, which would have given consumers “fewer options for quickly and efficiently resolving financial disputes.”

The rule was unveiled in July by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and praised by Democrats and consumer advocates as giving average people more power to fight industry abuses, such as Wells Fargo & Co.’s creation of millions of unauthorized accounts.

But banking lobbyists argued that the rule would unleash a flood of class-action lawsuits, and that the cost of fighting those suits would be passed on to consumers. Republicans quickly moved to repeal the regulation.

“The entire purpose of this rule is to promote class-action litigation and stop arbitration resolution when there is a dispute,” said Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho).

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce praised the repeal vote, saying the rule “would have benefited the class-action trial bar at the expense of American consumers and businesses alike.”

Set to take effect in March, the rule would not have banned clauses in checking account, credit card and other banking agreements that say disputes between companies and customers must be dealt with privately or in small claims court.

Instead, there would have been a ban on provisions that block consumers from banding together to bring class-action cases. The CFPB argued that such cases help hold banks accountable.

The determinations of an arbitrator are binding and consumer advocates say most decisions favor the company. The private proceedings also allow banks to deal with individual problems quietly rather than address widespread abuses.

Bureau Director Richard Cordray called the Senate vote “a giant setback for every consumer in this country” and urged Trump to veto the repeal legislation.

“It robs consumers of their most effective legal tool against corporate wrongdoing,” Cordray said. “As a result, companies like Wells Fargo and Equifax remain free to break the law without fear of legal blowback from their customers.”

...

===

http://www.alternet.org/environment/how-public-trust-principle-can-defend-human-rights-against-fracking

...ENVIRONMENT

How the Public Trust Principle Can Defend Human Rights Against Fracking

Pure drinking water and breathable air are not privileges bestowed upon citizens by the government, but the rightful property of the people.

By Mary Christina Wood, Rance Shaw / Center for Humans and NatureJune 1, 2017, 12:00 PM GMT

In her essay, “The View From 31,000 Feet: A Philosopher Looks at Fracking,” Kathleen Dean Moore posits there is a “human right to the material conditions of ongoing life, including clean water, clean air, and nontoxic soil.”[1] She describes the insatiable and constant taking of the fracking industry, demanding “land, livelihood, public property, private property, highway rights of way, democracy, health, sea beds, birdsong, silence, and the thriving of our children.”

So, then, how does (or should) the law restrain fracking, which the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has called “history seeming to repeat itself: an industry, offering the very real prospect of jobs and other important economic benefits, seek[ing] to exploit” public resources?[2]

The public trust doctrine, an ancient but evolving principle, shifts the legal paradigm from one of political discretion to one of fiduciary obligation. Thisprinciple “ranks so fundamental to citizens” that scholars commonly describe it as protecting core human rights.[3]

Statutory discretion in natural resource management

In the 1970s, at the inception of the modern environmental era, Congress passed the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act, the Endangered Species Act, the National Forest Management Act, and other key statutes in response to broad public demands for regulation. Over the ensuing decades, however, powerful industries have largely captured regulatory agencies, bending such agencies to industries’ own economic interests. Whereas Congress passed environmental statutes with the overriding goal of protecting the environment, the environmental agencies now predominantly use the statutes to legalize destruction of the environment. For example, as a 2006 Congressional Research Service brief revealed, less than 0.3 percent of the 85,000 yearly wetlands permit applications are denied under the Clean Water Act.[4]

Congress too promotes environmental damage. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 contains the now-infamous “Halliburton Loophole,” which essentially exempts fracking from the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, and CERCLA.

Unable to rely on federal agency or congressional protection, some local governments have taken measures to curtail fracking within their limited jurisdictional boundaries. In some states, like Colorado, the Supreme Court has ruled that local fracking bans are preempted when there is a conflicting state statute.[5] But in Pennsylvania, a state with an Environmental Rights Amendment to the constitution, the Supreme Court ruled that the legislature could not enact laws preventing protections of “resources essential to life, health, and liberty.”[6] In a plurality opinion, Chief Justice Castille wrote that the local governments had a public trust duty to safeguard essential resources, and that the state legislature could not deprive the local government of the means to carry out that duty. The reasoning applies to other states as well. The Public Trust Doctrine, as a fundamental attribute of sovereignty, offers a different legal framework in which political discretion succumbs to fiduciary obligation.

The public trust principle

The Public Trust Doctrine dates to the ancient Roman Institutes of Justinian. The doctrine has three tenets: government is trustee, current and future generations of citizens are co-beneficiaries, and crucial natural resources comprise the corpus of an enduring ecological trust. In the seminal American Public Trust Doctrine case, Illinois Central Railroad, Co. v. Illinois, the United States Supreme Court said that lands below navigable waters (the traditional trust property) are held in trust by the government because they are “a subject of public concern to the whole people of the State.”[7] Likewise, ground waters, air, and atmosphere—resources threatened by fracking—are essential to the citizenry.

The trust principle has constitutional underpinnings and carries the legal force necessary to overcome even statutory law in compelling circumstances. As trustee, all levels of government must abide by fiduciary duties, some of which require affirmative action, whereas others proscribe certain actions.

Case law reflects trust duties that are both substantive and procedural. The six substantive duties require a trustee to: (1) protect the corpus; (2) conserve the natural inheritance of future generations; (3) maximize the societal value of natural resources; (4) restore the trust corpus where it has been damaged; (5) recover natural resource damages from third parties that have injured public trust assets; and (6) refrain from privatizing trust resources except in limited circumstances.

..

.

==

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/scotus-isnt-only-court-we-should-be-worried-about-trumps-america

==

capt 12/16

See RICO tobacco and GW

kids win big in Wa Or, Mass

http://ecowatch.com/2016/05/17/mass-climate-change-lawsuit/

===

http://www.globalpossibilities.org/landmark-human-rights-case-against-worlds-biggest-fossil-fuel-firms-pushes-on/

Landmark Human Rights Case Against World’s Biggest Fossil Fuel Firms Pushes On

Dec 29, 2016 by Casey Coates Danson

Environment

This is the first-ever human rights violations case due to climate injustice alleged against carbon majors.

By Ping Manongdo / Eco-Business

December 24, 2016

:{The Philippines Commission on Human Rights has announced that it is moving forward with the next steps in the world’s first-ever case against major fossil fuel companies for alleged human rights abuses.

The commission is to take to task oil giants such as Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, Total, BHP Billiton, Suncor and ConocoPhillips for their alleged role in causing death and financial loss on a massive scale as a result of climate-induced disasters in the archipelago.}:

A month after concluding the first phase of their investigation, which looked at scientific evidence linking climate change and fossil fuel operations, CHR commissioner Roberto Eugenio T. Cadiz, who leads the national investigative body for the case, said they are now ready to push forward with public hearings, beginning in April 2017.

Typhoon Haiyan (Yolanda) devastation. Many houses were wiped out by container vans that were pushed by the typhoon from a nearby port in Tacloban, Leyte, Philippines. Image: Asian Development Bank, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Cadiz said they have secured responses from 20 out of the 47 fossil fuel companies involved in the case as of December 8.

The responses were either sent to CHR directly or to the Business and Human Rights Resource Center (BHRRC), a New York-based advocacy group that tracks the human rights policies and performance of businesses.

In a letter addressed to BHRRC, American company ConocoPhillips, which claims to be the world’s largest independent oil and natural gas exploration and production company, said they challenged the jurisdiction of the legal proceedings arguing that their company does not have operations in the Philippines.

“We operate responsibly and take climate change issues seriously; managing greenhouse gas emissions in our operations and integrating climate-change related activities and goals into our business planning,” Sabrina Watkins, ConocoPhillips’ head of sustainable development, said in the statement.

Repsol, a global energy producer based in Madrid, confirmed in a letter sent to BHRRC on November 8, that they sent a reply to the CHR but are unable to disclose details due to the confidentiality rules of the government body.

Russian company Lukoil for their part said that they have now developed and are implementing what they call a Biodiversity Protection Program focused on “undoing harm” to marine resources and “reclaiming oil contaminated land.”

The company further said that it has been aiming to prevent water pollution by using “zero pollution” technology in its off-shore operations since 1997. With this technology, not a single item of waste will pass into the water, the company said in a statement.

The CHR said the petitioners would be ready with a consolidated response by February 14, 2017.

==

win monsanto australia

http://ecowatch.com/2016/02/12/monsanto-lawsuit-gmo-contamination/

==

==

http://ecowatch.com/2016/02/05/heathrow-13-climate-prisoners/

Later this month, a judge in the UK is set to jail 13 non-violent protestors who occupied one of the runways at London Heathrow in July last year.

The protest, the first ever on a Heathrow runway, lasted six hours and caused the delay or cancellation of some 25 flights.

A judge in the UK is set to jail 13 non-violent protestors who occupied one of the runways at London Heathrow in July last year.

It was carried out by activists from Plane Stupid, who are opposed to airport expansion.

In their trial last month the activists—known as the Heathrow 13—tried to argue the “necessity defense” in that their actions were necessary due to the “airport’s contribution to life-threatening climate change.”

It is the same defense that the so-called Delta 5used recently in the U.S. after they blocked a crude by oil terminal in Washington State.

But whereas the judge in the Delta 5 trial praised the defendants for being “part of the solution to the problem of climate change” and “quite frankly, the kind of tireless advocates we need in this country,” the judge in the Heathrow 13 trial sees it very differently.

#ClimateTrial of the #Delta5 -brave activists argue that blocking crude oil train WAS necessary to defend climate https://t.co/KDnNJPOYOk

— RAN (@RAN) January 12, 2016

At the end of last month, the judge convicted the 13 of aggravated trespass and being airside without lawful authority. She asked them to return in three weeks on Feb. 24 for sentencing. The defendants have been told to prepare for immediate custodial sentences.

They could spend up to three months in prison.

In response to their convictions, the Heathrow 13 issued a statement:

“Today’s judgement demonstrates that the legal system does not yet recognize that climate defense is not an offense. We took action because we saw that it was sorely needed. When the democratic, legislative and processes have failed, it takes the actions of ordinary people to change them.”

There is now a growing campaign to urge the judge to reconsider: Today’s Independent newspaper reports how the judge is being “urged not to act on her threat to jail 13 peaceful environmental protesters—as campaigners warn that the British legal system’s long-standing tolerance towards non-violent direct action is under threat.”

==

Late last night, King County Superior Court Judge Hollis R. Hill issued a groundbreaking ruling in the unprecedented case of eight youth petitioners who requested that the Washington Department of Ecology write a carbon emissions rule that protects the atmosphere for their generation and those to come....“In this important ruling, Judge Hill has made it very clear what [the Department of] Ecology must do when promulgating the Clean Air Rule: preserve, protect and enhance air quality for present and future generations and uphold the constitutional rights of these young people,” said Western Environmental Law Center attorney Andrea Rodgers. “We will hold Ecology accountable every step of the way to make sure that Judge Hill’s powerful words are put into action. This is a huge victory for our children and for the climate movement. To Gov. Inslee, we hope you take this message with you to Paris and heed Judge Hill’s finding that ‘if ever there were a time to recognize through action this right to preservation of a healthful and pleasant environment, the time is now.’”

This case is one of several similar state and international cases, all supported by Our Children’s Trust, seeking the legal right to a healthy atmosphere and stable climate. Cases brought by youth to protect the atmosphere are pending before trial judges in North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Colorado, and before appellate courts in Massachusetts and Oregon...

http://ecowatch.com/2015/11/20/stem-tide-climate-change/

==

http://ecowatch.com/2015/11/20/stem-tide-climate-change/

WA state:In a landmark decision, Judge Hill declared “[the youths’] very survival depends upon the will of their elders to act now, decisively and unequivocally, to stem the tide of global warming … before doing so becomes first too costly and then too late.”

Highlighting inextricable relationships between navigable waters and the atmosphere, and finding that separating the two is “nonsensical,” the judge found the public trust doctrine mandates that the state act through its designated agency “to protect what it holds in trust.” The court confirmed what the Washington youth and youth across the nation have been arguing in courts of law, that “[t]he state has a constitutional obligation to protect the public’s interest in natural resources held in trust for the common benefit of the people.”

==

http://carbonmajors.org/download-the-study/

A few weeks ago the first ever human rights legal action seeking the accountability of the 50 big polluters was launched. Filed by Filipino typhoon survivors and several environmental organizations, it demands that the Philippines Human Rights Commission (CHR) investigate and acknowledge the complicity of 50 investor-owned fossil fuel companies in causing extreme weather events....

The top 50 investor-owned polluters under public scrutiny are taken from a list of 90 entitieswho, according to a report by Rick Heede, are responsible for 63 percent of the carbon dioxide and methane emitted between 1751 and 2010.

Coalitions of affected communities are developing jurisprudence that recognizes impacts of climate change as a breach of human rights. If successful, this recognition will lay the foundations for what is really required: attribution and action.

The petition was submitted on behalf of Greenpeace Southeast Asia, the Philippine Rural Reconstruction Movement and other local NGOs, with the support of the International Trade Union Confederation, Amnesty International, NGO legal expertsand thousands of individuals. The broad coalition was put together because success in fighting climate change will only occur when organizations and individuals join hands across the globe to demand climate justice.

--

Rather than attribute emissions to nations, the study aggregates historical emissions according to carbon producing entities themselves. Heede concludes that nearly two-thirds of carbon dioxide emitted since the 1750s can be traced to the 90 largest fossil fuel and cement producers, most of which still operate. online

The research attributes 63 percent of the carbon dioxide and methane emitted between 1751 and 2010 to just 90 entities. Fifty are investor-owned companies such as Chevron, Peabody, Shell, and BHP Billiton. Thirty-one are state-owned companies such as Saudi Aramco and Statoil, and nine are government-run industries in countries such as China, Poland, and the former Soviet Union. The research also classified the 90 entities according to type of fossil fuel extracted and marketed.

There are 56 oil and natural gas companies, and 37 coal producers. In addition, the CO2 emissions from seven cement manufacturers are included.

Top 20 investor- and state-owned entities and attributed CO2 & CH4 emissions 2010

Entity2010 EmissionsMtCO2eCumulative1854-2010MtCO2ePercent of Global1751-2010
  1. Chevron, USA
42351,0963.52%
  1. ExxonMobil, USA
65546,6723.22%
  1. Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia
1,55046,0333.17%
  1. BP, UK
55435,8372.47%
  1. Gazprom, Russian Federation
1,37132,1362.22%
  1. Royal Dutch/Shell, Netherlands
47830,7512.12%
  1. National Iranian Oil Company
86729,0842.01%
  1. Pemex, Mexico
60220,0251.38%
  1. ConocoPhillips, USA
35916,8661.16%
  1. Petroleos de Venezuela
48516,1571.11%
  1. Coal India
83015,4931.07%
  1. Peabody Energy, USA
51912,4320.86%
  1. Total, France
39811,9110.82%
  1. PetroChina, China
61410,5640.73%
  1. Kuwait Petroleum Corp.
32310,5030.73%
  1. Abu Dhabi NOC, UAE
3879,6720.67%
  1. Sonatrach, Algeria
3869,2630.64%
  1. Consol Energy, Inc., USA
1609,0960.63%
  1. BHP-Billiton, Australia
3207,6060.52%
  1. Anglo American, United Kingdom
2427,2420.50%
Top 20 IOCs & SOEs11,523428,43929.54%
Top 40 IOCs & SOEs546,76737.70%
All 81 IOCs & SOEs18,524602,49141.54%
Total 90 Carbon Majors27,946914,25163.04%
Total Global Emissions36,0261,450,332100.00%

==

==

http://www.alternet.org/environment/kids-win-landmark-climate-battle-against-washington-state-government

Kids Win Landmark Climate Battle Against Washington State Government

For the first time in the U.S., a court of law has ordered a state agency to consider the best available science when deciding to regulate CO2 emissions.

By Deirdre Fulton / Common Dreams June 26, 2015

Citing what she called the "historical lack of political will to respond adequately to the urgent and dire acceleration of global warming," a judge in Washington state handed a group of eight young petitioners a landmark win this week, ordering the Department of Ecology (ECY) to consider statewide reductions in carbon dioxide emissions based on best available science.

"The effect of this decision is that for the first time in the United States, a court of law has ordered a state agency to consider the most current and best available climate science when deciding to regulate carbon dioxide emissions," said Andrea Rodgers of the Western Environmental Law Center, attorney for the youth petitioners, who are in elementary, middle, and high school.

The kids acted with the help of a NASA climate scientist as well as Our Children's Trust, an Oregon-based nonprofit orchestrating a global, youth-driven legal campaign to establish the right to a healthy atmosphere and stable climate

==

Big Picture:  SCOTUS courts grew into role on Const with Marbury v Madison; after Civil War corps, esp railroads at times got courts to expandtheir powerv maybe some reverals in New Deal (hence ct "packing")

Powell called for right mirror to ACLU (tho see Citizen United)  also national republican lawyers org

Tort Reform part of Defund the Left; but scotus has undermined class action lawsuits; corps rig rules at state/fed level, overruling local/cty ordinances

scotus gives personhood rights to corps, which allows them to lie, control info, use "takings" to scare green regulations

Also, corps have huge expensive law firms to SLAPP activists

Also Coors et al funded legal foundations (often in concert with wise use, since the green used clean air, water, esa) to force gov't and corps to protect ppl and environment.

Until Bork, judge appt based on basic competence; nuke option

Legal firms become buffer (lobbyist [govt affairs]

FREE judge dude ranch Montana

==

5/15

Last month the U.S. Supreme Court issued its ruling in Williams-Yulee v. The Florida Bar, upholding a Florida law that bans judges and judicial candidates from personally soliciting campaign donations. At issue was public confidence in the judiciary, given that lawyers and potential litigants are more likely than average citizens to donate to judges' campaigns.

"Campaign contributions can create an appearance and risk of favoritism," saidMatthew Menendez, counsel for the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a legal watchdog group housed at the New York University School of Law.

In 2009, Florida judicial candidate Lanell Williams-Yulee signed a letter asking for campaign contributions. The Florida Supreme Court reprimanded and fined Williams-Yulee for violating the state law banning such a solicitation; Williams-Yulee appealed, arguing that the ruling violated her free speech rights. After the case made it to the U.S. Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, asserted that a judicial candidate's First Amendment rights are not compromised by "a narrowly tailored restriction like the one at issue here."

The map below shows whether each U.S. state holds judicial elections and, if so, whether the state bans solicitation of campaign contributions by judges and to what degree.

Today 39 states hold some kind of election for judges. Of those, 25 states* including Florida place broad limits on personal solicitation of campaign contributions by judicial candidates, while five have more narrow bans. The Supreme Court's decision upholds all 30 of these restrictions.

The ruling also opens the door for similar laws in the nine states that hold judicial elections but do not prohibit judges from soliciting campaign cash. Four of those states are in the South, the most of any U.S. region; they are Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina and Texas. The Brennan Center plans to focus attention on these nine states in an effort to pass bans there; it will also advocate for other initiatives that make judicial elections more democratic such as public financing of candidates and reforming judicial selection.

Such reforms have become even more critical since the Supreme Court's 2010Citizens United decision, which dramatically increased money in judicial elections by allowing unlimited donations to outside groups. In a pollcommissioned by the Brennan Center and Justice at Stake, nearly 90 percent of voters said they think fundraising and money in judicial elections are affecting judges' decisions on the bench.

==

http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/campaigns/global-warming-and-energy/polluterwatch/The-Lewis-Powell-Memo/judicial/

Lewis Powell saw that corporate interests could gain greatly by using the judicial system to their advantage, yet to make the judiciary more sympathetic to business interests, he knew corporations would have to plan and engage in a long-term, multi-dimensional strategy.

The Powell Memo on Judicial Influence:

"[T]he judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic and political change. [...] This is a vast area of opportunity for the Chamber, if it is willing to undertake the role of spokesman for American business and if, in turn, business is willing to provide the funds. As with respect to scholars and speakers, theChamber would need a highly competent staff of lawyers. In special situations it should be authorized to engage, to appear as counsel amicus in the Supreme Court, lawyers of national standing and reputation. The greatest care should be exercised in selecting the cases in which to participate, or the suits to institute. But the opportunity merits the necessary effort."

(Direct link to this quote in the Powell Memo)

The big business reaction to Lewis Powell’s judicial and legal strategy was swift. Within a few years, nearly a dozen corporate-funded legal foundations were created. The Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF)was formed in California in 1973 to counter public-interest law firms and represent the interests of business and private property holders against environmental regulations. PLF’s prospectus quoted the Powell memo at length. (Kim Phillips-Fein, “Invisible Hands,” p. 162).

When asked for his opinion of the “most critical” area of public interest law, PLF’s then-executive legal director replied, “environmental law,” citing the firm’s support for the use of DDT, the construction of a dam and reservoir project, the use of herbicides in national forests and the use of public grazing lands without environmental impact review. The early cases established a clear pattern for PLF and its followers at the Mountain States Legal Foundation and other regionally named corporate defenders. Environmental cases would be a priority and the foundations’ positions in such cases would invariably be those of their business benefactors, includingMonsanto, Weyerhaeuser, Gulf Oil, ARCO, Ford and other companies (Houck, "With Charity for All," pp. 1461-1462). The work of these groups also supported the Wise Use movement; radical property rights activists and corporate front groups that attacked environmental laws and regulations on behalf of landowners, ranchers and the oil industry (Helvarg, The War Against the Greens).

The conservative backlash against alleged liberal influence over the law went well beyond the corporate agenda that grew directly out of Powell’s analysis, but there were also tensions between the two. Corporate legal campaigns were primarily self-interested, practical and designed to get both immediate and longer-term results. The conservative legal movement that got its start in the 1970s was more ideologically driven; its greatest successes would take decades, and sometimes came about through indirect means (Teles, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement).

At the juncture between these two was the “law and economics” school, with leading proponents such as Richard Posner at the University of Chicago and George Mason University’s Henry Manne. Manne organized seminars for federal judges through his Law and Economics Center, with support from the OlinFoundation, which also backed some of the leading “second generation” conservative public policy law firms, like the Center for Individual Rights. The foundation’s chairman, John M Olin, was inspired by Powell’s memo to write to William Baroody at the American Enterprise Institute: “The Powell Memorandum gives a reason for a well organized effort to re-establish the validity and importance of the American free enterprise system.” (“Invisible Hands,” Kim Phillips-Fein)

For its part, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce also eventually followed Powell’s advice by creating two legal groups that have carried out a multi-decade legal strategy -- the National Chamber Litigation Center (NCLC) and the Institute for Legal Reform (ILR). NCLC served as the Chamber’s law firm, using aggressive and strategic litigation to challenge regulations and laws. Entering 134 new cases of significance to the business community in 2009, for example, the NCLC helped to secure 52 victories.

The Institute for Legal Reform (ILR) coordinated one of the Chamber’s flagship priorities in the post-Powell era -- the push for “tort reform.” The tort 'reform' campaign was so successful that by 2006, the American Lawyer proclaimed, “It’s Over,” explaining that “the power of the plaintiffs bar is on the wane in this country, and will be for a long time to come.” ILR, along with the American Tort Reform Association (funded by the tobacco, chemical and drug industries, along with the American Medical Association), created a “public relations masterpiece” that demonized trial lawyers, replaced state judges hostile to business interests, and mobilized popular support for business-friendly laws. (See Frankel, “It’s Over”) The campaign erected a variety of judicial and regulatory barriers against plaintiff attorneys and their clients – i.e., the victims of corporate crime and malfeasance -- including caps on punitive and non-economic damages, the abolition of “joint and several liability,” and limits on class action lawsuits. 

This push for tort 'reform' has also been a legal priority for various industries. According to a document produced by one corporate law firm, for instance, the tobaccoindustry’s tort reform budget for 1995 alone was $21.8 million (see Covington & Burling Tort Reform Project Budget).

The U.S. Chamber has used the momentum built by decades of successful tort reform to brazenly argue for policies that would shield corporations from having to pay when they are responsible for cases of massive damage. For instance, after the 2010 BP Horizon disaster the Chamber arguedthat the $75 million liability cap should not be lifted retroactively to make BP pay for damages from the oil gusher. This position drew criticism from a variety of expert observers, including Ken Feinberg, the manager of BP’s oil spill compensation fund.

Some of the landmark changes in the law that have come about through support from business and conservative interests in recent decades have been used to bolster other strategies outlined by Powell in his memo. An example is the dismantling of the Fairness Doctrine for media, which was introduced to ensure public interest voices would balance commercial interests as part of the bargain for corporate broadcasters' free license to use the People’s airwaves. 

Another significant shift in the law since Powell’s memo was circulated has been the gradual expansion of corporate constitutional rights (referred to by some business groups as “business civil liberties”), especially in the realms of commercial and political speech. The most infamous example is the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. In the commercial sphere, companies have similarly used corporate speech doctrines to challenge various restrictions on corporate advertising (e.g. direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs for off-label uses), limits on media ownership, and product safety labeling requirements (e.g. cigarettes and genetically modified foods).

Corporate constitutional rights are regularly claimed (with the implicit threat of litigation) in opposition to new or proposed regulations. One recent example came during recent attacks on regulations created by the Dodd-Frank financial reform package, which contained a provision requiring that companies report their use of tin, gold and other minerals that can be traced back to the conflict-ridden Democratic Republic of the Congo. In its comments to the SEC, Tiffany & Co. claimed the SEC rules would “compel speech in a manner that violates the First Amendment.”

References and More Information:

Nan Aron, "Justice for Sale: Shortchanging The Public Interest for Private Gain.” Washington, DC: Alliance for Justice, 1993.

Oliver A. Houck, “With Charity for All,” Yale Law Journal, Volume 93, No. 8, July 1984. More information available at:http://research.greenpeaceusa.org/?a=view&d=6000.

Steven M. Teles, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law. Princeton University Press, 2008. More information available at:http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Rise_of_the_Conservative_Legal_Movem.html?id=MTps-NK20jAC.

Alison Frankel, “It’s Over: Tort reformers, business interests, and plaintiffs lawyers themselves have helped kill the mass torts bonanza.” The American Lawyer, December 1, 2006. Available at:http://www.law.com/jsp/PubArticle.jsp?id=1165320496651.

Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan. New York: Norton, 2009. More information available at:http://books.google.com/books/about/Invisible_hands.html?id=CcU7z9jLqXcC.

David Helvarg, The War Against the Greens. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1994. More information available at:http://www.amazon.com/War-Against-Greens-Wise-Use-Movement/dp/1555663281.

Covington & Burling Tort Reform Project Budget, Budget, October 3, 1995, available in the Tobacco Legacy Documents’ online archive at:http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/khu28d00.

Robert Weissman, “First Amendment Follies,” Multinational Monitor, May, 1998. Available at:http://www.multinationalmonitor.org/mm1998/98may/corp3.html.

Patrick Dorsey, Sr. VP and General Counsel of Tiffany & Co., comments to the SEC, dated February 22, 2011. Available at:http://www.sec.gov/comments/df-title-xv/specialized-disclosures/specializeddisclosures-17.pdf.

Robert L Kerr, The Rights of Corporate Speech: Mobil Oil and the Legal Development of the Voice of Big Business, LFB Scholarly Publishing, 2005. More information available at:http://www.amazon.com/Rights-Corporate-Speech-Development-Scholarship/dp/1593320701.

Robert L Kerr, The Corporate Free-Speech Movement: Cognitive Feudalism and the Endangered Marketplace of Ideas, LFB Scholarly Publishing, 2008. More information available at:http://www.amazon.com/Corporate-Free-speech-Movement-Endangered-Marketplace/dp/1593322933.

Stephanie Mencimer,Blocking the Courthouse Door: How the Republican Party and Its Corporate Allies are Taking Away Your Right to Sue. NY: Free Press, 2011. More information available at:http://www.amazon.com/Blocking-Courthouse-Door-Republican-Corporate/dp/0743277007.

Chris Young, "Corporations, pro-business nonprofits foot bill for judicial seminars," Center for Public Integrity, March 28, 2013.

People for the American Way, "The Rise of the Corporate Court." (2010)

Community Rights Counsel, "Using Federal Courts to Attack Community and Environmental Protections"

Commonweal Institute:  "Conservative Movement" web site.

The American Constitution Societyand the Alliance for Justice are two groups that organize lawyers, students and others to push back against the pro-corporate conservative legal movement that has undermined community and environmental rights. Be sure to read Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) speech to the ACS 2013 annual convention, "Corporate Capture of The Federal Courts"

To understand how far the courts have moved away from environmental protections, we recommend Christopher's Stone's book "Should Trees Have Standing" or the law review it is based upon, which was cited by Justice William O. Douglas in his famous dissenting opinion in the Mineral King decision -- Sierra Club v. Morton 405 U.S. 727. Douglas argued that natural resources ought to have standing to pursue their own protection.

==

several articles:

Mother Jones

Is Your Judge for Sale?

Thanks to Karl Rove and Citizens United, judicial elections have been overtaken by secretive interest groups, nasty ads, and the constant hustle for campaign cash.

By Andy Kroll | Tue Oct. 28, 2014 6:00 AM EDT

Social Title:

Thanks to Karl Rove and Citizens United, your judge may be for sale

Social Dek:

Inside America's increasingly tainted judicial elections

The 30-second TV spot is stark and brutal. First it shows the bespectacled face of candidate Louis Butler, then a grainy mug shot of an ex-con. "Louis Butler worked to put criminals on the street," the narrator warns [1], "like Reuben Lee Mitchell, who raped an 11-year-old girl with learning disabilities." After Mitchell's release from prison, the narrator continues, he raped again. "Can Wisconsin families feel safe with Louis Butler?"

This attack ad wasn't from a bitterly fought congressional race. It was from a 2008 campaign for state Supreme Court justice—a position that until recently was considered above the fray of partisan politics. Butler, the first African American Supreme Court justice in Wisconsin history, was defending his seat against a trial court judge whose campaign tactic recalled the GOP's infamous Willie Horton hit job on Michael Dukakis during the 1988 presidential campaign. Long before ascending to his state's highest court, Butler had been assigned as Reuben Lee Mitchell's public defender—he wasn't the judge in the case, as the nasty ad implied.

Butler's opponent, Michael Gableman, had been showered with campaign donations from business leaders, who were keenly aware of Butler's role in two decisions. One was a 4-3 ruling to strike down a $350,000 limit on so-called pain-and-suffering damages [2] in malpractice suits. The other held that if an individual harmed byleadpaint exposure couldn't identify the producer, then multiple paint companies could be held liable under a legal theory known as "risk contribution [3].

[4]

Read our graphical explainer [4] on how dark money is taking over judicial elections.

While Butler's and Gableman's campaigns spent a combined total of $1.2 million on the race, outside groups aligned with the US Chamber of Commerce and the state's labor unions spent $3.6 million, funding 89 percent of all the TV ads. Butler was the first sitting justice to get booted from the court in 40 years.

By 2011, with Wisconsin reeling from political battles over Gov. Scott Walker's union-busting agenda, the next Supreme Court race was equally ugly. This time it was conservative Justice David Prosser defending his seat; a misleading ad [5] from a partisan group backing his opponent claimed that Prosser, as a district attorney in 1978, had helped cover up sexual abuse of two young boys at the hands of a Catholic priest. (The abuse had only emerged years later; the victims called the ad "offensive, inaccurate, and out of context.")

Although Prosser successfully defended his seat, he says that the election—which saw nearly $5 million in total campaign spending—poisoned relationships on the court. The tension boiled over weeks later, when Prosser and Ann Walsh Bradley, a liberal justice, engaged in an argument that got physical as four of their fellow justices looked on. Bradley claimed Prosser choked her, while Prosser said he raised his hands in self-defense as Bradley charged at him. In police interviews [6], two conservative justices sided with Prosser, and two liberal justices with Bradley. Investigations by the county sheriff, the local DA, and a special independent prosecutor all cleared Prosser of any wrongdoing, but the controversy still festers. When I spoke with Prosser in September, written in chalk on the sidewalk outside the state Capitol was an invitation to visit him for "free chokes."

"They wanted to make sure we were punished for our decision and that other judges witnessed that," says former Iowa Supreme Court Justice Marsha Ternus.

Bitter, costly judicial elections are by no means unique to Wisconsin. These days, as more candidates for the bench face rough contests—buffeted increasingly by outside money, thanks to the US Supreme Court's 2010 decision in Citizens United—state judges around the country often raise six- and seven-figure sums, mount statewide campaigns, and fend off attack ads from groups that don't disclose their donors. This trend has escalated over the last decade and a half as partisan groups realize that donating to judges can get them more influence, for less money, than bankrolling legislative campaigns. After all, the donors often end up with business before the very judges they are helping elect.

These are also the judges that most citizens who interact with the system have to face. Can Americans still trust in getting their fair day in court.

Court cases that make big news are usually in the federal system, where most judges are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Yet the vast majority of justice is done at the state level, where more than 100 million cases are filed annually (versus about 400,000 in federal courts). The nation's approximately 30,000 state court judges vastly outnumber their federal counterparts, and 85 percent of them will stand in at least one election during their career.

No two states pick their judges exactly the same way. Some hold partisan judicial elections, others have nonpartisan elections, and still others use merit selection—that's when legal experts select a short list of qualified candidates, the governor appoints one to the bench, and that judge later stands in a retention election.

The system has its roots in the Panic of 1837, a mini-depression fueled by rampant cronyism and massive overspending by corrupt governors and legislatures. Partisan elections replaced the tradition of elected officials appointing their friends to the bench, but for decades connections and loyalty still mattered most, with party bosses determining who won. Eventually states embraced nonpartisan elections and merit selection, and for most of the 20th century, judicial elections were a little-noticed corner of American politics

Still, on occasion a contentious race attracted national attention. In 1977, Rose Bird became the first woman appointed to the California Supreme Court and its first female chief justice. An avowed foe of capital punishment, she voted to vacate all 61 death penalty verdicts that came before her, prompting Republican Gov. George Deukmejian to label her a "soft-on-crime liberal." With Bird up for retention in 1986, oil and agribusiness companies, which generally saw Bird's liberal views as a threat to their interests, poured more than $5.6 million into a campaign that would unseat her. It was an early glimpse of a reliable strategy for big business: Using the soft-on-crime theme to oust judges considered unfriendly to corporations.

Around that time, a political consultant by the name of Karl Rove was plotting his own assault on the Texas Supreme Court. Rove had helped launch the "tort wars" in response to what some Republicans saw as a court system too cozy with trial lawyers and too eager to slam corporations with hefty judgments that Rove had dubbed "junk lawsuits [7]."

Running on the slogan "Clean Slate '88," conservative candidates backed by Rove's operation won five of the six open seats on the Texas Supreme Court. Not long after, Rove teamed up with the Business Council of Alabama to engineer a similar Republican takeover in that state.

Direct spending on supreme court races, 2000-14

Two years later, the US Chamber of Commerce, under the leadership of an aggressive new president named Tom Donohue, picked up on Rove's strategy. Pledging to "play hardball" against "frivolous" lawsuits, the Chamber spent $10 million on judicial races in 2000 alone. It pumped $4.4 million into Ohio's Supreme Court election—the largest expenditure from a single source on a court race in US history. In the following years, the Chamber injected tens of millions into races in Illinois, Michigan, Mississippi, and Wisconsin. Corporate America had grasped the potential to install friendly judges who could crack down on costly class actions and neutralize the efforts of consumer advocates. "We're clearly engaged in hand-to-hand combat," as Donohue put it, "and we've got to step it up if we're going to survive."

Unions spent millions on these races as well—particularly across the Upper Midwest, as labor leaders recognized they could get a great return on investment by backing justices sympathetic to workers' rights. As an official with the Ohio AFL-CIO once said: "We figured out a long time ago that it's easier to elect seven judges than to elect 132 legislators."

A major showdown came in 2004, in West Virginia's Supreme Court election. Don Blankenship [8], the former CEO of Massey Energy, donated $3 million to Republican candidate Brent Benjamin. Meanwhile, a nonprofit funded primarily by Massey Energy ran TV ads [9] accusing incumbent Justice Warren McGraw of getting a child rapist out of prison and into a job at a high school. After Benjamin won, the investment paid off big time: He later cast the deciding vote to overturn a lower court's $50 million verdict against Massey Energy. Two years later, the US Supreme Court ruled [10] that Benjamin should have recused himself. It overturned the decision and sent the case back to West Virginia. (Massey Energy ultimately prevailed in state court [11].)

Corporate interests also reaped a huge return on investment in the 2004 Supreme Court election in Illinois. Five years earlier, a jury had handed down a $1.19 billion penalty [12] to the insurance company State Farm for requiring millions of claimants to accept subpar replacement auto parts. State Farm and its employees—working through the US Chamber, the Illinois Republican Party, and an Illinois-based tort reform group—steered $4 million to elect a sympathetic judge named Lloyd Karmeier to the Supreme Court, which was considering State Farm's appeal of the auto parts verdict. Karmeier, his opponent, and various outside groups spent a record $9.3 million on the race. Karmeier, who would later acknowledge that the sum was "obscene," won easily. And the millions State Farm spent were a pittance compared with what it gained: The next year, Karmeier cast the deciding vote to overturn the more than $1 billion verdict against State Farm.

Up to this point, the big spenders were mostly targeting contested judicial elections—ones in which a candidate challenged a sitting justice. Then came the Iowa Supreme Court's 2009 decision in Varnum v. Brien [13], in which the seven justices unanimously ruled that the state's ban on same-sex marriage violated the state constitution. Social-conservative groups leapt into action, targeting three of the seven justices who were up for retention election—ones where voters only check "yes" or "no." The National Organization for Marriage and its allies spent nearly $1 million and defeated all three. "They wanted to make sure we were punished for our decision and that other judges witnessed that so they wouldn't do it either," former Justice Marsha Ternus told me.

The strategy of turning sleepy retention elections into political showdowns has been spreading. In Florida's 2012 retention elections, the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity and the Republican Party of Florida spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to unseat three sitting justices.A group called Defend Justice From Politics spent $3.1 million on the justices' behalf, helping them prevail. In Michigan in 2012, two anonymously funded nonprofits, the Judicial Crisis Network and Americans for Job Security, poured $2.1 million into attack ads against five judges on Michigan's 6th Circuit Court, though the judges won out. And earlier this year, Tennessee's lieutenant governor, Ron Ramsey, took it upon himself to spearhead an effort to unseat three sitting state Supreme Court justices—and, along with them, the attorney general, who is appointed by the court. Ramsey's PAC pumped $425,000 into a group running negative ads [14] that blasted the three justices as "liberal on crime" and for "helping advance Obamacare." Funds were also contributed by Americans for Prosperity and the GOP's State Government Leadership Foundation, which said it planned to spend an additional $5 million in 2014 on judicial races in North Carolina, Tennessee, and elsewhere.

Though the three Tennessee justices prevailed in the end, one of them, Connie Clark, told me she's concerned about the precedent set by the fight. "As long as there are no limits on outside money," she says, "then this will become the new normal."

The transformation of judicial campaigns has alarmed another veteran of the court system. "Judicial elections pose a serious threat," former US Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor told Mother Jones. "If judicial decisions are in fact not fair and impartial—or even if they are perceived as being biased—the basis of support for our courts crumbles."

Initially, the 2011-12 election season—the first full cycle since Citizens United—saw a modest dip in overall reported spending on state judicial races, compared to four years earlier. But that is likely because much of the new spending does not have to be disclosed or tracked. This year, for example, Americans for Prosperity-Tennessee announced a "major new effort [15]" to educate the public about the "liberal records" of the three justices—and not a penny of that spending was reported to the state. The outside spending on judicial races that we do know about rose to a record-high $24.9 million—a nearly sevenfold increase since 2000, and now accounting for 40 percent of the total spending on these campaigns.

Direct vs. outside judicial spending (in 2014 dollars)

Recent research suggests this flood of political money could be influencing judges' decisions.Emory University analyzed [16] 2,345 state supreme court decisions from all 50 states between 2010 and 2012 and concluded that the more campaign money justices received from business interests, the more likely they were to vote in favor of businesses appearing before them.(Interestingly, the study found a stronger tie between business donations and Democratic justices' decisions. Republican justices, it speculated, were already more favorably inclined toward business interests, so the campaign money didn't make as much of a difference.) Another analysis [17], by the left-leaning think tank Center for American Progress, suggested that as more money was spent on soft-on-crime attack ads in campaigns, justices were increasingly siding with the prosecution

The public may be starting to catch on: A 2013 poll [18] by Justice at Stake, a nonprofit group focused on reforming the system, found that 87 percent of Americans believe that campaign donations could influence court rulings. "You can't expect judges to act like Huey Long on the campaign trail and expect them to be Solomon in the courtroom," says Bert Brandenburg, the group's executive director.

A case pending before the US Supreme Court could inject even more politics into judicial races. In Lanell Williams-Yulee v. the Florida Bar, a county-level judge wants the nation's high court to strike down laws in 30 states blocking judges from personally asking donors for campaign cash. In those states, treasurers and fundraising consultants typically make the ask on behalf of a judicial candidate. Only nine states currently allow judges to solicit donations directly for their campaigns, but in those states, "the road to victory begins with the solicitation of money," Wallace Jefferson, the former chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court, has written. "The 'ask' is undignified, and the 'give' is fairly compelled." For those fighting to insulate judges from electoral politics, the elimination of the fundraising ban would be yet another step in the wrong direction.

Some researchers dispute the notion that rough-and-tumble judicial elections are a problem. One recent Michigan State University study [19] of supreme court races concluded that attack ads did not hurt incumbents in partisan elections. Other studies [20] found that nonpartisan elections are less likely to draw a challenger, are less competitive even when there is a challenger, and attract fewer voters than partisan elections do.

The debate boils down to a fundamental notion: whether the judicial branch of government is unique from the other two and should be insulated from politics. With court integrity hanging in the balance, should judges be chosen the same way we pick presidents and members of Congress

Randy Shepard, who served as the chief justice of the Indiana Supreme Court for 25 years, retired from the court in 2012 as the longest-serving state chief justice in American history. A lifelong Republican in a red state, Shepard has gone through the merit selection process and run in multiple elections. "What's at stake in these big-money elections is the promise of due process and an impartial court," he told me. "Do I as a citizen walk into that courtroom standing on a relatively level playing field?"

He offered up a hypothetical from a law review article he wrote that, he proudly noted, was cited by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Anthony Kennedy in the Massey Energy case [10]—the one where the high court ruled that a judge who'd received massive campaign contributions connected to a company had to recuse himself from a case involving that company. "Say you're going before a trial judge making a decision about the custody of your grandchildren, and your evil son-in-law or daughter-in-law had made a very large contribution to the judge. How would you feel about that? You wouldn't feel very optimistic, would you?"

==

chamberwatch

Generally, plaintiffs’ attorneys represent consumers and workers to help them seek compensation in court for injuries caused by alleged corporate wrongdoing. In the late 1990s, the Chamber launched a well-financed campaign to malign plaintiffs’ attorneys as part of a wider crusade to implement national and international policies that shield corporations from lawsuits. 

In 1998, the Chamber founded the Institute for Legal Reform (ILR), now the largest sub-group within the Chamber. More than half of the $44 million the ILR raised in 2012 came from just 21 large donors, with an average donation of more than $450,000. The Chamber does its anti-consumer work through the ILR and through its **Coalition to Preserve Arbitration**, led by AT&T and comprising trade associations in finance, insurance, car sales and other industries where contracts are complicated and companies often have an advantage in information and expertise. 

One of the ILR’s apparent goals is to further entrench the use of pre-dispute binding arbitration clauses in corporate contracts with consumers and employees. The clauses deny individuals’ right their day in court and require them instead to resolve disputes with corporations in private arbitration proceedings. The ILR funds research that attempts to support the claim that consumers do better in arbitration than in the courts, but more credible research shows that consumersand employeesare less successful in arbitration than in the courts. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has found that arbitration clauses are prevalent in financial services contracts and that very few consumers use arbitration to resolve financial disputes. Arbitration is an unpopular choice for consumers because it tends to create an unbalanced playing field that favors corporations. 

Arbitration clauses in consumer contracts frequently forbid consumers from participating in class actions against the company. As a result, consumer disputes with companies can be arbitrated only on an individual basis, a method that is often impractical because the individual amount at stake is often small, even where the corporation’s total benefit from the challenged conduct is significant. That means consumers are increasingly unable to challenge wrongful corporate conduct. And if consumers can’t seek redress, companies do not have to answer for predatory or illegal practices. 

The ILR also works to place articles on “cases and actions that portend to have an impact on business” in widely read publications through its media outfit, the Legal Newsline, founded in 2006. 

Further, 39 states elect their high court judges, and from 2001 to 2003, for example, the candidate backed by the Chamber won 21 of 24 judicial elections. In 2004, the Chamber-backed candidate won 12 of 13 state Supreme Court races. 

The Chamber gives financial support to the campaigns of state judges it views as aligned with its interests and attacks judges that it views as opposed to its priorities. Business groups spent about $26.2 million in races between 2000 and 2009, and the Chamber was a major player. In 2000, for example, the Mississippi chief justice, whom the Chamber supported but who was concerned about out-of-state influence on the state elections, asked the Chamber to stop running ads for her — but the Chamber ignored her request. 

Chamber-identified ads disappeared in the 2002 Mississippi election season, but similar ads were run by the Law Enforcement Alliance of America (LEAA). The LEAA’s donors are secret, but Mississippi Supreme Court Justice Oliver Diaz suspected the Chamber was still at work, saying, “The ads that the U.S. Chamber ran against me in 2000 were extremely similar [to the ones] that the LEAA ran against me in 2008.” The Chamber had run highly negative ads, including accusing Justice Diaz of “voting for drug dealers and baby killers.” 

“Judges who are running for reelection do keep in mind what the next 30-second ad is going to look like,” Justice Diaz said. A 2013 report by the Center for American Progress found that as campaign cash in judicial elections has increased, courts have begun to rule more often in favor of prosecutors and against criminal defendants. 

Fewer numbers are available now than when the wave of spending began around 2000. The Chamber’s state high court spending is becoming increasingly difficult to trace, as observers, including former state supreme court justices, believe it has turned increasingly to spending money through opaque third-party organizations like the LEAA. Additionally, as the Center for Public Integrity notes, “Tracking all outside spending is nearly impossible thanks to lax state disclosure rules, as well as a loophole in the federal tax code that allows politically active nonprofits to run attack ads without disclosing who funds them.” 

In a 2002 speech to the Illinois Chamber of Commerce, U.S. Chamber President Tom Donohue gave some insight into the rise of the Chamber's involvement in judicial elections. Taking aim at trial lawyers who successfully litigated class action lawsuits for people harmed by asbestos and tobacco companies, he said, “Our approach is simple — implement a multi-front strategy of challenging these unscrupulous trial lawyers every time they poke their head out of the ground.… On the political front, we’re going to get involved in key state Supreme Court and attorney general races as part of our effort to elect pro-legal reform judicial candidates.... We’re clearly engaged in hand-to-hand combat, and we’ve got to step it up if we’re going to survive.” 

==

5) EDUCATE AND TRAIN (INDOCTRINATE) LEGISLATORS

Through ALEC, SPN think tanks plan and conduct hundreds of "educational" workshops for legislators that often result in legislative push for a specific agenda. For example, Colorado's Independence Institute gave a report on "public pension reform" at ALEC's 2011 annual meeting, which was followed by renewed efforts to privatize and otherwise alter pensions being introduced in 29 states in that year.

Moreover, many SPN think tanks hold "legislative forums," seminars, "policy previews," "policy orientations," etc., when their state's legislature begins a new session. Whether called lobbying or not, these events present state legislators with the policy priorities and bills being pushed by the think tanks for that legislative session. Such events have been held by the Montana Policy Institute, the Idaho Freedom Foundation, the Freedom Foundation of Minnesota, the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and Oregon's Cascade Policy Institute, the Mississippi Center for Public Policy, Louisiana's Pelican Institute for Public Policy, North Carolina's John William Pope Civitas Institute, New Jersey's Common Sense Institute, the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, and the Illinois Policy Foundation, according to "SPN News."

Such events advance corporate interests like privatizing American infrastructure, but are re-framed as "show[ing] lawmakers how to fund transportation infrastructure with private money." Such a framing avoids words like "convince," "persuade," and "lobby."

---

judicial junket update:

http://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/03/28/12368/corporations-pro-business-nonprofits-foot-bill-judicial-seminars

==

==

bp gulf spill NEW ORLEANS (AP) — A federal appeals court panel has reaffirmed its ruling that BP is liable for federal Clean Water Act damages stemming from the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the latest loss for the oil giant as it fights court decisions that could ultimately bring $18 billion in penalties.

The three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected arguments that there were errors in its June 4 ruling on BP's Clean Water Act liability. The ruling released Wednesday night is not the final say from the court. BP and its minority partner in the Macondo well, Anadarko Petroleum Corp., have a request pending for the full 15-member court to reconsider the issue.

The June order and Wednesday's follow-up were issued by Judges Fortunato Benavides, Carolyn Dineen King and James Dennis. They upheld U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier's ruling holding the well owners are liable.

BP and Anadarko had argued they were not liable because equipment failure on the leased rig Deepwater Horizon caused the April 2010 disaster. An explosion on the rig killed 11 workers and sent millions of gallons of oil spewing into the Gulf in what became the nation's worst offshore oil disaster.

Barbier has also ruled that BP was "grossly negligent" in the disaster. BP has asked Barbier to reconsider that finding, which, if it stands, would be a factor in whether the water act penalties for the company reach an estimated $18 billion.

Under the Clean Water Act, a polluter can be forced to pay from $1,100 to $4,300 per barrel of spilled oil. The higher limit applies if the company is found grossly negligent — as BP was in Barbier's ruling. But penalties can be assessed at lower amounts.

Government experts estimated that 4.2 million barrels spilled into the Gulf. BP has urged Barbier to use an estimate of 2.45 million barrels in calculating any Clean Water Act penalties.

Barbier has scheduled a trial in January to help decide how much BP owes in federal Clean Water Act penalties.

BP declined comment on the latest ruling. Anadarko did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In a June interview, Loyola University law professor Blaine LeCesne said he doubts Anadarko will have to pay much, if anything, in Clean Water Act fines because its partnership gave BP complete control over how the well was drilled and run.

==

note not class action, presumably greg abbot not helpful?

A jury in Dallas, TX today awarded $2.925 million to plaintiffs Bob and Lisa Parr, who sued Barnett shale fracking company Aruba Petroleum Inc. for  intentionally causing a nuisance on the Parr's property which  impacted their health and ruined their drinking water.

The jury returned its 5-1 verdict confirming that Aruba Petroleum “intentionally created a private nuisance” though its drilling, fracking and production activities at 21 gas wells near the Parrs' Wise County home over a three-year period between 2008-2011.

Plaintiffs attorneys claimed the case is “the first fracking verdict in U.S.history.”

The New Politics of Judicial Elections, 2011-12: How New Waves of Special Interest Spending Raised the Stakes for Fair Courts

This collaborative report analyzes the prominent role of special interest money in state supreme court elections. In 2011-12, many of these races “seemed alarmingly indistinguishable from ordinary political campaigns—featuring everything from Super PACs and mudslinging attack ads to millions of dollars of candidate fundraising and independent spending.” http://www.followthemoney.org/

http://newpoliticsreport.org/

older?

Justice at Risk: An Empirical Analysis of Campaign Contributions and Judicial Decisions

Justice at Risk is an empirical research project exploring the relationship between campaign contributions to candidates in state supreme court elections and the votes justices cast in cases while on the court. It concludes that there is a significant relationship between business group contributions to state supreme court justices and the voting of those justices in cases involving business matters. The study, sponsored by the American Constitution Society and designed by experienced independent empirical researchers, utilizes data from the Institute

The methodology used in the report is available here

The codebook with the ACS data is available here.

The datasets are available here.

corkery

Other recipients, such as American Action Network, Americans for Job Security (AJS) and Americans for Prosperity, are notably active in the political ad wars. AJS, for example, which received a combined total of nearly $3 million from Wellspring in 2008 and 2010, spent at least $8.3 million on ads mentioning federal candidates in 2010, and nearly $16 million in 2012. AJS was also involved in a scheme last year that funneled $11 million into efforts to curb the political power of labor unions and prevent a tax increase. California’s campaign finance agency called it political "money laundering" and last month levied $1 million in fines in the case.

And still other Wellspringrecipients train their sights on the judicial branch. The Judicial Crisis Network (JCN) -- originally called Judicial Confirmation Network -- was started in 2004 to help build support for former President George W. Bush's federal court nominees. Now it works against Obama's judicial picks -- and Obama himself. According to Federal Election Commission records,

 JCN spent $571,000 in 2008 opposing Obama's election. JCN also runs ads benefiting conservative state court candidates. According to the Michigan Campaign Finance Network, the group spent more than $1 million airing ads against a Democratic state supreme court candidate in Michigan last year; its target, Bridget Mary McCormack, won despite that. It also spent $1 million on a lower court race – believed to be the first time dark money has been used in a trial court contest.

As it happens, Neil Corkery is treasurer of JCN. Wellspring, run by his wife, gave the group and its affiliate, the Judicial Education Project, a total of more than $700,000 over a two-year period encompassing 2010 and 2011.  ...?

In 2010 Wellspring gave $125,000 each to the Michigan-based American Justice Partnership (AJP) and the Michigan Chamber of Commerce, which shares AJP's goal of putting more conservatives on the bench.

That year, AJP gave more than $1 million to the Michigan Republican Party. And the Michigan Chamber gave $5.4 million to the Republican Governors Association -- about the same amount that the RGA subsequently routed to the Michigan GOP. The state GOP spent about $4.8 million on in Michigan's supreme court race that year, according to the independent Michigan Campaign Finance Network, which did a detailed review of public records.

Got that? Not if the groups involved can help it. The upshot, though, is that two of Wellspring's recipients invested in the contest -- which ultimately restored a conservative majority to the highest court in the state.

In addition, over the course of three years, Wellspring has given nearly $1 million to Missourians for Better Courts. That group has fought to change Missouri's judicial selection process, which it argues is overly influenced by liberal trial lawyers.

Putting, or keeping, conservatives on the nation’s courts was the focus of several other Wellspring grantees, including the Alabama Civil Justice Reform Committee, Alabama Voters Against Lawsuit Abuse, Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce and the Illinois Manufacturers Association.

Cash in, cash out

On the other side of the ledger sheet, though, the sources of Wellspring's millions are mostly a cipher. Like all 501(c)(4) organizations, it doesn't have to reveal them. CRP and NPR have been able to learn of only three donors, all of which are also (c)(4)s: The American Democracy Alliance gave Wellspring $150,000 in 2008, the year the Corkery group launched. A second, Founding Principles PAC gave it $1,026, also in 2008. And Rosebush Corp. gave Wellspring $100,000 in 2011.

That's a little more than $251,000 -- roughly 1 percent of the $24 million Wellspring has reported as income from 2008 through 2011. None of the three donor groups returned calls from NPR and CRP seeking comment.

The American Democracy Alliance, like Wellspring, has taken an interest in judicial elections: In 2010, it gave $100,000 to ShowMe Better Courts, a Missouri group; and $500,000 to the Adam Smith Foundation -- which, in turn sent money to Missourians for Better Courts, the same group that received nearly $1 million from Wellspring.

Rosebush Corp., headed by a Pennsylvanian named Brian Sullivan, also gave $750,000 in 2011 to Americans for Limited Government, a group headed by wealthy libertarian Howard Rich that has spent millions running ads against Democrats and giving to other conservative organizations. The next year, Rosebush gave to Club for Growth Action, which has helped fuel the rise of some tea party Republicans, and to the pro-Mitt Romney super PAC, Restore Our Future.

...http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2013/11/wellsprings-flow.html

==

funded the Davis hit:  Though the ATA resisted Gray Davis' lawsuit to avoid disclosing its funders in 2001, the group revealed its major 2002 contributors' names (most likely mistakenly) in the 2002 tax form it provided Public Citizen. Its top contributor that year was the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which gave $2.6 million. The ATA received about $2.3 million of that donation in the month before Election Day.11(http://www.stealthpacs.org/profile.cfm?org_id=106#11) The Chamber reportedly employed a strategy of funding outside groups to influence judicial elections in 2002, making its role more discrete than in 2000 when it broadcast ads under its own name.12

American Taxpayers Alliance 990 form, 2002.
Robert Lenzner and Matthew Miller, "Buying Justice; For Years Trial Lawyers Owned State Courts. Now Big Business Is Striking Back," Forbes, July 21, 2003.

==

legal.txt

MACRO:  big green shifted from grassroots to the courts EDF etc and won major victories

stuffed spotted owl story?) AND what's the point of having a Clean Air Act if it's not enforced?  Similarly, historic anti-tobacco suit forced companies to admit they kill ppl, forced them to pay damages, and forced them to turn over the proof (those databases are still useful in outing BS ppl and tactics.  Do we need same for fossil fuels?

In addition, CRM used the courts to get social and economic justice (Brown v Bd of Ed) thus Powell says we need FedSoc to balance ACLU (plus corps have massive legal capability to defend and attack eg SLAPP; however, legal firm branches out into lobbying, also buffer (Hunt & Wms hires the intel co to spy on activists).

Note also that tort and class action lawsuits are leverage where small groups and individuals can get justice from large rich corp

omg: "By using stealth tactics to pursue a corporate agenda, the Bush administration is undermining the very landscape of democracy. The White House has also been darkly brilliant at using the courts to do its dirty work -- through methods such as "sweetheart suits," the practice of encouraging states and private groups to file lawsuits against the federal government, and then agreeing to negotiated settlements that bypass environmental laws without any interference from Congress or the public. [10]

RICO countered by voodoo TP:

Citizens for a Sound Economy

CSE, one of the third-party ‘anti-tax’ tobacco industry partners, was a think tank dedicated to free market economics. CSE (which split into AFP and FreedomWorks in 2004) was co-founded in 1984 by David Koch, of Koch Industries, and Richard Fink, former professor of economics at George Mason University, who has worked for Koch Industries since 1990.3 ,51 CSE supported the agendas of the tobacco and other industries, including oil, chemical, pharmaceutical and telecommunications, and was funded by them.52 In 2002, before Tea Party politics were widely discussed in the mainstream media, CSE started its US Tea Party (http://www.usteaparty.com) project, the website of which stated ‘our US Tea Party is a national event, hosted continuously online and open to all Americans who feel our taxes are too high and the tax code is too complicated.’53 Between 1991 and 2002 the tobacco companies, mainly Philip Morris, provided CSE with at least US$5.3 million (see online supplementary table S3). Philip Morris gave CSE US$250 000 annually in the early 1990s to start six state chapters.41

Philip Morris (PM) designated CSE a ‘Category A’ public policy organisation for funding.54 ‘Category A’ organisations were ‘the largest and most important/sustained relationships’ that were assigned a ‘PM senior relationship manager’ to put them at the ‘centre of a network of information-sharing among PM people involved with the organisation’ and ‘[assure] systematic and ongoing relationship activities’.54 In response to an internal 1999 email asking whether CSE was worth its current level of funding, Philip Morris’ vice president of federal government affairs replied: They are adding this level of value. They have provided significant grassroots assistance, in the nature of several thousand calls to the Hill on the lawsuit [likely the federal RICO lawsuit against the major cigarette companies discussed below] direct lobbying on the lawsuit, some media as well as continuing a very useful level of activity on FET [federal excise tax]/prescription drugs [a proposal to expand Medicare and fund prescription drugs with a tobacco tax]. Throughout the August [Congressional] Recess they have been very active on our behalf in the field in key states with key Members.55

Vol. 18 No. 7 (July, 2008) pp.632-636

THE RISE OF THE CONSERVATIVE LEGAL MOVEMENT: THE BATTLE FOR CONTROL OF THE LAW, by Steven M. Teles. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. 385pp.  Cloth. $35.00/£19.95.  ISBN: 9780691122083.

Reviewed by Roy B. Flemming, Department of Political Science, Texas A&M University.  Email: roy [at] politics.tamu.edu.

Sure, it was a coincidence but the timing could not have been better.  The morning before I sat down to write this review, I received a solicitation letter from the Federalist Society asking me for a donation.  The letter signed by Eugene B. Meyer, the organization’s president, pointedly quoted Steven Teles’ comment from his book that the “Federalist Society represents, without a doubt, the most vigorous, durable, and well-ordered organization to emerge from . . . modern conservatism’s political strategy.”

When Teles set out to document the stumbles, turning points, and successes of the conservative counter-mobilization against legal liberalism, his “first real breakthrough” came after Meyer let him loose to rummage through the Society’s internal documents. Other entrepreneurs in the conservative legal movement like Henry Manne, William “Chip” Mellor, and Clint Bolickfully cooperated with Teles, answering his questions and providing him with background documents.  Equally important, pivotal financial patrons of the movement, like the Olin Foundation, followed suit.  Finally, Teles decided to organize his research around the themes of strategy and entrepreneurship which he credits to conversations with Stuart Butler of the Heritage Foundation. No published study about the conservative legal movement of which I am aware can compete with the information, detail, perspectives, and stories that Teles has packed into his book.

Teles’ major stories pivot around the formation and evolution of the Federalist Society, the emergence and institutionalization of law and economics as part of law school curriculums, the Center for Individual Rights, and the Institute for Justice.  Nested within these narratives are vignettes of other players and organizations that illustrate how patrons and entrepreneurs learned from their mistakes and redirected their strategies.  Teles quickly alerts his readers that he not concerned with organizations like the American Center for Law and Justice that have been involved in religious or social conservative litigation.  Nor is he interested in the thicket of conservative think tanks that sprouted up during the past three decades or in the proliferation of litigating groups with traditional pro-business agendas or interests in tort reform.  The price of Teles’ tight focus, however, is easily off-set by the many benefits generated by his in-depth discussions.

The idea for a conservative legal counter-mobilization first surfaced in Lewis Powell’s  confidential memorandum to the US Chamber of Commerce in 1971 shortly before Nixon nominated him to the Supreme Court.  (Powell’s memo can be found at [*633] www.pbs.org/wnet/supremecourt/personality/print/sources_document13.html).  Entitled “Attack of [sic] the American Free Enterprise System,” Powell argued America’s economic system was under “broad attack.”  The “most disquieting” attacks were not those made by the usual left-wing or socialist suspects but those from “the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians.”  Powell urged the Chamber to confront the criticism especially in universities and colleges (including a “balancing of faculties”) and redirect the public agenda by creating incentives for “independent scholars who believe in the system” to publish more often and more widely.  In a very real sense, Powell’s ideas foreshadowed Manne’s campaign to create law and economics centers in law schools and the Olin Foundation’s initiatives aimed at the elite schoolsas well as the network of conservative faculty and students created by the Federalist Society.

In a section called a “Neglected Opportunity in the Courts,” Powell cautioned that liberal and far left groups had been “far more astute” in recognizing the “judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic, and political change.”  This could be a “vast area of opportunity” for the Chamber and the soon-to-be associate justice recommended that it hire “highly competent” staff attorneys to file amicus briefs in the Supreme Court or under special circumstances retain “lawyers of national standing and reputation” to participate in Chamber-sponsored law suits.  The American Civil Liberties Union, civil rights groups, and liberal public interest law outfits like those created by Ralph Nader, offered off-the-shelf templates that conservatives could use to organize their counter-mobilization.  As Teles explains, Powell implied that the fundamental problem was an imbalance in the interests appearing in courtrooms and that it could be righted by recruiting pro-business if not conservative “repeat players” and by a revival of “judicial restraint” on the bench.

Things did not play out as simply as Powell intimated.  Following the formation of the Pacific Legal Foundation in 1973 with the support from the California Chamber of Commerce, several other regional foundations were soon created under the auspices of the National Legal Center for the Public Interest (NLCPI).  This network was organized geographically, not functionally, and held together by interlocking directorships.  The result was “organizational turmoil” because as one insider told Teles “NLCPI had all the structural flaws of the Articles of Confederation” (p.63).  Equally telling, the emphasis on filing amicus briefs displaced coherent litigation strategies and put the foundations on fund-raising treadmills. Most damning of all for Powell’s business-led strategy were unexpected tensions between business interests and conservative ideology.  As Adam Smith cautioned long ago, business interests are not synonymous with the public interest however it is defined.

Teles’ cameo study of the Mountain States Legal Foundation illustrates the point.  With reliable funding from Joseph Coors, a long-time patron of right-wing causes, effective leadership in the early years by James Watts who later became President Reagan’s Interior [*634] Secretary, and a shared sense of grievance arising from the “Sagebrush Rebellion” in the Western states over the control of federal lands, the Mountain States Legal Foundation had several built-in advantages.  Nevertheless it faltered because its business allies expected returns on their “investments” and the foundation often filed amicus briefs in response to particular contributions or to encourage new ones.  Matters came to a head when the foundation challenged on First Amendment grounds Denver’s grant of an exclusive cable television franchise to a local businessman, a grant widely supported by the Mile High City’s business community.  As an insider explained to Teles, the foundation’s suit “gored very powerful interests there, well connected to the Republican Party . . . Joe Coors resigned from our board [saying] . . . ’I founded MSLF . . . to take on the Sierra Club, not to do this sort of thing’” (p.65).

Soul-searching about the strategy behind the first generation of public interest firms began in the late 1970s when Michael Horowitz (subsequently chief counsel of the Office of Management and Budget during the first Reagan administration) submitted a highly critical report to the Scaife Foundation.  The Horowitz Report redefined the goals of the legal counter-mobilization.  Litigation alone could not dislodge legal liberalism.  Ties to business interests tethered conservative public interest firms and held them back from taking the moral high ground. Amicus briefs were “pufferies intended for naïve audiences of donors and not truly doing meaningful work” (p.71).  The aversion to basing organizations in Washington, D.C. had to be jettisoned in order to confront liberalism on its own turf.  Most important of all, the movement needed to redefine itself along clear, consistent libertarian lines with long-term strategies that would appeal to underdogs caught up in unresponsive legal institutions like black beauticians struggling under state regulations or lower middle class whites whose houses were threatened by eminent domain.  Conservatives had to become idealistic “good guys” limiting government and empowering civil society. 

The Horowitz Report doused cold water on patron enthusiasm for funding conservative public interest law firms but in time the foundations used the report to restructure how these firms operated  Two of these second generation firms are the subject of a separate chapter in which Teles compares the Center for Individual Rights (CIR), best known for its battles against affirmative action policies at the University of Texas and University of Michigan, and the Institute for Justice (IJ) whose fame soared after it turned defeat in KELO v. CITY OF NEW LONDON into a public policy success.  While the two firms differ significantly in many ways, they share important similarities.  For one thing, judicial activism no longer is a dirty word.  Instead both firms see judicial activism as a means of reviving old rights to protect the conservative goal of limited government; property rights and eminent domain offer just one example.  Clint Bolick (2007), co-founder of the Institute for Justice, recently argued in favor of judicial activism in a new book published by the libertarian Cato Institute.  The firms, seeing the value in an activist bench, are accordingly more strategic in the cases they select and [*635] keep a steady eye on whether a case has the potential to change the public policy agenda or the law.

Horowitz, like Powell, stressed that a “key site” to contest legal liberalism was the university.  In three chapters, Teles traces the winding, upward path of the law and economics movement and the seemingly inexorable growth of the Federalist Society.  The law and economics story has two parts.  The first deals with constructing the “mother ship” at the University of Chicago and the travails of Henry Manne to build law and economic centers at other universities and his final success at George Mason University.

Chicago legitimized law and economics.  The JOURNAL OF LAW AND ECONOMICS, the sub-field’s first journal, started there and was later edited by Ronald Coase who won a Nobel Prize for his work.  Chicago’s highly influential Anti-Trust Project provided fellowships supported by the Volker Fund, attracted law professors like Robert Bork, and revolutionized the field. Richard Posner with impeccable establishment credentials (Harvard Law and former Supreme Court clerk for Justice William Brennan) wrote ECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF LAW (published in 1973 and now in its seventh edition) in which he challenged myriad shibboleths in traditional legal research.  In the meantime, Manne spread the gospelby pushing for new centers at other universities, aggressively marketed law and economics with help from theLiberty Fundby holding regular conferences that identified ambitious scholars and brought them into the conservative fold, and through the Economics Institute for Federal Judgesintroduced numerous judges to the fundamentals of micro-economics.

The second part of the story focuses on the Olin Foundation’s strategic deployment of its largesse aimed directly at faculty and students in elite law schools (most of Manne’s centers were at lesser-ranked schools) which solidified the stature of the law and economics sub-field and raised its status as a distinctive alternative to traditional and contemporary legal scholarship.  Law and economics was not Olin’s first choice, however.  As an official explained to Teles: “I would have preferred to do something in constitutional law but . . . [i]f you said to a dean that you wanted to fund conservative constitutional law, he would reject the idea out of hand . . . Law and economics is neutral, but it has a philosophical thrust in the direction of free markets and limited government.  That is, like many disciplines, it seems neutral but it isn’t in fact” (p.189).  Olin’s gamble on law and economics paid off handsomely in ways that Lewis Powell would have applauded.  At Harvard, Olin’s support for law and economics provided money, academic panache, and camouflage for Harvard’s president who wanted to stymie the critical legal studies movement and mollify angry alumni in corporate law firms upset by the havoc they felt the “crits” were creating within the profession.  Law and economics raised the research bar for hiring and tenure decisions and offered alternatives to law schools that altered the balance of power in their faculties.

The Federalist Society rang repeated alarms within the legal profession that Harvard Law was “out of control” and [*636] from its beginning the Society has been concerned generally about the placement of conservatives in law schools and out of them.  Teles maintains in his chapter on the Society, however, that over the course of its twenty-five year history the Federalist Society has carved out an influential niche for itself bylimitingits attention to creating and fostering complex networks of lawyers, faculty, law students, and foundation patrons that are held together by an emphasis on serious debate and discourse over ideas that challenge legal liberalism while avoiding right-wing factionalism.  Eschewing the establishment of an in-house litigation center early on, the Society also decided not turn itself into a conservative clone of the American Bar Association despite earlier feelings that perhaps it should and despite its persistent criticisms of the ABA.  These strategic choices (there were others at critical moments) were made by a stable, self-perpetuating cadre of long-serving leaders, including Eugene Meyer, who were present at the Society’s founding and are aligned with foundation executives and senior figures from the legal community.

Teles neither constructs a theory of the rise of the conservative legal movement nor tests one.  Conceptual references are employed at various times but largely to locate the study within the existing literature.  This by no means diminishes Teles’ accomplishment.  Each of his multiple interlocking stories of the pas de troisbetween different conservative entrepreneurs, their patrons and financiers, and the institutions they either created or tried to change took place over several years and demanded clear precise detailing, which they duly received.  Teles’ book is an important reference and the chief departure point for anybody seriously wanting to understand one of the most important transformations in contemporary legal history and politics.

REFERENCES:

Bolick, Clint. 2007. DAVID’S HAMMER: THE CASE FOR AN ACTIVIST JUDICIARY. Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute.

Posner, Richard. 1973. ECONOMICS OF LAW.  Boston: Little Brown and Company.

CASE REFERENCE:

KELO v. CITY OF NEW LONDON, 545 U.S. 469 (2005)

*********************

Roy B. Flemming.

Can a Judge Really Block the SEC’s Settlement With Steven Cohen?

Judge Victor Marrero last week became the latest federal judge to question a time-honored tactic of federal regulators: negotiating settlements in which companies pay millions of dollars in penalties without admitting or denying that they've actually done anything wrong.

In the case before Marrero, SAC Capital Advisors, a hedge fund run by the billionaire investor Steven A. Cohen, had agreed to settle insider-trading allegations by writing the Securities and Exchange Commission a check for $602 million. As usual, the deal included the "neither admit nor deny" language that has become standard for settlements with the SEC and other federal regulators.

Marrero found that odd. "There is something counterintuitive and incongruous about settling for $600 million if it truly did nothing wrong," he said at a Federal District Court hearing last week in Manhattan.

Judges have been increasingly willing to question the "neither admit nor deny" deals since Judge Jed S. Rakoff refused to approve a $285 million settlement in 2011 between the SEC and Citigroup over allegations of mortgage fraud.

In December 2011, Judge Rudolph T. Randa, a federal judge in Wisconsin, questioned an SEC settlement with the Koss Corporation, the Milwaukee-based headphone manufacturer, in which the company didn't admit or deny wrongdoing (though he ultimately approved the settlement.) Two months later, Judge Renee Marie Bumb blocked an $11.5 million settlement between the Federal Trade Commission and a New Jersey marketing company that also used "neither admit nor deny" language.

"They've asked more questions, they've taken more time," Thomas O. Gorman, a partner at Dorsey & Whitney who specializes in securities law, told ProPublica.

But it's far from certain whether judges actually have the power to block such settlements.

http://www.propublica.org/article/can-a-judge-really-block-the-s.e.c.s-settlement-with-steve-cohen

Brand name riggers of the justice system

By Jim Hightower- Mon., 3/4/13

Practically every national brand name you've ever heard of now slips predatory arbitration provisions into their customer terms-of-service agreements and/or employment agreements. Not only do these sneaky inserts strip away your constitutional right to take them to court (peremptorily immunizing them from any wrongs they do to you), but many of the boilerplate provisions also arbitrarily ban you from joining with other small claimants in class actions to hold them accountable. Here is a sampling of 10 market powerhouses that suckerpunch you with this double-whammy:

The list of corporations that underhandedly bar your access to the courts ranges across every business sector. Buying a home? If you choose one from Centex, DR Horton ("America's Builder"), KB, Pulte, or Ryland-it'll come with forced arbitration built into it. Maybe you or a loved one needs a nursing home. That can be an unhappy experience, but if you have a complaint, you'll find that such national chains as Carrington Place, Covenant, and Kindred shove you into the dark hallways of corporate justice.

Take out a student loan from Discover, invest through Charles Schwab or T. Rowe Price, purchase a television from Sony, or a game console from Xbox LIVE, get involved in some e-commerce on eBay or PayPal, get a Starbucks gift card, buy a membership at Gold's Gym, go for entertainment through Ticketmaster or Netflix, or call Orkin for pest control--every one of those transactions comes with a fine-print proviso that waives your Seventh Amendment rights.

The same goes for the contract you'll have to sign if you take a job with nearly any national corporation. From Hooters to Neiman Marcus, Papa John's to Yahoo!, Hobby Lobby to Nordstrom, Manpower to Macy's, the employment agreement that they tell you is just a perfunctory part of putting you on the payroll has the binding arbitration "gotcha" in it.

 ---

Yet another thrust of the corporate political agenda was the fostering

of a sympathetic climate for corporate anti-regulatory ideology

among the federal judiciary. To this end, several pro-corporate foundations

developed ��judicial education” seminars, which involved free trips

for federal judges to attend training sessions at resorts such as Marco

Island, Florida. Here corporate perspectives on environmental regulations,

anti-trust law, and other topics were presented along with golf,

fishing, and other recreations.

The organization that pioneered the judge

junkets, the Law and Economics Center, was founded in 1974 and

funded by a number of corporations such as Ford Motor Company, Abbott

Laboratories, and Proctor and Gamble, as well as right-wing foun.. 173

dations such as the Carthage Foundation and the Olin Foundation.

LEC’s program included such seminars as “Misconceptions About Environmental

Pollution and Cancer.”

Later, additional conservative

groups joined the judicial education movement, including the Foundation

for Research on Economics and the Environment (FREE)and the

Liberty Fund. Topics at a typical seminar sponsored by FREE at the

Elkhorn Ranch in Big Sky, Montana, included “The Environment.a

CEO’s Perspective,” taught by retired Texaco CEO Alfred DeCrane,

“Progressive Myths and the Lords of Yesteryear,” and “Why We Should

Run Public Lands Like Businesses.”

According to LEC’s newsletter, many judges reported that the

seminars had “totally altered their frame of reference for cases involving

economic issues.” One such judge was Spencer Williams, who attended

a Law and Economics seminar at the Key Biscayne Hotel in Miami

while presiding over a predatory pricing case being heard in U.S. district

court. Returning from the seminar, the judge overturned a jury’s

decision that would have awarded $15 million to the plaintiff. In a letter

to the LEC, Williams wrote, “As a result of my better understanding of

the concept of marginal costs, I have recently set aside a $15 million

anti-trust verdict.” gangs of am

Rove stacked ct in TX Priscilla Owen:http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/people/o/priscilla_r_owen/index.html

She chose opinions overturning rulings in favor of a child born with birth defects, a worker injured on an oil rig, a nurse fired for blowing the whistle on a drug-dealing co-worker, a family with an interest in an oil field that had been drained by a nearby company, asbestos and breast-implant plaintiffs and a student whose school made him cut his hair....Ms. Owen represented mostly oil and gas companies. She quickly gained a reputation as a formidable litigator, and the Texas firm of Andrews & Kurth made her a partner by the time she was 30.

sentelle ~ ESA b/c stops us from building hosp?! or from driving to them if bug on windshield was ES 192

fed judge ~ earth day in school b/c religion 192  strat ignor

see http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/17/magazine/17CONSTITUTION.html?pagewanted=print&position

big picture hist

NEWS: http://thinkprogress.org/justice/issue/

...

Another way the wealthiest Americans have rigged the rules so more of the national income flows upward may be just as consequential, but less well understood. A 30-year campaign to push America's courts sharply to the right has borne abundant fruit for those in the top 1 percent.

We see it reflected in today's Supreme Court, which, having unleashed a flood of super-PAC cash into our political campaigns in a decision that was one of the most brazen examples of judicial activism in the court's history, now stands poised to overturn not only the Democrats' healthcare bill, but much of the jurisprudence that supported the welfare state developed since the New Deal.

A study by the Constitutional Accountability Center found that the Chamber of Commerce had won 65 percent of its cases heard by the court under Chief Justice John Roberts, compared to 56 percent under former Chief Justice William Rehnquist (1986-2005) and just 43 percent of the cases that came during the Burger court (1969-1986).

��

But that's only the beginning. “The Roberts Court,” wrote Slate's Dahlia Lithwick, is “slowly but surely... giving corporate America a handbook on how to engage in misconduct. In case after case, it seems big companies are being given the playbook on how to win even bigger the next time.”

Many of the court's rulings have overturned long-standing precedents. While conservatives constantly rail against judges "legislating from the bench," it is far more common for right-leaning jurists to engage in “judicial activism” than those of a liberal bent. That's what several studies have concluded. Media Matters offered a run-down of a couple of prominent ones:

A 2005 study by Yale University law professor Paul Gewirtz and Yale Law School graduate Chad Golder showed that among Supreme Court justices at that time, those most frequently labeled "conservative" were among the most frequent practitioners of at least one brand of judicial activism -- the tendency to strike down statutes passed by Congress. Those most frequently labeled "liberal" were the least likely to strike down statutes passed by Congress.

A 2007 study published by University of Chicago law professor Thomas J. Miles and Cass R. Sunstein... used a different measurement of judicial activism: the tendency of judges to strike down decisions by federal regulatory agencies. Sunstein and Miles found that by this definition, the Supreme Court's "conservative" justices were the most likely to engage in "judicial activism" while the "liberal" justices were most likely to exercise "judicial restraint."

In a recent opinion, two federal appeals court judges suggested that all efforts to protect workers, consumers or the environment were unconstitutional, including regulatory efforts by the states. It's a radical view, but one that has gotten increasing traction in conservative legal circles. It is also the culmination of years of institutional investments by the corporate Right to advance what's come to be known as the “law and economics��� movement, which analyzes legal rulings “costs” – essentially applying neoliberal economic logic to the field. Its advocates eschew the notion that human rights or economic fairness are inherently valuable factors for the law to consider.

The model has gained increasing influence in American courts, and that's no accident. In his book, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law, Johns Hopkins scholar Steven Teles writes that conservatives, reacting to what they viewed as liberal hegemony in the legal community of the 1960s, fought hard to shift the legal terrain rightward.

Spurred by their overlapping grievances, informed by an increasingly sophisticated of how to produce legal change, and coordinated by strategically shrewd group of patrons, conservatives began investing in a broad range activities designed to reverse their �� organizational weaknesses. While similar kinds of organizational development were happening in other domains … in no other area was the process of strategic investment as prolonged, ambitious, complicated and successful as in the law.

In 1998, the Washington Post reported that “Federal judges are attending expenses-paid, five-day seminars on property rights and the environment at resorts in Montana, sessions underwritten by conservative foundations that are also funding a wave of litigation on those issues in the federal courts.”

Funding for the seminars, run by a group called the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment (FREE), also comes from foundations run by companies with a significant interest in property rights and environmental law issues.

One of the group's funders was the John M. Olin Foundation, which invested millions of dollars in the law and economic movement – endowing university chairs, funding think-tanks and providing early support for the Federalist Society, which was founded in 1982 by former attorney general Ed Meese, controversial Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork and Ted Olsen—who years later would win the infamous Bush v. Gorecase before the Supreme Court in 2000 and then go on to serve as Bush’s solicitor general. The foundation said in a 2003 report to its trustees, “All in all, the Federalist Society has been one of the best investments the foundation ever made.”

In 2005, the Olin Foundation actually declared “mission accomplished” and closed up shop. The New York Times reported that after “three decades financing the intellectual rise of the right,” the foundation’s services were no longer needed. The Times added that the loss of Olin wasn’t terribly troubling for the movement, because whereas “a generation ago just three or four major foundations operated on the Right, today’s conservatism has no shortage of institutions, donors or brio.”

If the economics and law movement were to become the standard in our legal culture, it would represent a massive upward redistribution of wealth. Not only would “transfer payments” – unemployment benefits, assistance for needy families and the like – be deemed unconstitutional, but so would minimum wages, job training programs, subsidized student loans and most of our already threadbare social safety net. And that environment will have been purchased for a princely sum by those who have profited so handsomely from America's spiraling income inequality.

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. He is the author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy: And Everything else the Right Doesn't Want You to Know About Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America.

http://movetoamend.org/how-corporate-elite-hijacked-americas-courts-enrich-top-1-percent 

http://old.mediatransparency.org/storyprinterfriendly.php?storyID=21

In her recent book Slanting the Story, journalist-critic Trudy Lieberman cites the Powell manifesto's call for a focal attack on Ralph Nader. She suggests that as a result of such concerted assaults, the right wing is "well on its way" to victory in the "broad philosophical argument" between liberals and conservatives.

In its 1993 paper Justice for Sale, the Alliance for Justice detailed how Powell's legal recommendations inspired "a multi-faceted, comprehensive, and integrated campaign" coordinated and funded by large corporations and rightwing foundations "to create taxpayer subsidized law firms...to rewrite American jurisprudence...advanc[e] their agenda before judges, lawyers, legal scholars, and government policy makers...[and] sought to assure control over the future direction of the law" by installing ideologically friendly faculty in law schools, as well as organizing and rewarding students with scholarships and clerkships under conservative judges, and placing those judges on the bench.

The Alliance document reported that the California Chamber of Commerce picked up on Powell and proposed what became in 1973 the Pacific Legal Foundation, the first of eight regional litigation centers. The seed money for establishing these centers was provided that year by J. Simon Fluor, founder of the global engineering company that bears his name. The Olin, Scaife, Bradley, Smith Richardson, and Coors' Castle Rock foundations, and others, continue to underwrite these operations. They have wrought great changes in the law - such as weakening affirmative action, and curbing access to courtrooms by death-row prisoners, the handicapped, minorities, and the elderly - to appeal, to sue, to vote. Cases argued up the judicial ladder by radical litigators have often reached the Supreme Court. They tried unsuccessfully to roll back the Miranda rights of prisoners placed under arrest, and to limit the right of states to enforce certain environmental protections. But they have won decisions in Federal courtrooms that endanger public school systems, the rights of women, the separation of church and state, and clean air and water regulations.

The Federalist Society is the legal think tank for these conservative litigators. It has promulgated theories that have been applied by litigators to weaken the powers of the federal government, reverse legal precedents encoded by the Warren court, and to propound counter-Constitutional principles on states' rights and property rights whose roots can be traced back to the Confederacy. The Federalists are particularly effective on campus, with active student chapters in most American law schools.

===-

http://www.mindfully.org/Air/2004/Judge-Ginsburg-Industry23mar04.htm

sentelle, kirkland & Ellis, Baden, douglas ginsberg FREE

PR BS left list eh LWV,  http://www.americanjusticepartnership.org/pdf/Justice_Hijacked_Report.pdf  apparently upset by merit vs voter selction of judges. Soros funded? Justice at Stake

Justice at Stake is a nonpartisan campaign with more than 50 national partners, working to keep state and federal courts fair and impartial. Justice at Stake Campaign partners educate the public and work for reforms to keep politics and special interests out of the courtroom—and to protect what Chief Justice Rehnquist called one of the "crown jewels" of our democracy.

JAS is currently funded by grants from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Joyce Foundation, the Herbert Block Foundation, the Moriah Fund and the Open Society Institute.

http://www.justiceatstake.org/about/index.cfm

koch http://www.communityrights.org/TaintedJustice/KochReport.pdf

5 mil one year to fed soc

59 mil over 18 year to university judicial education?  law and econoics ctr at gmu, loec kansas univ modelled on gmu and FREE since 1987  Douglas Ginsberg

These organizations influence not only public opinion and policy but also judicial outlook. For example, in 1999 CSE subsidized the creation of amici briefs providing reasons to proclaim the Clear Air Act unconstitutional. CSE received $600,000 from the Claude R. Lambe Foundation that year.175(http://old.mediatransparency.org/funderprofile.php?funderID=9#175) The foundation also provided substantial funding to the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment (FREE), which holds seminars for federal judges at its ranch near Big Sky, Montana. Many influential judges attend these seminars, including those who heard arguments made by legal representatives receiving funding from CSE. It makes sense that the Kochs would fund such anti-environment organizations, given their seedy past of environmental violations and lawsuits. Most significantly, the U.S. Department of Justice charged Koch Industries with 97 counts of defying federal hazardous waste and clean air-acts when it knowingly emitted benzene fumes and then lied about its actions when questioned. In 2001, Koch Industries agreed to a $20 million settlement, a drastically smaller sum than it would have paid if convicted.176(http://old.mediatransparency.org/funderprofile.php?funderID=9#176)

Other significant grantees in the domain of research and advocacy include the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Reason Foundation, the Heritage Foundation, the Hudson Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. David Koch serves on the board of directors of the Reason Foundation.

The foundations also provide substantial funding to the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy (PRI), whose mission is "to champion freedom, opportunity and personal responsibility for all individuals by advancing free-market policy solutions."177(http://old.mediatransparency.org/funderprofile.php?funderID=9#177) The organization espouses entrepreneurship, privatization and individual liberty, three of the Koch brothers' main areas of interest. PRI publishes articles and papers, sponsors events, testifies before policymakers and provides commentary for a variety of media sources, reaching more than 141 million people in 2001 through these means. The organization supports transferring power from the government to private organizations and individuals, especially in terms of education, the environment and health care. It believes that government taxes and regulations "stifle" the nation's "entrepreneurial spirit" and lead to problems in each of these domains. Thus, the organization promotes vouchers, increased standards and accountability, and "teacher quality" in education; free-market competition in health care; and the elimination of federal social welfare programs, claiming that they result in reliance on the state and undue control of the government over individual lives. The organization gives an annual privatization award to individuals and private organizations that provide important community services, such as charter schools and sources of private scholarships.

In addition to funding think tanks and advocacy institutes, the Koch foundations also provide substantial sums to academic institutes and universities to further conservative ideology and recruit youth to the crusade. Their main grantee is George Mason University (GMU). The three Koch foundations contributed $23,030,497 between 1985 and 2002 to the university, its foundation and its Institute for Human Studies.178(http://old.mediatransparency.org/funderprofile.php?funderID=9#178) Richard Fink, the president of the Charles G. Koch Foundation, serves on the Board of Directors of GMU, where he taught until 1984. After serving as president and chief executive officer of CSE for several years, he returned to GMU, where he serves on the board of trustees of the Center for the Study of Public Choice and the Center for Market Processes and as a member of the board of the Progressive Policy Institute.179(http://old.mediatransparency.org/funderprofile.php?funderID=9#179)

Charles is chairman of GMU's Institute for Humane Studies, which hosts the Charles G. Koch Summer Fellow Program. The mission of the center is "to support the achievement of a free society by discovering and facilitating the development of talented, productive students, scholars and other intellectuals who share a commitment to liberty and who demonstrate the potential to change significantly the current climate of opinion to one more congenial to the principles and practices of freedom."180(http://old.mediatransparency.org/funderprofile.php?funderID=9#180) The institute sponsors free summer seminars for students interested in learning about "free market economics and networking."

The two most significant contributions to the university came in the form of a $3 million grant in 1997, which helped to launch the Mercatus Center, and a $10 million grant in 1998, which helped to create the James M.Buchanan Center for the Study of Political Economy.

Charles Koch is a board member at the Mercatus Center, which describes itself as a "research and education center [that] generates knowledge and understanding of how institutions affect the freedom to prosper and holds organizations accountable for their impact on that freedom."181(http://old.mediatransparency.org/funderprofile.php?funderID=9#181) The center promotes free markets and "Western" values and customs. The director of its regulatory studies program, Wendy Lee Gramm, was named "villain of the month" by the Clean Air Trust in January 2002 for her work in opposition to federal regulations aimed at protecting health and the environment. The nonprofit trust charges that through his considerable donations, "Koch basically rents the university's name to give a patina of credibility to Wendy Gramm's anti-environmental agenda."182(http://old.mediatransparency.org/funderprofile.php?funderID=9#182)

The James M. Buchanan Center for the Study of Political Economy encompasses the Center for Study of Public Choice and the Center for Market Processes and is associated with the Institute for Humane Studies. Of the Buchanan Center's grant, the president of GMU remarked, "We believe this support will help us become a national center of excellence of study of the relationship between the polity and the economy."183(http://old.mediatransparency.org/funderprofile.php?funderID=9#183) Another $3 million grant in 2001 from the Charles G. Koch Foundation allowed the university to establish the Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science (ICES) with its seven prestigious professors of experimental economics at GMU.184(http://old.mediatransparency.org/funderprofile.php?funderID=9#184)

GMU also directed some of the Koch foundation funding to its Law and Economics Center (LEC) at its School of Law. Flipside.org reports that the LEC's mission is to "teach federal judges that the goal of the law should be to maximize the wealth of society by promoting the efficient use of scarce resources." To do so, the center sponsors annual eight-week training conferences at resort locations for federal and state judges. Nearly 800 judges, including two U.S. Supreme Court justices, have participated in the program since it began in 1976. The LEC also holds "economic institutes for law professors and law institutes for economists" (e.g., the Economics of Private Law institute), so that the two disciplines may become more intertwined.185(http://old.mediatransparency.org/funderprofile.php?funderID=9#185)

In addition to its donations to the LEC and FREE, the Koch family foundations also provide significant contributions to other conservative legal organizations. Clint Bolick, a rigid opponent of affirmative action at the Landmark Center for Civil Rights, and William Mellor, former president of PRI, asked the Koch family for financial backing for a libertarian public-interest law firm to advocate for school vouchers, faith-based social service programs and property rights and to oppose affirmative action. The organization became the conservative Institute for Justice in 1991, and it continues to receive substantial funding from the Koch family foundations.186(http://old.mediatransparency.org/funderprofile.php?funderID=9#186) The Federalist Society also receives a great deal of funding from the Koch family.

http://old.mediatransparency.org/funderprofile.php?funderID=9

T Hartmann SLAPP lawsuits

Politicians, staffers, and flacks often have legal background (perhaps prepares to argue and write laws).  The mainstream green movement developed considerable legal and policy expertise in order to use the Clean Air etc acts to force corporations (and sometimes the government itself) to protect the environment and public health.

Gov't can also use law as weapon: Nixon enemy list investigated by FBI and IRS.  Corps can use deep pockets to force adversaries to surrender, even when in the right (e.g., Monsanto on farmers and seed cleaner).  Corps can also use lawyers to deflect or delay gov't enforcement, which ends up being the same thing.  The tobacco industry routinely staved off lawsuits and regulations for decades.

More ominously, the ascendancy of a right-wing Supreme Court has been a tremendous help.  The Citizens United case allows unlimited and untraceable money into the political process, including the election of judges themselves (e.g., coal company state Sup Ct justice).  A conservative supreme court refused to allow a complete vote count in Florida (assisted by brooks Bros Riot, supported by Abramoff, Enron, Rove, Exxon?

Law should the MOST moderating influence: judges are often appointed for life, and they are bound by precedent, and constantly subject to review.  Also presumably old and respected in their community.  Conservatives are wary of "acticist " jusges who seek to supplant the legislature in making laws. (do "strict constructivsts" anticipate tea party consitutionalists?]

--

Mayer NYer

The KochsÃÃ��¢Ã‚€ÂÃ��™ subsidization of a pro-corporate movement fulfills, in many ways, the vision laid out in a secret 1971 memo that Lewis Powell, then a Virginia attorney, wrote two months before he was nominated to the Supreme Court. The antiwar movement had turned its anger on defense contractors, such as Dow Chemical, and Ralph Nader was leading a public-interest crusade against corporations. Powell, writing a report for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, urged American companies to fight back. The greatest threat to free enterprise, he warned, was not Communism or the New Left but, rather, âÃ��‚€Âœrespectable elements of society”—intellectuals, journalists, and scientists. To defeat them, he wrote, business leaders needed to wage a long-term, unified campaign to change public opinion.

Corporate think-tank influence extends even into the branch of government designed to be immune to it: the judiciary. Some of that influence is exerted by intervention in lawsuits to make arguments that favor industry. In 1999, for example, the Citizens for a Sound Economy Foundation, the funding arm of CSE, paid for "friend of the court" briefs that sought to declare the Clean Air Act unconstitutional. Where might a nonprofit charity like CSEF come up on short notice with the money required to pay lawyers who can charge $5,000 an hour? Answer: the Claude Lambe Foundation, also controlled by the Kochs, which gave CSEF $600,000 for "general operating support"; the DaimlerChrysler Corporation Fund, which kicked in another $250,000; and General Electric, which matched the DaimlerChrysler Fund’s donation. ThereâÃÂ��€Â™s no way of knowing whether that $1.1 million paid for the legal briefs, but that amount buys a lot of lawyers, even at Washington prices.

Influence is also exercised less directly. For example, the same Lambe Foundation that gave to CSEF also donated $150,000 to the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment (FREE), based in Bozeman, Montana. FREE conducts seminars for federal judges–including those at the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, where CSEF’s briefs were filed. FREE is in ideological lockstep with organizations like CSEF: While the foundation works the legal angle, FREE "educates" the judges who will hear the cases. Indeed, the two judges, Douglas Ginsburg and Stephen Williams, who held the Clean Air Act unconstitutional (a ruling that was later overturned by the Supreme Court), based their decision largely on the arguments advanced by CSEF. And both judges had enjoyed the all-expenses-paid FREE seminars. (Ginsburg attended them each year from 1993 to ’98; Williams went in 1993 and 1998.)

The Montana seminars feature horseback riding and hiking at FREE’s dude ranch near Big Sky. In each of two years, 1999 and 2000, 6 percent of the federal judiciary took in these junkets. A typical day includes morning presentations, free time in the afternoon, an evening cocktail hour, and then dinner with a speech by, say, Alfred DeCrane Jr., retired head of Texaco, called "The EnvironmentÃÃ��¢Ã‚€ÂÃ��“A CEO’s Perspective."

��

FREE says its seminars focus on "economic implications of science, risk, and environmental issues." Sounds innocent enough, until you peruse some of the reading material. One seminar handout discusses the "bureaucratic pathologies of . . . agencies like the EPA" and the "irresponsible efforts [of] . . . environmentalists hostile toward industrial civilization." FREE defends its seminars and its reliance on quasi-corporate funding on the grounds that "federal judges are smart, mature, sophisticated men and women . . . disposed by training to be discerning, critical, and alert to shoddy arguments."

It appears that FREE seminars have been successful at winning over these discerning judges. According to the Community Rights Counsel, a public-interest law firm based in Washington, D.C., that has gathered and analyzed an immense amount of data on FREE, in one case, "the judge ruled in favor of a litigant that [was] funded by the same special interests that helped fund his seminar." That judge, Stephen Williams (the same one who ruled the Clean Air Act unconstitutional), reversed himself in a highly publicized suit brought by the timber industry to gut the Endangered Species Act. At issue in Sweet Home v. Babbitt was the power of the government to protect endangered species by regulating habitat. In a two-to-one opinion issued on July 23, 1993, Williams and another judge upheld that power. Two weeks later, Williams attended his first FREE seminar. When he returned to Washington, he granted a rehearing to the timber industry, switched his vote, then wrote an opinion (later overturned by the Supreme Court) striking down the habitat regulations.

Central to the functioning of American democracy is a judicial system that dispenses justice with an even hand. Yet CSEF, FREE, and other like-minded groups seem intent on reshaping the judiciary in their own image. Chief among these groups is the shadowy but powerful Federalist Society. Another regular recipient of Koch largesse, the Federalist Society is described by the Washington Monthly as "the best-organized, best-funded, and most effective legal network operating in this country." (See "Lay of the Land," March/April 2002.) Lawyers who belong to or are active in the society include at least two Supreme Court justicesÃ��ƒÂ¢Ã‚€Ã��‚“Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomasâ��ƒÂ‚€Â“as well as dozens of other federal judges, Attorney General John Ashcroft, Solicitor General Ted Olson, and Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham. The society boasts a total membership of "20,000 legal professionals [and] active chapters in 60 cities." Yet, according to its 1998 federal tax return (which was provided to me when researching this story and which mistakenly included its list of donors), the Federalist SocietyâÂÂ��€ÃƒÂ‚™s income that year included $4,934,325 in grants from the Kochs’ and other such foundations but zero–yes, zeroÃ��ƒÂ¢Ã‚€Ã��‚“in membership dues.

http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/200207/thinktank_printable.asp

Jud Confirm Network

r reed

http://politicalcorrection.org/factcheck/200905190002

stein 2005?

ÃÃ��‚· Center for Individual Rights: $2.1 million 37 annual budget

ÂÃÂ��· Pacific Legal Foundation: $6.5 million annual budget

ÃÂÂ��· Institute for Justice: $4.7 million annual budget

· Landmark Legal Foundation: $1.1 million annual budget

· Mountain States Legal Foundation: $2.1 million annual budget

· Washington Legal Foundation: $3.2 million annual budget

ÃÂ��‚· Judicial Watch: $14.3 million annual budget

ÃÃ��‚· Federalist Society: $3.6 million annual budget

hightower

The entire court system is infested

By Jim Hightower- Sun., 1/30/11

Unfortunately, the corporatization of America's judiciary is not just a problem at the top. For more than 30 years, there has been a concerted effort by such ultra-wealthy corporate supremists as the Kochs, Scaifes, DeVoses, Coors, and Murdochs to place extremist, laissez-faire ideologues throughout the federal court structure. Using their extensive, well funded, and coordinated network of front groups, these moneyed elites can now move litigation through corporate-friendly courts at the district, appellate, and supreme levels.

��

For example, the legal effort by right-wing operatives to scuttle Obama's health care reform has taken the path of least political resistance, for their lawyers know how to go court shopping. They file their cases in the courts of judges who were put there because they are ideologically opposed to such things as government regulation of insurance giants and health care conglomerates. Some two dozen of these 'Obamacare' cases have been generated in the past few months, pushed by a who's who of corporate-funded fronts, including the American Center for Law and Justice, the Goldwater Institute, Judicial Watch, Liberty University, the Thomas More Law Center, the Pacific Justice Institute  http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/groups/pacific-justice-institute , and the Pacific Legal Foundation. Carefully choosing their courts, they've filed multiple cases that go after various parts of the reform law. As an official of the Goldwater group puts it: "[Obama's] health care plan will not die in a single sweep. It will take a thousand cuts."

One of these cuts has come from US District Judge Henry Hudson of Richmond, Virginia. On December 13, he ruled that a key provision of Obama's reform is unconstitutional, a ruling at odds with 14 other federal judges who'd dismissed similar challenges. The judge had to resort to tortured reasoning from the Civil War era to push this flawed case forward, but, hey--you can't let legal niceties get in the way of ideology.

Peek under Hudson's judicial robe, and you'll find a naked partisan with a long career in hard-right Republican politics. A protege of Ronald Reagan and his detestable attorney general, Ed Meese, Hudson ran unsuccessfully for a Virginia congressional seat in 1991, then was given two GOP political appointments in the state before George W lifted him onto the federal bench in 2002.

Even today, as he sits in judgment of politically motivated cases, Hudson continues to draw annual income as an owner of Campaign Solutions, a Republican political consulting firm. One of its successful clients is Virginia's GOP attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, who was elected with the firm's help in 2009. Ken just happens to be the official who filed the right wing's case against Obama's health care reform in Judge Hudson's court.

ALEC TASK FORCE

Civil Justice Task Force

     Articles and reports focusing on the right-wing attack on the judicial system

        Hijacking Justice: The Federalist Society, a Right-wing network of lawyers, judges and supporters, is undoing civil rights and other gains made through the courts [122], George E. Curry & Trevor W. Coleman, Emerge, October 1999

        Federalist Society Becomes a Force in Washington, Conservative Group's Members Take Key Roles in Bush White House and Help Shape Policy and Judicial Appointments [123], Thomas B. Edsall, Washington Post, April 18, 2001

        A Hostile Takeover, How the Federalist Society is capturing the federal courts, [124] Martin Garbus, The American Prospect, March 1, 2003

        Justice For Sale: Shortchanging the Public Interest for Private Gain [125], Review and Commentary by Richard L. Grossman, The Workbook, Fall 1993

        The Federalist Society and the Challenge to a Democratic Jurisprudence [126], Institute for Democracy Studies, undated

        The Attack on Trial Lawyers and Tort Law [127]. (PDF file, approx. 1 MB.)

        Also available in an online HTML version [128], David C. Johnson, Commonweal Institute, October, 2003

        Vast Right-Wing Collusion, Biased Judges, Big Money, and Tax Exempt Organizations Force Their Agenda [129], Mike Kress, American Politics Journal, March 16, 1999

        The Federalist Society, The Conservative Cabal That's Transforming American Law [130], Jerry Landay, Washington Monthly, March, 2000

        Don't Be Fooled. They're Activists, Too [131], Simon Lazarus, Washington Post, June 3, 2001

        Tipping the antitrust scales, How the right helped make the federal courts safe for Microsoft. [132], Andrew Leonard, Salon, March, 1999

      �� THE TAKINGS PROJECT: Using Federal Courts to Attack Community and Environmental Protections [133], Douglas T. Kendall & Charles P. Lord, Community Rights Counsel, April, 1998

        Issues Groups Fund Seminars for Judges [134], Ruth Marcus, Washington Post, April 9, 1998

        The Right's Judicial Juggernaut [135], Jack Newfield, The Nation, September 19, 2002

        The Federalist Society: From Obscurity to Power [136], A Report by the People For the American Way Foundation, undated.

        Federalist Society [137], Right Web Profile, November 30, 2006

        Judges get FREE lessons on property rights [138], Dustin Solberg, HighCountryNews.org, July 6, 1998

        Judges' Free Trips Go Unreported, U.S. Jurists Say They Forgot To Comply With Ethics Law [139], Joe Stephens, Washington Post, June 30, 2000

The initial introductory chapter I did not find particularly helpful and can be bypassed. The book begins to hit its stride in the second chapter on the "liberal legal network." It is helpful to have handy a copy of Laura Kalman's perceptive "The Strange Career of Legal Liberalism" to fully ingest the author's analysis. Basically, the author suggests, a combination of liberal legal groups (e.g., NAACP LDF; ACLU), elite law schools and their liberal faculty, the American Bar Association, and especially the Ford Foundation during the 1960's formed a potent coalition pushing the incorporate of liberal ideas into the law. This is, of course, also the era of Warren Court activism. Particular important in this regard was the "Gideon" decision which in turn led to the development of the Legal Services Program which unleashed numerous law suits pushing liberal ends in public interest litigation. Much of this activity was encouraged by generous support from the Ford Foundation. This activity generated a conservative response via conservative public interest law firms such as the Pacific Legal Foundation and the Chamber of Commerce. However, because of being controlled by business interests, lacking academic support, and making tactical mistakes, the first generation of conservative public interest firms generally was not successful.

A highly favorable development was the introduction of "law and economics" into legal analysis, and the two chapters devoted to this topic are among the best in the book. Particularly important in this regard are, of course, Judge Posner, Henry Manne (who established various programs at several schools and remade George Mason Law School), and the Olin Foundation, which becomes sort of the conservative Ford Foundation. Probably the strongest chapter in the book is devoted to the Federalist Society, which skillfully lays out its history, goals, and methods. The author is insistent that "boundary maintenance" separates the FS from its members'political activity, but I found this argument less than convincting. The FS did provide a network of highly skilled lawyers and faculty who generated vital legal analysis to support the conservative legal movement. So, when the second waive of conservative public interest law firms arrives in the late 1980's ("Center for Individual Rights" and the "Institute for Justice"), it is successful given the lessons of the past, the presence of the Federalist Society, the academic foundation laid by the law and economics movement, and highly effective leadership.

user rev of Teles , Steven M. The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law (Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparative Perspectives)