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yt EP 3 ON POWELL Episode 3: The Powell Memo | Master Plan - YouTube

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Episode 8: Shock and Awe | Master Plan - YouTube

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ep 3 cronkeit you are there.

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yt 10 25 25 new bk; ca

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clinton dec loophole bernie cda drug bill passed

sen BO ~ single payer bc of 2-3 mill illin jobs in insur ?

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OMFG SEE LEVER

[### JD Vance's Supreme Court Plot

The Lever

https://www.levernews.com › jd-vances-supreme-court-p...](https://www.levernews.com/jd-vances-supreme-court-plot/)

Oct 16, 2025 — Two new Supreme Court cases are designed to end campaign finance laws, legalize bribery, and create Citizens United 2.0.

MOst Americans want to overturn Citizens United v. FEC, the landmark 2010 Supreme Court decision that unleashed unlimited corporate spending on U.S. elections. But two new cases before the high court — including one spearheaded by now-Vice President JD Vance — are instead set to expand that ruling and turn America into a kleptocracy.

For the next several episodes of Lever Time, we’re taking a deep dive into Citizens United and how it’s transformed our lives. In this first episode, David Sirota uncovers conservatives’ plan to deregulate the campaign finance system, their efforts to legalize bribery, and what options we have to stop them.

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A full transcript of today’s episode is available below.

TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00] David Sirota: From The Lever's reader supported newsroom, this is Lever Time. I'm David Sirota. We may be in an age of partisan polarization, but most Americans still agree on one thing. Money corrupts the political process. 15 years ago, the Supreme Court issued its decision in Citizens United, the landmark case that allows corporations and billionaires to overrun our political system with cold hard cash.

American democracy has been tilted in favor of the rich ever since that decision. Most Americans would like to overturn Citizens United according to polls, and there have been many attempts, but two new Supreme Court cases, including one originally spearheaded by Vice President JD Vance, could go. In exactly the opposite direction.

They could eliminate the

last restrictions on campaign donations, and they could obstruct law enforcement's efforts to halt outright bribery. Today on lever time, we're gonna take a deep dive into the current state of the Citizens United era. In this first episode of a special multi-part investigative podcast series, we're gonna take a look at how conservatives are trying to accelerate their plan to deregulate the campaign finance system.

And what options still exist to stop them. That's all coming up on today's episode of Lever Time.

[00:01:30] George Stephanopoulos: The White House borders are. Tom Holman was recorded on an FBI surveillance tape in September, 2024, accepting $50,000 in cash.

[00:01:37] David Sirota: That's a BC news anchor George Stephanopoulos a few days ago interviewing Vice President JD Vance.

[00:01:43] George Stephanopoulos: Did he keep that money or give it back?

[00:01:46] Archive Clips: George, you've covered the story ad nauseum.

Tom Holman did not take a bribe

[00:01:52] David Sirota: last September. Tom Holman. Donald Trump's current borders are was reportedly caught on tape accepting a paper bag filled with $50,000 in cash from undercover FBI agents. During a sting operation, the undercover agents were posing as business executives seeking government favors.

If Trump was reelect. Although Holman was not a government official at the time, he allegedly accepted the money in exchange for promises of immigration related government contracts. If and when he joined Trump's administration, I mean, call me crazy, but that sounds like a bribe, right? Well, apparently not.

If you're JD Vance,

[00:02:33] George Stephanopoulos: you said he didn't take a bribe, but I'm not sure you answered the question. Are you saying that he did not accept the $50,000?

[00:02:39] Archive Clips: He did not take a bribe. Did he accept $50,000? I'm sure that in the course of Tom Holman's life, he has been paid more than $50,000 for services. The question is, did he do something illegal?

[00:02:52] David Sirota: That really is the question. Despite the bribery scandal, Trump appointed Holman to his administration. And soon after the Justice Department closed its investigation. And as ABC's George Stephanopoulos implied with his questions, some sources believe Holman may have kept the money. So what on earth is going on here?

Is bribery now legal? This week, the Lever published its first book. It's called Master Plan, the Hidden Plot to Legalize Corruption in America, adapted from the lever's Award-Winning podcast series of the same name, master Plan. The book tells the story of how we reached this strange point in history where the Vice President of the United States is now defending someone who reportedly accepted cash in exchange for the promise of government favors.

The book reveals for the first time ever, the secret plot to legalize corruption in America. It's a story that maybe you think you know, but trust me, you do not know it because the details were all kept secret until now. The book takes you on a 50 year journey following secretive groups of business executives and conservative politicians as they execute a master plan to deregulate the campaign finance system.

Weaken anti-bribery laws and defend what they call the free enterprise system in America. We show how these master planners have spent decades infiltrating our media, our schools, our elections, and our judicial system. The book also tells the story of a few key Supreme Court rulings that were key to the entire master plan.

Starting in the 1970s, the high court enshrined a radical fringe theory that money is a form of constitutionally protected free speech. Later, the court granted free speech rights to corporations, and then in 2010. Came the most consequential case of them all.

[00:04:53] Barack Obama: Citizens United Citizens United Citizens United Citizens United

[00:04:57] Archive Clips: Citizens United.

Citizens United was the worst court decision in modern American history.

[00:05:13] David Sirota: The Citizens United Opinion overturned decades of campaign finance laws. The Supreme Court's decision built upon the precedents of those previous cases that were engineered by the master plan. The ruling non ironically insisted that quote, independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.

That's a direct quote. And from that assertion, the ruling then declared that such corporate spending to buy elections can never be limited. That landmark decision opened the floodgates, allowing a tidal wave of corporate and billionaire money into American politics, often hidden from the public eye.

Here's former President Barack Obama at a press conference talking about the Citizens United ruling during his second term.

[00:06:05] Barack Obama: There aren't a lot of functioning democracies around the world that work this way. Where you can basically, uh, have. Millionaires and billionaires, bankrolling, uh, whoever they want, however they want, in some cases undisclosed.

And what it means is ordinary Americans are shut out of the process.

[00:06:22] David Sirota: In the years since the 2010 Citizens United decision, there's been a 28 fold increase in election spending.

[00:06:29] Archive Clips: This 2024 election cycle is predicted to be the most

expensive IT history. The Kamala Harris campaign said it raised almost $1 billion in the build up to the election.

The sums are staggering. $118 million in counting that Musk has contributed to a Trump Allied group. Where did it all come from and where did it go, and

[00:06:48] David Sirota: was it worth it? According to data from the Roosevelt Institute, nearly 20% of all spending during the 2024 federal election came from mega donors and their families.

A total of $2.6 billion. Still Citizens United left a few guardrails in place like campaign contribution limits, but now. Those last remaining regulations could be destroyed in the coming months. The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments in a lawsuit originally filed by Future Vice President, JD Vance, and his fellow Republicans in Congress.

Their goal. To reverse the Supreme Court's 2001 ruling that protected limits on coordinated campaign spending. They want to eliminate all restrictions on political parties, coordinated spending with candidates if those restrictions are killed off. Party committees could become pass through conduits, allowing big donors to avoid current campaign finance limits and deliver much bigger cash contributions to lawmakers who can then reward them with government favors.

This new lawsuit is part of a larger strategy to try to chip away at the remaining regulations limiting big money in politics. To support this JD Vance case, the master planners have conjured illegal fiction in an amicus brief submitted to the Supreme Court House. Republicans insisted that allowing unlimited coordinated spending between political parties and candidates would be totally fine because the money would be lumped together with donations from other contributors.

House Republicans argue that pooled political money, quote significantly dilutes the potential for any particular donor to exercise a corrupting influence over any particular candidate. In other words, they're asking the Supreme Court to believe that if a bank's CEO donated millions of dollars to a political party and the party spent that money in coordination with the candidate's campaign.

That money couldn't possibly influence how that lawmaker drafts span legislation. Right? It's a ridiculous argument, but they're making it with a straight face to the US Supreme Court. But you might be wondering, wait, doesn't the public want limits on campaign donations? If getting money out of politics is a popular idea, shouldn't the government be supporting the existing laws?

Well, earlier this year, Donald Trump's solicitor general ended the Justice Department's support of the current law. The Solicitor General also submitted a brief to the Supreme Court asking them to strike down current law if the old campaign finance law is overturned. Even more money could flood into the Republican and Democratic national Committees, allowing for even more direct collaborations between mega donors, political parties, and candidates.

In other words, this JD Vance case is a very, very big deal. Think of it as Citizens United 2.0. So after the Trump administration bailed on defending current law, who did the US Supreme Court assign to defend the last remaining threads of campaign finance regulations, a conservative attorney named Roman Martinez.

He served as a clerk for Chief Justice John Roberts in 2010, exactly when Roberts engineered the original Citizens United ruling. This same conservative attorney now charged with defending the last remaining campaign finance statutes. He also recently helped the Chamber of Commerce pressed justices to limit the scope of federal anti-bribery laws.

Could somebody play that old Chevy Chase clip here? Isn't that a conflict of interest? Like Citizens United in 2010, this new Supreme Court case only questions a narrow aspect of campaign finance law, the part that governs how much money political parties can spend in coordination with their candidates.

But just like Citizens United, the court could go way beyond the narrow issues in this case. And use the case as an opportunity to create a whole new precedent outlawing all campaign contribution limits. The court is set to hear the case during its current term, depending on how justice's rule. By the 2026 midterm election, we could be living under a whole new Citizens United 2.0 paradigm.

Where campaign donations to candidates and the potential for billionaires to buy elections are truly unlimited. And even if this JD Vance case fails, there's one more case also on the horizon. It aims to make it almost impossible for prosecutors to enforce federal anti-bribery laws. We'll hear more about that case after the break.

Welcome back to Lever Time. While the Republican Party pushes the Supreme Court to overturn campaign finance laws and kill campaign contribution limits, the court is also being petitioned to hear a separate case taking aim at federal anti-bribery laws.

[00:12:04] Archive Clips: Former Cincinnati City Council member pg sit and field has just been sentenced to 16 months in prison.

[00:12:11] David Sirota: PG Sittenfeld was arrested after an FBI Sting Caught him accepting $20,000 of campaign contributions as he supported a local development project that donors wanted.

[00:12:21] Archive Clips: Sittenfeld, of course, was found guilty on federal charges of bribery and attempted extortion.

[00:12:27] David Sirota: Sittenfeld was a rising democratic political star before all this unfolded.

He went from being the favorite in Cincinnati's mayoral race to being a convicted felon. He was convicted for taking what prosecutors called a bribe, and he paid the price. The system worked right. Well, not exactly. Sittenfeld was then pardoned by President Donald Trump, and Sittenfeld is now appealing his conviction by his own admission.

He's the first person ever to appeal a case after he's been pardoned and he's teaming up with a Trump connected law firm. He's being represented by Trump's former solicitor General, and he has the support of an army of former elected officials. Clearly, this case is less about one shady municipal deal in Cincinnati and more about eliciting a whole new Supreme Court precedent, making it even harder to prosecute public corruption cases if Seinfeld's appeal is approved by the Supreme Court.

It would join a decade long string of decisions, overturning bribery convictions that includes cases involving former Virginia Governor Bob McDonald aids to then New Jersey, governor Chris Christie, associates of New York, governor Andrew Cuomo, and a former mayor of Portage, Indiana. In that former mayor's case, the court went so far as to declare that a public official reaping a payment from the recipient of government contracts is not necessarily engaging in illegal bribery.

But is really just accepting a legal quote gratuity. It kind of makes you wonder why is the Supreme Court so chill about bribery?

[00:14:05] Archive Clips: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is responding to growing criticism about his lavish trips funded by a major GOP donor.

[00:14:12] Ted Lieu: Justice Samuel Alito also accepted lavage gifts.

From another conservative billionaire and didn't disclose it.

[00:14:20] David Sirota: Oh, right. While Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito were secretly accepting gifts from billionaires, they were overseeing cases that helped tear down bribery laws in their view, the real problem in American politics is not egregious corruption.

But instead overly strict anti-corruption laws, Seinfeld's case aims to weaken whatever's still left of the federal bribery statute, and it offers a novel new theory. His lawyers suggest that pay-to-play culture is now so pervasive. That it should no longer even be considered a prosecutable crime.

Perhaps you remember this

[00:15:00] Chris Hayes: last month, Donald Trump summoned a who's who of top lobbyists and executives from the oil and gas industry to the upscale La Quinta slash bribery palace. He calls Mar-a-Lago. And proceeded to solicit a billion dollars from the fossil fuel companies to get 'em elected as multiple outlets have now reported

[00:15:17] David Sirota: that specific incident was cited in Sittenfeld Supreme Court petition as proof that pay-to-play corruption is not a problem.

It's just a regular part of doing political business. The petition complains that in the Trump oil donor situation, quote, a prosecutor could doubtless present this meeting alone as at least ambiguous evidence of a quid pro quo. Therefore, if Seinfeld's conviction is allowed to stand. The petition argues that politicians would be quote, open to prosecution if they say anything during these often informal, unscripted conversations that can be read to even hint at a possible quid pro quo.

I. In the past, the Supreme Court may have evaluated the merits of these two cases and issued narrow rulings honoring past precedents, but in the era of the Roberts Court. Judicial respect for past precedent has often been completely ignored on campaign finance matters. By now you're probably thinking, okay, soda.

So the Roberts Court is about to give Citizens United an upgrade and blow the doors off of whatever's left of bribery laws. Is there anything we can do to stop this political disaster, to find a path out of our current nightmare? Let's zoom out a bit and take a look at the backers of the original Citizens United case.

The case takes its name from a small media corporation called Citizens United. In 2008, citizens United produced a little notice documentary film called Hillary the movie. Over the course of 90 minutes, the film painted Hillary Clinton. As a monster, she is steeped in controversy. Steeped

[00:17:00] George Stephanopoulos: in sleazes.

Ruthless, vindictive,

[00:17:03] Archive Clips: venal. Sneaky,

[00:17:06] George Stephanopoulos: ideological. Intolerant.

[00:17:09] Archive Clips: Liar is a good

[00:17:10] George Stephanopoulos: one. Scares the hell outta

[00:17:12] David Sirota: me. Under the old campaign laws, the Federal Election Commission issued an opinion saying the film's distribution would've been electioneering. That could be limited in an alternate universe. The story could have ended there.

But instead, citizens United went to court challenging the Federal Election Commission's opinion, not because they necessarily cared about the movie, but because they saw a chance to elicit a corruption legalizing scheme hiding behind the First Amendment. As one of the cases legal architects told us in an interview for our new book, the case was carefully engineered.

To give the new conservative court an opportunity to ignore legal precedent and quote, go big. It's hard to ignore the parallels with today with these two new cases, conservative groups hope that their arguments over campaign finance and bribery laws will give the Supreme Court, which is now far more conservative than it was in 2010.

Another chance to go big. Further eroding the laws that govern our elections and limit corruption. It's hard to tell how much more the American public can take. Corruption isn't an academic issue or a low level concern. It's the crisis creating every other problem.

[00:18:33] Archive Clips: Corruption is why they just defunded nursing homes to cut taxes for the rich.

[00:18:38] David Sirota: That's Georgia Democratic Senator John Ossoff.

[00:18:40] Archive Clips: Corruption is why you pay a fortune for prescription. Corruption is why your insurance claim keeps getting denied. Corruption is why hedge funds get to buy up all the houses in your neighborhood, driving you out of the market, and then your corporate landlord ignores your calls during a gas leak.

Corruption is why that ambulance costs $3,000 after you just had to get your choking toddler to the hospital.

[00:19:04] David Sirota: But even if these two new Supreme Court cases further legalize corruption and weaken our democracy, not all is yet lost in the weeks ahead. Right here on Lever Time, we're gonna take a deeper look at some of the potential changes that could defeat Citizens United 2.0 and pull this country out of its nosedive.

We're gonna take you to the state that's taking matters into its own hands. Montana is undoing Citizens United

[00:19:29] Chris Hayes: and

[00:19:30] David Sirota: your state can too. And we're gonna look at a new vision for campaign finance that could put a cap on the influence of oligarchs once and for all.

[00:19:38] Archive Clips: More than 100 candidates from across the state and political spectrum have already signed up for New York State's new public campaign finance program.

[00:19:45] Adam Schiff: Thanks to you, we've raised the maximum amount of money we can spend to this race.

[00:19:48] David Sirota: But first, we're gonna tell you about a proposed amendment to the Constitution.

[00:19:52] Adam Schiff: Today I'm joining my colleagues to reintroduce my constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. To affirm what should be obvious that our democracy is not for sale.

[00:20:02] David Sirota: That's all coming up on the next episode of Lever Time. Thanks for listening to another episode of Lever Time. Check out our brand new book, master Plan, the Hidden Plot to Legalize Corruption in America. You think you know the story of corruption, but trust me. You don't know the half of it. It's been secret until now.

Get the book by using the link in our show notes or going to lever news.com/book. Lever Time is a production of the Lever. This episode was produced by me, David Sirota and Natalie Bettendorf. It was edited and mixed by Ron Doyle. Our theme music is by Nick Campbell. You can subscribe to Lever Time on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, the PRX mobile app, or wherever you get your podcast.

Show notes. I'm David Cerda.

We'll be back next week with a new episode of Leverone.

[### Get Ready for Citizens United 2.0

Jacobin

https://jacobin.com › dark-money-pacs-vance-scotus](https://jacobin.com/2025/07/dark-money-pacs-vance-scotus)

Jul 14, 2025 — Thanks to champion of the working class J. D. Vance and his right-wing friends, including “dark money kingpin” Leonard Leo, we may soon find out ...

[### The Right's Secret Plan to Help Billionaires Buy Elections

Rolling Stone

https://www.rollingstone.com › political-commentary](https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/jd-vance-right-plan-billionaires-elections-1235445122/)

Oct 13, 2025 — J.D. Vance and other MAGA interests are working to get the Supreme Court to end restrictions on campaign-spending limits.

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new DN

“Master Plan”: New Lever Podcast Series Traces How Oligarchs “Legalized Corruption” in U.S. | Democracy Now!

Investigative journalist David Sirota, founder and editor-in-chief of The Lever, is the host of a new podcast series exploring how extremist ideologues and wealthy oligarchs have developed a system of legalized corruption in the U.S. Master Plan traces the decades-long conservative-led plan to increase the role of money in politics. “This was a plan, a specific plan, to deregulate the campaign finance laws,” says Sirota.

AMY GOODMAN: We look now at a major new investigation into how political extremists and corporate forces are orchestrating a system of legalized corruption in the United States. A new podcast series from The Lever aims to expose their scheme. It’s called Master Plan. It’s narrated by David Sirota, founder and editor-in-chief of The Lever. In this clip, he describes how he first became interested in following money in politics and the resulting corruption.

DAVID SIROTA: Can you pinpoint the exact moment when you realized how corrupt and FUBAR everything was? I can. It was after a predawn bus trip to Canada.

ROGER GARRITY: Sera Congi joins us live now from the U.S.-Canadian border in Highgate with more on the story. Sera?

SERA CONGI: Roger, it’s a matter of consumers paying one price here in the U.S. and a different price just 40 feet from where I’m standing.

DAVID SIROTA: It was the year 2000. I was a few years out of college, following my dreams of good government and progress that I’d seen on The West Wing. I scored my first big job in politics working for a then-obscure New England congressman who had started busing seniors to Canada in search of lower-priced prescription drugs.

REP. BERNIE SANDERS: So, then the question comes: Why is it that the same exact prescription drug, manufactured in the United States of America, is sold here in Canada or in Mexico or in Europe at far, far lower prices than that product is sold in the United States? That is insane.

DAVID SIROTA: He was right. It is insane. And he had a plan to fix it: a bill that would allow American pharmacies to buy cheaper drugs from Canada and sell them to Americans at the lower world market prices. It was a commonsense idea that seemed popular in both parties. Some Democrats even started campaigning on the issue in the 2000 election. I worked for one of them, in Montana, a farmer running for Senate who was organizing similar bus trips to Canada.

BRIAN SCHWEITZER: We didn’t ask people when they got on those buses for Canada if they were Republicans or Democrats or libertarians or vegetarians. We only asked them if you would like to make a difference. We said that we would embarrass Congress into action. And over a year ago, when we started these trips, Congress had never heard about the problem about prescription drugs. Now everybody’s got a solution.

DAVID SIROTA: The pressure campaign worked. More lawmakers from both parties sponsored the bill. It got votes in the House and Senate. It passed Congress, and President. Bill Clinton signed it. To 25-year-old me, it seemed the system had worked. There was a problem. The public pressured its government. The legislative machine went to work. And the wrong was righted. But then the hammer came down.

JOHN ROBERTS: A congressional plan to reduce Americans’ medical costs today ran smack into a roadblock.

DAVID SIROTA: I remember hearing the news. I was in my tiny D.C. apartment.

JOHN ROBERTS: Secretary of Health Donna Shalala, in a letter to the president, has now scuttled the plan by citing “serious flaws and loopholes” which “undermine the potential for cost savings.”

DAVID SIROTA: The trickery was grotesque. Lawmakers issued their press releases touting the passage of a bill that promised to lower the cost of prescription drugs, but the pharmaceutical industry had been funneling millions of dollars to both political parties, and lobbyists got their allies in Congress to slip a loophole into the bill. Then the Clinton administration used that loophole to kill the program before it could ever go into effect.

PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON: Since she couldn’t certify that American consumers wouldn’t get lower prices, she didn’t want to hold out false hope and be involved in something she thought was not legitimate.

DAVID SIROTA: The Clinton White House made this announcement right after Christmas, when everyone was on break — the kind of timing often used in Washington to make sure nobody notices something bad is happening. The whole thing reeked of corruption. And today, the price of medicine continues to skyrocket.

KRISTIN BYRNE: Last January, prices of more than 800 medications went up. It hurts those without insurance, and even those with it.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s a clip from the podcast series from The Lever called Master Plan.

For more, we’re joined by its host, David Sirota, founder and editor-in-chief of The Lever. His new Rolling Stone article is headlined “How the 2024 Election Is Normalizing Corruption.”

David, thanks for staying with us. Why don’t you lay out this series that you’ve been working on for a long time?

DAVID SIROTA: :{The premise of the series is that we live in a world where the campaign finance system has been deregulated and anti-corruption laws have been gutted. We’ve seen that recently at the Supreme Court, but we’ve seen it at the Supreme Court and in our politics really for decades. And I think we understand implicitly — polls show that people understand that we’re living in a time when money completely and thoroughly dominates politics. Every day you wake up, there are headlines about how much money is flooding into the political system. And it feels like that’s just the natural course of events.

But what we trace through never-before-reported documents is that this was a plan, a specific plan to deregulate the campaign finance laws, that started about 50 years ago with something called the Powell Memo. Back then, Lewis Powell, on his way to becoming the Supreme Court justice, issued a memo, wrote a memo about how corporations needed to reinvest in trying to take over the U.S. government because the government had been becoming too democratically responsive. And so, part of the plan that came out of that Powell Memo was a plan to destroy the post-Watergate campaign finance reforms and to destroy any future campaign finance reforms.

Soon after that, you saw the Buckley v. Valeo case, which enshrined the radical legal doctrine that money in politics is not corruption, money in politics is constitutionally protected speech. That came out of groups — that case came out of groups inspired by the Powell Memo. Soon after that, Lewis Powell, on the Supreme Court, extended those free speech rights to corporations trying to spend unlimited amounts of money in elections.

That ruling from Lewis Powell ended up becoming the basis for Citizens United — Citizens United, written by, of course, Lewis Powell’s immediate successor on the court, Anthony Kennedy, himself a former corporate lobbyist, famous for doling out money in Sacramento, in that Legislature there. And that ruling, of course, says that money cannot be regulated spent in elections, if it comes from so-called independent expenditure committees. And that ruling now has allowed an explosion of campaign cash into our political system.

And finally, after that came a string of rulings essentially weakening the federal bribery statute so that it’s almost impossible to prosecute corruption and bribery, straight-up bribery. So, the point being here is that people who are watching this understand that the system is dominated by money. I think what we unearthed, again, through never-before-reported documents, is that it was a specific plan to deregulate the campaign finance system by people who knew they couldn’t get their way on policy unless they were able to short-circuit democracy. To my mind, this is the real crisis of democracy: allowing our democracy to be bought.

AMY GOODMAN: And we just have 20 seconds. How is this election normalizing corruption, David?

DAVID SIROTA: Well, when you look at Donald Trump running out there, saying to oil donors, “Give me a billion dollars, and I will give you the policies that you want”; when you see, to my mind, Democrats trying to avoid too many — taking too many positions that might offend their corporate donors; when you see Democrats’ big donors demanding, for instance, they fire Lina Khan; and none of that seeming like a scandal, all of it seeming like that’s just the way politics is done, we are in an era where that kind of corruption is now normal. And that’s a problem.

AMY GOODMAN: We have to leave it there, David Sirota, editor-in-chief of The Lever, the podcast series, Master Plan. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us.

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in order to overturn roe, had to 1st get rid of camp finance

Aug 13, 2024

MASTER PLAN, Ep 1: Nixon’s Milk Money Prompts A Backlash

Master Plan’s first episode explores a scandal that inspired groundbreaking anti-corruption legislation — if only the reforms could have lasted.

busted for milk shakedOWn --> FECA

evid

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Aug 20, 2024

MASTER PLAN, Ep 2: Watergate’s Magic Window Of Corporate Cash

As brand-name companies fund the break-in, a White House memo envisions dark money and Nixon leaves a ticking time bomb in D.C.

evid

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master plan 11 4 24

immed after ruling hockey stick dk money? politics by extortion?

montana amicus brief said 2 claims demo BS bullock whitehouse w/ mccain

11-1179-Senators-Whitehouse-and-McCain-Cert-Amicus

sep by other reps

memo john dean to colson on using corps/trade gps to beat finance reform ep 1

ep 2* Secret Plan for a 60-Day Lawless Window:Read the memo in which Watergate’s burglary mastermind G. Gordon Liddy lays out how anonymous corporate donors can funnel money to Nixon’s campaign before new campaign finance laws go into effect.

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DAVID:The news story picks up later that day at the Common Cause office, where we see rooms of young volunteers. They’re sporting some quintessential 70s outfits along with handlebar mustaches, big collars, and big hair. Most of them look fresh-faced— barely out of college — as they begin to sort through the preliminary donor information they’d managed to extract from CREEP. They didn’t get the holy grail — the anonymous donor list from the secret window — but they’d gotten something.

ARCHIVAL NEWS CLIP:A quick total for Chairman Gardner, just under $5 million. Heading the list, Chicago insurance man Clemens Stone — $1,000,000 — reinforcing rumors he’s about to be appointed ambassador to Great Britain.

Next, $800,000 from Richard Scaife of the wealthy Mellon family.

Arthur Watson, former ambassador to France, gave $300,000. John Mulcahy of New York hosted the president on his trip to Ireland, $255,000.

ep 3 xtras powell robe pix logo tob

...DAVID: I am going to play you a recording. It’s something of an artifact, a vinyl record that almost no one has heard in the last 50 years.

ARCHIVAL NEWS CLIP:Lewis F. Powell Jr. began the practice of law in Virginia in the year 1932. His intellect, his dedication and his great qualities as a human being became widely known and appreciated by his peers…

DAVID:That’s the iconic voice of Walter Cronkite, the CBS News anchor, who you’ve heard in previous episodes delivering reports on the Watergate Scandal.

ARCHIVAL NEWS CLIP:In his 64th year, he can look back upon a distinguished career equaled by very few…

DAVID:In addition to his anchor gig, Cronkite in the mid-20th century hosted a popular radio and TV program called You Are There. It used fictional reenactments to teach the audience about historical events and figures, presenting them as if they were being covered live.

ARCHIVAL NEWS CLIP:A great change took place in the life of Lewis Powell, on October 21, 1971. All things are as they were then, except You Are There.

DAVID:Prior episode topics included the Battle of Gettysburg and the Boston Tea Party. For this one, Cronkite focused on a different monumental event.

ARCHIVAL NEWS CLIP:On December 6, 1971, the Senate confirmed the nomination of Lewis F. Powell Jr. to the Supreme Court of the United States.

DAVID:But this edition of You Are There was never broadcast. It was never intended to be heard by anyone outside of a hundred-or-so attendees gathered for the annual Christmas luncheon for Philip Morris Incorporated. You might recall Philip Morris as the tobacco giant behind dozens of cigarette brands, including Marlboro and Virginia Slims.

The event, at the swanky 21 Club’ in Midtown Manhattan, brought together corporate executives, board members and shareholders to celebrate Lewis Powell and his confirmation to the United States Supreme Court. In his opening remarks, Phillip Morris’s longtime Chairman and CEO, Joseph Cullman, declared Powell’s Supreme Court appointment “without question the greatest single honor ever bestowed upon anyone connected with Philip Morris.”

For this smoke-filled celebration, money was no object. The 20-minute spoof of You Are Thereincluded the real-life Walter Cronkite — often cited as “the most trusted man in America.” He was there in person at the event with a cast of actors performing scripted skits recounting key moments in Lewis Powell’s life and career. It starts with him growing up in Richmond, Virginia…

ARCHIVAL NEWS CLIP:

…Mr. Powell! Mr. Powell! I just come from your house, congratulations, your wife just give birth to a baby boy…

…Well, that’s really good news…

DAVID:Then the program spotlights Powell being asked by President Nixon to fill a Supreme Court seat.

ARCHIVAL NEWS CLIP:We will now continue our committee hearings on Mr. Lewis Powell’s nomination.

DAVID:So why was Powell being celebrated by Philip Morris? Because when he was nominated, he was on the boards of several major companies including — wait for it — Philip Morris! In fact, he had been crucial in helping the cigarette-maker navigate the growing legal and regulatory scrutiny over public health concerns about smoking. And now Philip Morris’s own guy - Lewis Powell –- was going to be on the Supreme Court!

The live show in Manhattan concluded —- I shit you not –– with the head of Philip Morris presenting Lewis Powell with a black Supreme Court justice robe emblazoned with giant logos for Marlboro cigarettes and other Philip Morris brands. Just like a NASCAR driver!

It almost seems too hard to believe but we found pictures of the robe to prove it. (There’s a link in our show notes.)

Obviously this was a pretty strange event and the robe was likely a gag gift. But still, the following day Powell wrote a heartfelt thank you letter to Cullman for the gifts to him and his wife, which also included a crystal sculpture and a watch.

“But” Powell wrote, “sentimentally, I think we like the Philip Morris robe best of all!”

Philip Morris was rejoicing because Powell was one of their own — a distinguished member of the political and business gentry ascending to the nation’s highest court.

But there was another, more covert reason for the corporate elite’s glee. Earlier that year, Powell had written a “confidential memo” that was the founding document of the entire Master Plan.

Maybe you’ve heard of it.

REP: HANK JOHNSON: This master plan that was set out in the Lewis Powell memo, and I’d advise you to go and look it up…

DAVID:You can see why people described Powell as a mixture of “aw, shucks” humility and witty grace. It’s also why he was uniformly liked. His friends, family and biographers used words like calm, affable, sensible, self-effacing. In a 1978 documentary, here’s how Powell described his early years on the court, when he wanted to earn his place among the veteran justices.

LEWIS F. POWELL:The justice that’s the youngest in seniority is the door keeper. I was the highest-paid doorkeeper in the world for five years.

DAVID:When Powell finally hung up his robe in 1987, the liberal crowd applauded him for being a centrist.

...

JARED: Affirmative action was probably the biggest one, where he was the fifth vote to allow it. These were the big social issues of the ‘80s and ‘90s, and he was seen as a swing vote or a moderate.

...

JARED:But meanwhile, in cases dealing with the rights of corporations and about campaign finance laws, Powell took positions that weren’t so moderate — and the long-term effects of those court decisions, on the economy and the environment, for example, didn’t become obvious until decades later.

DAVID: And so they have kinda flown under the radar.

JARED: Yeah. A lot of crazy stuff was going on in the early 1970s. And that’s probably part of the reason why this memo, which he wrote only a few months before getting on the Court, never really caught the public’s attention. Powell never spoke publicly about it.

He later said that it was something he’d written up in his free time in 1971, basically as a favor to an old friend. And he told people that he sent the memo off to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and nothing much came of it. End of story.

...

DAVID: That’s Master Plan Producer Jared Jacang Maher, who has spent the last two years digging deep into Lewis Powell.

JARED: I read the entire official biography of Lewis F. Powell. It’s like 700 pages long. It was written by a legal scholar who was once one of Powell’s clerks at the Supreme Court and it does not mention the memo once.

...

DAVID:Okay, there we go. Richmond, Virginia was the capital of the Confederacy during the Civil War. After Reconstruction, it emerged as an economic hub in the early 1900s. The growth of the tobacco industry, banking, railroads, and manufacturing all converged to transform the city into a central power for the new South — this one based around corporate enterprise.

Powell’s family wasn’t wealthy, but his father could trace his roots back to Captain Nathaniel Powell of the original Jamestown settlers. After college, Powell returned to Richmond and earned a job that would come to define his life and career.

ARCHIVAL TELEVISION:YEE-HAW!

JARED:No, man… Powell wasn’t running moonshine in a muscle car with a Confederate flag painted on top. Powell was a good boy with legitimate career goals. He joined a law office in Richmond that represented big businesses trying to avoid government rules and regulations. The firm’s founder had made a name for himself by helping railroad companies fight off regulators in Virginia. Rockefellers, Railroad barons — that was their bread and butter.

DAVID: OK, so Lewis Powell, more Boss Hogg than the Duke boys. Got it.

JARED:Correct. And as the firm’s post-war clientele grew from small local companies into multinational conglomerates, Powell was one of the lawyers working hard to deregulate financial laws.

DAVID:By the 1960s, Powell had become one of the most prominent lawyers in Richmond and a fixture of the city’s elite establishment. Powell and his colleagues weren’t just legal advisors; they were deeply involved in business strategy and decision-making, and they were often rewarded with shares in the companies they represented. Powell held seats on the boards of major companies like the Ethyl Corporation, Brooks Brothers, various Virginia banks, and, yes, Philip Morris.

...

JARED with a dictaphone filter: “As you know, I have long thought that the tobacco industry could not continue indefinitely to ignore the extremism and lack of regard for the truth manifested by the American Cancer Society and others. I believe your recent moves have been justified and constructive. At the very least, the American Cancer Society is likely to be more restrained in the future.”

DAVID: And to be clear, Powell is writing this to Philip Morris’s CEO even though he and the tobacco industry knew, based on their own studies, that cigarettes were killing people.

JARED: Yup, this campaign Powell was involved in, this was a sophisticated PR effort that mixed lobbying, media relations, litigation and industry groups to prevent anything that would hinder their profits.

DAVID: And they were extremely successful. In 1971, Philip Morris saw record revenues. By the way, this was the same year they hosted the Walter Cronkite radio party for Lewis Powell.

But while Powell was helping Phillip Morris cover up tobacco’s health risks, he also had a side obsession.

JARED: Which leads us to our third and final major influence on Powell — one that we were shocked to find. While digging around the Powell archives, I found letters showing that starting in the 1960s, Powell began a regular correspondence with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who infamously used the agency to target alleged communists in every aspect of American society. It turns out that while Powell was president of the American Bar Association and a member on the Virginia Board of Education, he was functioning as an “SAC contact.”

...

JARED: It’s an FBI term for a confidential informant. Or you could say it was someone that the FBI was really close and friendly with. A trusted friend they could call upon to provide information. Like, in Powell’s case, about possible communist activities in the legal profession.

DAVID: Okay so this fine, upstanding, polite guy Lewis Powell is also kind of like J. Edgar Hoover’s eyes and ears on the legal profession.

JARED:Yeah and not only that, into the late 1960s, Powell was corresponding frequently with Hoover’s most trusted lieutenant, sharing his concerns about communism and left-wing activism. This high-level FBI official was giving Powell agency intelligence about the operations and financials of the New Left. Powell was thinking a lot about this new breed of political activists and college campus organizers. He was very interested in a report called “Confrontation Politics” which analyzed the rhetorical style of these radical groups.

In one letter, Hoover’s guy recommended that Powell check out a newly published book, called Revolution for the Hell of It

DAVID: By Abbie Hoffman.

JARED: Here’s what Hoover’s guy wrote to Powell: “Hoffman is the leader of the Youth International Party (Yippies) and a self-admitted anarchist and revolutionary. This book might give you some insights into the New Leftist mentality.”

DAVID:While Powell’s correspondence with the FBI was secret, Powell was becoming more public about his crusades against communism and for law and order. He began making political speeches around the country amid the protests and chaos of the 1960s.

LEWIS F. POWELL:Today there are others with quite opposite goals who insist with equal fervor that civil disobedience of laws deemed to be unjust is a legitimate means of asserting desired right. Tyranny is the inevitable result of this form of anarchy.

DAVID:Powell was internalizing, echoing and being radicalized by the same themes being promoted by conservative icons of this era. Here’s Ronald Reagan right around the same time:

RONALD REAGAN:You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, “There is a price we will not pay. There is a point beyond which they must not advance.”

JARED: There’s this two year period, between 1968 and 1970, where Powell became increasingly alarmed about the direction of the country. One speech I found — it’s called “The Attack on American Institutions” — and it shows just how vehement he’d become.

LEWIS F. POWELL:And yet these are not ordinary times, and you are not an ordinary audience. You are the front line of the free enterprise system. Also you are dedicated Americans who believe that our economic and political system — free American democracy — you believe that to be the best ever conceived by man.

JARED:Richard Nixon, I should mention, was especially impressed with thisspeech by Powell in 1970.

...

JARED: Ok this is from a string of letters between Powell and this guy from Madison Avenue, William Ruder. Ruder was co-founder of the PR agency Ruder Finn, which was key to helping Philip Morris with their campaigns to deny the scientific evidence that smoking causes cancer.

Ruder wrote to Powell:

“I enjoyed our discussion about the question of the whole free enterprise system — and the open question as to who is going to be doing the work to make sure that in the long run it survives. I think unfortunately that this is in the category of everybody’s job — and therefore nobody’s. And that’s a real pity.”

...

DAVID:That last line by Nixon is really important.

PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON:I know what you’ve done through the years.

DAVID:Nixon knew exactly who Powell was and exactly what Powell represented. In a private phone call with California Governor Ronald Reagan, Nixon characterized Powell as “a corporation lawyer.”

For Nixon, nominating Powell was a political masterstroke — Powell was conservative conservative enough to get nominated by a Republican president, but seemed on the surface to be moderate enough to be accepted by a Democratic Congress. But the bottom line was… if Powell was confirmed, big business would get its man, the man with the plan, on the highest court in the land.

...

Well that’s the thing: The FBI did a background check of Powell and interviewed dozens of friends, colleagues and co-workers for its report to the Senate. But remember — the agency was run by Powell’s penpal J. Edgar Hoover, and so, conveniently, Powell’s memo — the clearest statement of his actual political ideology that he’d bring to the Supreme Court — did not show up in the FBI’s report, nor did they mention his close association with Hoover and Hoover’s top lieutenant.

And, of course, they also left out Powell comparing liberal activists to Adolf Hitler.

ARCHIVAL NEWS CLIP:“The vote confirming Powells nomination to the court was 89-1.”

DAVID:Amazingly, only one guy in the entire Senate seemed suspicious of Powell.

ARCHIVAL NEWS CLIP: ... the only dissenting vote coming from Fred Harris of Oklahoma. Harris explained his contrary vote as a lack of confidence and a man he charged was an elitist with no compassion for little people.

...

PROFESSOR ADAM WINKLER:There were a lot of people sitting in Congress who had voted for many of the kinds of laws that Powell thought were so dangerous — consumer regulation, highway safety regulation, civil rights laws and significant antitrust laws, etc. Had Justice Powell’s strong pro-business views as expressed in the Chamber of Commerce memo been known, he might never have made it onto the Supreme Court.

DAVID:We’ll never know, because while the Powell Memo circulated among the Chamber of Commerce crowd, it remained a secret to the outside world.

But that changed once Powell was installed on the court, and his memo got out.

A few months after Powell was sworn in, his memo was leaked to Jack Anderson, a prominent Washington Post columnist known for exposing Nixon’s corrupt activities. Anderson’s article, headlined “FBI Missed Blueprint by Powell,” was syndicated nationwide, raising questions about why this aggressive political document was concealed during Powell’s confirmation hearings.

Powell himself never publicly addressed that controversy. He downplayed the memo to his clerks and colleagues. He portrayed it as a quick, informal favor for a friend, not a serious policy document.

Meanwhile, corporate leaders, upset by the negative press around the memo, rallied to Powell’s defense.

Fellow lawyers penned letters to newspaper editors criticizing the media coverage.

Senator Harry F. Byrd Jr., a longtime friend of Powell’s, even took to the Senate floor to defend his fellow Virginian. Byrd said:

“In essence, the memorandum is a call to the business community of the United States to exercise its first amendment right of free expression on its own behalf.”

In retrospect, this pushback seems to be a tactic from Powell’s own playbook, using the controversy as an opportunity to spread the message of the memo even further.

In fact, Byrd had the full text of the Memo submitted into the Congressional Record. It seemed like Powell’s acolytes were ready to heed his words and fight back against the haters, or has he called them, “the Naders”

LEWIS F. POWELL:There should be no hesitation and every available means should be employed to challenge and refute unfair attacks

DAVID:Overshadowed by other political scandals like the Watergate investigation, the leak of the Powell Memo faded from the media’s memory and Powell worked hard to burnish his public image as a moderate, genteel lawyer.

Even when Powell died in 1998, his obituary in The Washington Post didn’t not mention the memo. It seemed lost to history.

But the memo did not go away.

...

ep 10 evidence

...

DAVID:To understand how the government’s ridiculously weak security system worked, you gotta first understand what it was trying to police. In the post-Citizens United era, oligarchs and billionaires were increasingly disguising their money by funneling it through shadowy charities, so-called social welfare organizations, and other opaque nonprofits that were engaging in all sorts of political battles.

So after Citizens United, California law enforcement officials — led by then-Attorney General Kamala Harris — they started more stringently enforcing the state’s rules requiring these nonprofit groups to submit a non-public list of their major funders alongside their annual tax forms. Like security cameras at a bank, the requirements were designed to help regulators keep an eye on things. In this case, the regulators were supposed to make sure charities and social welfare groups were not committing fraud and were not just political groups by another name.

Plenty of groups complied with the new enforcement, but some refused. The master planners didn’t want to disclose their donors to anyone. So in 2015, one of the biggest groups objecting to the rules filed a lawsuit against Kamala Harris and the California State Attorney General’s office, trying to stop them from shining any spotlight on the darkest of dark money.

“DIE HARD”:They’re shooting at the lights… they’re going after the lights!

DAVID:The group leading the case? Americans for Prosperity — officially a tax-exempt public charity that described itself as “devoted to education and training about the principles of a free and open society.”

Yeah, if you heard that description and coughed like that, it’s probably because you’re remembering…

ARCHIVAL NEWS FOOTAGE:Americans for Prosperity is the tax-exempt conservative political organization set up by David and Charles Koch.

DAVID:The Koch’s political machine waltzed into court insisting that being forced to disclose donor information to the government was a First Amendment violation because it might make their donors less likely to donate — and subject those donors to retribution.

Judges in California’s federal appeals court didn’t buy that argument.

But the master planners refused to concede. And when they appealed to the Supreme Court to intervene, support for their case poured in from Powell memo-inspired groups that we’ve mentioned before, like the Cato Institute and the Pacific Legal Foundation, which pushed the Supreme Court to hear the case in 2021.

Here’s Senator Sheldon Whitehouse:

SENATOR SHELDON WHITEHOUSE:We counted 50 dark-money-funded front groups filing amicus briefs saying take this case, take this case, take this case. 50 was a blaring signal to the Federalist Society justices on the court. “This is huge for us. We need this. Let’s get this done.”

DAVID:By this point, the Supreme Court looked very different than it did back when Antonin Scalia scolded James Bopp in defense of disclosure laws. Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsberg were dead, and Anthony Kennedy was retired — and the master planners like Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society had orchestrated a multimillion-dollar campaign to replace them with Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett, taking a 5-4 court and making it a 6-3 supermajority.

In oral arguments, this new, even more conservative court immediately started questioning Scalia’s belief that the public has a right to know who is spending money to influence policy. The oft-silent Clarence Thomas spoke up again, seemingly concerned about donors to alleged hate groups...

ARCHIVAL SUPREME COURT AUDIO (CLARENCE THOMAS):Do you think it would be reasonable for someone who wants to make a substantial contribution to an organization that has been accused of being racist or homophobic or white supremacist, that in this environment that they would be chilled because they have reduced or no confidence that their contribution will be kept confidential?

DAVID:Oh dear, whatever might happen to white supremacist groups if their donors had to reveal themselves?

Meanwhile, the master planners came up with an argument transporting them back to a golden age of white supremacy.

“BACK TO THE FUTURE”:

…You’re safe and sound back in good old 1955…

…1955?!...

DAVID:Okay, so remember how James Bopp — the architect of the Citizens United case — said he found inspiration from Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP’s old civil rights cases that desegregated schools? Remember that?

....

DAVID:You probably know that billionaires, the guys at the Chamber of Commerce, the acolytes of the Powell Memo, and all the other master planners really hate the IRS because they generally don’t like paying taxes — and their leaders have spent decades berating the agency as a greedy monster.

ARCHIVAL SPEECH AUDIO (RONALD REAGAN):We must radically change the structure of a tax system that still treats our earnings as the personal property of the Internal Revenue Service.

DAVID:But the master planners also hate the agency for another reason: In the world of campaign finance, the IRS is one of the few remaining cops that is supposed to make sure charities that get special tax breaks for their work are actually charities, and not political advocacy groups.

And so for the master planners who want to deregulate the campaign finance system, the next step was disarming these cops. Yes, “defunding the police.”

Now, you’re probably thinking — wait, why is the IRS, the tax man, involved in campaign finance? To answer that, we’re gonna go a bit deeper into the whole issue of charities and the tax code that I hinted at a bit earlier. I’m joined by Master Plan editor Ron Doyle, who promised we’d get through this part quickly.

RON: What, you don’t wanna spend a lot of time talking about the tax code?

DAVID: I know, it feels like the cure for insomnia, but this is important, so let’s get it over with.

RON: Yeah, let’s do it. So, we just told you about the Supreme Court’s ruling that ended disclosure rules for social welfare organizations like Americans for Prosperity.

DAVID: The Koch Brothers’ conservative nonprofit.

RON: Exactly. But we also need to explain how a political group like Americans for Prosperity became classified as a social welfare organization in the first place. That’s where the IRS comes in. These nonprofit groups are known as 501(c)(4)s, named for the section of the federal tax code that classifies them. If the IRS approves a group’s application for 501(c)(4) nonprofit status, that group doesn’t have to pay any taxes — but the law says that these groups must “operate exclusively for the promotion of social welfare.” Classic charity stuff, like the Sierra Club or your local volunteer fire department. Originally, these groups were not allowed to participate in political activities.

DAVID: But, of course, since so many political groups are now 501(c)(4)s, I’m guessing that changed in some sort of nefarious plot twist.

RON: I don’t know if it was nefarious, but it was definitely a plot twist. The IRS made a tiny change to the tax code in 1959 that allowed 501(c)(4) “social welfare” groups to still get their tax exemption, as long as they are “primarily engaged in promoting in some way the common good.”

DAVID: So wait — the law said “exclusively,” but the IRS in 1959 interpreted that to instead mean “primarily?”

RON: Yeah, pretty much. And that paradoxical Orwellian newspeak was everything — the subtle shift let these groups start engaging in all sorts of political activity — lobbying, supporting political candidates — as long as they could argue it isn’t their primary purpose. And that’s why overtly political groups like Americans for Prosperity or the anti-abortion National Right to Life Committee don’t have to pay any taxes.

DAVID:And then came the January 2010 Citizens United decision, which allowed corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money in politics and elections. While the ruling upheld existing donor disclosure laws, it didn’t require the creation of those laws. So donors started funneling lots of money to 501(c)(4)s, which weren’t subject to existing public disclosure laws.

RON:And those anonymously funded 501(c)(4)s could then spend on so-called “issue” ads like the ones that now plague this country during every election cycle.....

Representatives in 2010 and began aggressively cutting the agency’s budget.

Republican lawmakers bragged that the cuts were designed to hobble the agency.

ARCHIVAL NEWS FOOTAGE (REP. CRENSHAW):We deliberately lowered the IRS funding to a level to make them think twice about what they are doing and why they are doing it

DAVID:Between 2010 and 2021, the years that overlapped this fake scandal about 501(c)(4)s, the IRS’s budget was slashed by 19 percent, and its staff was reduced by nearly a quarter. With those kinds of cuts— and with the threat of more — the IRS essentially stopped investigating any possible violation of the nonprofit rules.

The IRS was so depleted of resources that billionaires and corporations were able to more easily avoid taxes with little threat of audit — and then use the winnings from that tax avoidance to pump even more cash into the newly deregulated dark money groups.

So the second step in this post-Citizens Unitedcaper was complete. The last few cops guarding the vault were bruised, battered, and neutralized, leaving campaign finance reformers on the ground watching in horror as the heist of democracy moved forward.

After the break — the final step in this caper: the getaway plan.

The post-Citizens United heist of democracy crescendoed in sorta the same way as that great heist movie classic, “The Usual Suspects.”

===

in order to overturn roe, had to 1st get rid of camp finance

Oct 8, 2024

MASTER PLAN, Ep 9: The Swing Vote That Changed America

bork --> kennedy

...Indiana attorney James Bopp engineered the case allowing dark money in politics specifically with the court’s “swing vote” in mind.

...Carefully watching this appointment was an Indiana lawyer who’d made it his life’s mission to outlaw abortion and gut campaign finance laws. James Bopp knew that Kennedy had a moderate reputation after siding with liberal justices on social issues, but his rulings on campaign finance cases began to signal that he could be open to helping the master planners further open the floodgates of dark money.

Bopp got a chance to test his theory when the political advocacy group Citizens United planned to release Hillary: The Movie.Knowing that a film criticizing then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton would likely violate the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law’s restrictions on electioneering, Bopp challenged the constitutionality of the law.

A hidden drama at the Supreme Court began as Chief Justice Roberts proposed a narrow ruling in the Citizens United case, while Justice Kennedy pushed for a far-reaching decision. Behind the scenes, a scathing dissent has since vanished from the record — and the final ruling would live in infamy, reshaping campaign finance law for years to come.

Bopp was about to find out that Kennedy wasn’t just an ally.

evid

early in his career, Anthony Kennedy helped draft an anti-tax ballot initiative for then-Governor Ronald Reagan. Theagenda for a "confidential" two-day meeting of Reagan’s Tax Reduction Task Force in late 1972 listed Kennedy among a select group of participants, including economist Milton Friedman, management consultant Peter Drucker, and William Baroody, head of the American Enterprise Institute.

...

Anthony Kennedy was born into this swampy culture. His dad was a powerful lawyer and lobbyist who focused on the state legislature, running a reliable business of influence peddling and soft corruption. In 1963 his father died of a heart attack, and young Anthony took over the firm. He was only 27 years old. As a lobbyist, Kennedy soon became known for handing out campaign money to legislators on behalf of his clients. He worked alongside Ed Meese, a master planner we've mentioned a few times before, who had a close relationship with that B movie actor from the man meets monkey film, Bedtime for Bonzo, “even a monkey brought up in the right surroundings could learn the meaning of decency and honesty.”

Of course, by the early 1970s that same actor was the arch conservative governor of California, Ronald Reagan. And so while the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was holding its secret meetings about implementing the Powell memo in 1973 the Chamber's California State branch, was doing its part to put the memos’ ideology into action, backing Governor Reagan's major anti tax ballot measure, which it billed in Powell memo-esque terms as an economic Bill of Rights. Who helped Reagan draft that ballot measure? Anthony Kennedy.

ARCHIVAL NEWS FOOTAGE: It is the most. Revolutionary and complicated tax reform ever to be submitted to a vote of the people. Proposition one would cut state income taxes, making them a little smaller each year. It would put a constitutional limit on state spending, allowing increases only as the total personal taxable income in California rises.

DAVID:The tax proposition ultimately failed by hundreds of 1000s of votes, but Reagan soon helped his pal Kennedy by getting President Gerald Ford to appoint him to a federal judgeship. Kennedy was just 38 years old when he was appointed to the bench, making him the youngest federal appellate judge in the country. Right away, Kennedy forged a reputation as mild-mannered and polite, some might even say Genteel. He was a conservative, yes, but not necessarily a predictable or totally ideological one. He had a reputation for supporting individual freedoms, read: like a libertarian, and making narrow decisions on a case-by-case basis, rather than issuing sweeping ideological rulings. And he kept that up into the late 1980s coming to be known as the leader of a conservative minority on California's more liberal Ninth Circuit. And then in June 1987, journalist Bill Moyers asked the OG master planner US Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, how much longer he would remain on the court...

ARCHIVAL NEWS FOOTAGE, Newscaster: Good evening. Justice Lewis Powell, a courtly Southerner surprised almost everyone today by announcing his retirement from the US Supreme Court. His decision touched off a flurry of speculation on who the President will appoint as a replacement and how that will affect the direction of the court, and of course, the country.

DAVID: That meant Anthony Kennedy's old pal from Sacramento, now-President Ronald Reagan, suddenly had a chance to nominate a new Supreme Court justice. Want to guess who Reagan first picked to fill Lewis Powell's seat? Nope, not Anthony Kennedy. Reagan first went for the A-Lister of the master plan cinematic universe, the one, the only Robert Bork. Yep, that's the same Robert Bork who did Nixon's dirty work and who helped Gerald Ford get the Buckley v Valeo ruling, as you also heard a few episodes ago, when Reagan nominated the Rasputin-like Bork to the Supreme Court, Senate Democrats fought back. We told you that Bork got borked, but we didn't tell you what happened next when Bork was voted down, Reagan's second choice was Douglas Ginsburg. Ginsburg had led the Reagan White House's deregulation agenda. He'd hobbled antitrust enforcement at the Justice Department, and he had just made an appearance at a Federalist Society event. I mean, he was no Robert Bork, but he was a pretty perfect Master Plan pick, right? Well, almost —

ARCHIVAL NEWS FOOTAGE: Ginsburg was forced to withdraw from consideration in a very 1980s scandal, several conservative Republicans had urged President Reagan to withdraw Ginsburg nomination after he disclosed he smoked marijuana in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

DAVID:Listen, I remember this happening when I was a kid who smoked weed, and when was a huge deal back then. So Ginsburg got Borked too. Months after Powell's retirement, Reagan, just like Nixon in the early 1970s was zero for two in Supreme Court nominees. And just like Nixon with Powell back then, Reagan now needed to find a jurist who was conservative enough to get nominated, but who presented as liberal and reasonable enough to get confirmed. And so Reagan turned to his old Sacramento buddy,

...

orrin hatch corp law ex lobby

...

DAVID: After the Roberts-Alito Supreme Court takeover, Kennedy's rulings with liberal justices on LGBTQ issues, habeas corpus, abortion rights, they probably made it seem like he'd keep the court from going too far to the right, but conservatives knew that Kennedy's vote could be swung, so they began lining up to throw all kinds of cases at him and the new conservative majority on the court, like kids lining up to see Santa Claus, but as they say in Christmas Story,

...

DAVID:Back at his storefront office in Terre Haute, Indiana, James Bopp had his eye on deregulating the campaign finance system, a cause that Kennedy seemed especially amenable to. So Bopp elbowed his way to the front of the queue with a case that brought his two pet causes together, the crusade against abortion and the crusade to deregulate campaign finance laws.

JAMES BOPP JR.: I can't tell the story without talking about Wisconsin right to life.

DAVID:James Bopp saw a new chance to try to go big. It was absolutely critical. Bopp is talking about FEC v Wisconsin right to life, a Supreme Court case that was heard right after John Roberts and Sam Alito were installed, right when Anthony Kennedy was the new swing vote

JAMES BOPP JR.:Wisconsin Right to Life contacts me and says that there's an upcoming vote on Bush's judicial nominees, Feingold of McCain, Feingold fame is up for election, and we want to lobby him, and the vote is going to be in September.

ARCHIVAL NEWS FOOTAGE: The special interest anti-abortion group Wisconsin Right to Life is now airing this TV spot. There are a lot of judicial nominees out there who can't go to work, but come this weekend, this ad and corresponding radio hits will be illegal. Why nominees because Wisconsin Right to Life or WRTL talks about in its ad, contact Senators Feingold and Cole and tell them to oppose the filibuster.

DAVID: Wisconsin Right To Life ads fell within the 60-day window or blackout period before that year's general election, which made it subject to the restrictions of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, which, as you heard before, had been upheld by the pre-Roberts, pre-Alito Supreme Court. Under that law, the group couldn't mention Senator Feingold by name, because that would be considered electioneering. So Bopp sued on the grounds that those restrictions were a violation of free speech.

On April 25, 2007, James Bopp argued that case in front of the Roberts and Alito Supreme Court. The questioning focused on whether the Wisconsin right-to-life ads were just issue ads designed to lobby, or whether they were a stealthy form of electioneering against the candidate in the election. Here's Justice Stevens questioning Bopp about the distinction.

ARCHIVAL SUPREME COURT AUDIO (JOHN PAUL STEVENS):Are you trying to convince us? The purpose of these ads was to convince Senator Feingold to change his position on filibuster.

JAMES BOPP JR.: It was, indeed it was to lobby him.

ARCHIVAL SUPREME COURT AUDIO (JOHN PAUL STEVENS):Did you think that was a realistic goal?

JAMES BOPP JR.:Yes, as it turns out, because in 2006 we ran the same sort of anti-filibuster as and Senator Cole, now up for reelection, changed his position on the filibuster. So these things happen. In other words, people, people's positions are affected by grassroots lobbying, and at least people should have the opportunity.

DAVID: Then, Anthony Kennedy chimed in.

Archival Clip, Justice Anthony Kennedy: Is that called democracy?

DAVID:Senators Feingold and Cole and tell them to oppose the filibuster those

Archival Clip, JAMES BOPP JR.:We are hopeful. Your Honor.

DAVID: Ultimately, the conservative majority on the court, including the key swing vote, Anthony Kennedy narrowly agreed with Bop, saying that Wisconsin right to life's ads were not express political advocacy, since they didn't literally tell people whether or not to vote for specific candidates. The Court declared that Wisconsin right to life's ads could not be regulated by the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. Here's Chief Justice John Roberts once again, play acting as a baseball umpire.

Archival Clip, John Roberts: Discussion of issues cannot be suppressed simply because the issues may also be pertinent in an election where the First Amendment is implicated, the tie goes to the speaker, not the censor.

DAVID: Put another way, a mere four years after the old Rehnquist Court dunked on the master planners and upheld McCain's campaign finance law, the new Roberts Court had just sided with those same master planners and overturned a major part of that law. This was an Empire Strikes Back moment for the ages.

SEN. SHELDON WHITEHOUSE (D-R.I.): I call that the ‘Magic words’ case.

DAVID: This is Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. White House first took his seat as the junior senator from Rhode Island just six months before the decision in FEC versus Wisconsin right to life came down. He told us just how significant this little noticed case really was. That was the case in which Supreme Court decided what the magic words were, that if you used them in an ad, it became a political ad and was subject to a variety of regulations and limitations. But if you didn't use those magic words, then you could say that your ad was not a political ad, but it was issue advocacy. You weren't recommending a vote against Senator Whitehouse. You were just recommending that voters call up Senator Whitehouse and ask why he was a thieving, dirty, puppy-hating, anti-American scoundrel, right? The effect on the airwaves is the same, but if you didn't use the magic words about vote or elect then this whole new avenue opened up for dirty political TV advertising.

DAVID: Whitehouse said that the little magic words loophole started opening up the floodgates for unregulated, anonymous, dark money ads that buy elections, all under the guise of educating the public with so-called ‘issue ads’ rather than electioneering. I think that was the purpose of the exercise. Here are the words that if you don't use them, you're good to go on election spending.

DAVID: So you can see why. James Bopp told us that the decision in FEC v Wisconsin Right To Life was absolutely critical. It was a huge blow to the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, but perhaps more importantly, it showed Bopp how this new Roberts Alito court was inclined to rule on all of these campaign finance issues. Bopp also noticed something else. Arch conservative justice Antonin Scalia wrote a concurrence, agreeing with the court's decision, but saying it should have gone a step further and completely eliminated McCain-Feingold's prohibitions against unlimited corporate spending to sway elections.

The concurrence was backed by Clarence Thomas, hardly a surprise, but there was a third signature on the document, you guessed it, Anthony Kennedy. That was a signal to James Bopp that perhaps he could get Kennedy, the old Sacramento Swamp Thing, to channel his predecessor, Lewis Powell, and go huge.

ARCHIVAL CAMPAIGN SPEECH (HILLARY CLINTON):I announced today that I'm forming a presidential exploratory committee. I'm not just starting a campaign, though. I'm beginning a conversation with you, with America.

DAVID: It's early 2007. Hillary Clinton has announced her campaign for president. James Bopp is in Terre Haute, working on arguments that might get justices to go big in that Wisconsin right to life case.

ARCHIVAL CAMPAIGN SPEECH (HILLARY CLINTON):So let the conversation begin, I have a feeling it's going to be very interesting.

DAVID: And then one day, James Bopp’s phone rings,

JAMES BOPP JR.: So I'm sitting in my office, and I get a phone call from David Bossie.

DAVID: David Bossie is a conservative activist. In 1992 he was working for a non-profit that was first founded by the same people who made one of the sleaziest dark money ads in American history, the Willie Horton ad that shifted the 1988 presidential election that you heard about in episode six. By 2000, Bossie was the organization's president, so James Bopp picks up the phone to talk to David Bossie and Bossie asks Bopp if he'd represent his organization in a juicy lawsuit about Hillary Clinton that could end up letting corporations spend unlimited amounts of money in politics.

ARCHIVAL AD: Oh, baby. You know what I like.

DAVID:James Bopp likes big campaign finance cases, and this one might be the biggest of them all.

JAMES BOPP JR.: And he said, ‘I'm working on a movie called Hillary: The Movie, alright?’ And this is now in early 2007, I'm working on a movie, and she's running for president.

DAVID:Hillary: The Movie was promoted by Bossie as a documentary, but it was functionally just a hyper conservative 90-minute anti-Clinton campaign ad with Sad, Scary Music, all funded by a boatload of anonymous money.

“HILLARY: THE MOVIE”: She's deceitful. She'll make up any story, lie about anything, as long as it serves her purpose of the moment, and the American people are going to catch on to it. I can't think of any other politician in history who has shown such a disrespect and a contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law as Hillary.

DAVID: Bossie was calling bopp to figure out how to drop this thing into the 2008 election cycle while skirting campaign finance laws that apply to political ads during elections.

JAMES BOPP JR.:I want to broadcast this movie, and I need your help two ways. Okay, first way is to make sure that our movie script does not have an appeal to vote for or against a candidate, because I want to be able to do this, and if it has an appeal to vote, I'm prohibited, so I want you to give me the advice to make sure that they could still do this movie.

DAVID:The second thing Bossie wanted Bopp's help on was finding a legal way to get around the requirement to file a disclosure report about who exactly was funding the project.

JAMES BOPP JR.: The report would have required him to reveal his donors, and people would not want to contribute if they are going to be outed as funding an anti-Hillary certainly critical Hillary movie, right? So he doesn't want to have to do this report of their donors.

DAVID: This is something we've seen over and over again in our reporting, conservatives want to be able to broadcast whatever messages they want, but they don't want to have to admit who is actually funding the message. And this quote, unquote movie was pretty nasty.

“HILLARY: THE MOVIE”:I knew Richard Nixon, and I'll tell you something, she's no Richard Nixon. She's worse, ruthless, vindictive, venal, sneaky, ideological, intolerant, liar is a good one…scares the hell out of me.

DAVID: So Bopp took the lessons he learned in the Wisconsin case, and he set about strategically assembling this new case using arguments that Roberts and Scalia and Kennedy had signaled they were sympathetic to, and just like his inspiration, Thurgood Marshall in Brown v Board of Education, James Bopp hoped this case would be the big one.

Bossie's organization had run into issues with federal election regulators in the past. They tried to make some so-called documentaries before, but the dark money group was clearly a political organization and not a movie studio. So more than once, the Federal Election Commission insisted that they were subject to McCain-Feingold's restrictions. Bopp anticipated a similar pushback on Hillary: The Movie, but rather than waiting for federal election regulators to send a cease-and-desist letter to Bossie, Bopp had a genius idea. He went to a lower court demanding a declaratory judgment up front one that would officially allow Bossie to air his documentary right up until the 2008 primaries. In other words. Courts. Bopp took a play out of the Powell memo and used this case as a preemptive attack.

LEWIS BLACK AS LEWIS POWELL:The greatest care should be exercised in selecting the cases in which to participate.

DAVID: He used this obscure movie to create a case out of thin air, the lower court said, essentially no campaign finance restrictions obviously apply to this, but that ruling gave Bopp what he really wanted, a way to appeal the case up to John Roberts, Sam Alito, and Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court. When Hillary: The Movie became a legal case, it ended up being named after Bossie’s non-Movie Studio, nonprofit, maybe you've heard of it:

…

DAVID: Citizens United was appealed up to the Supreme Court in August of 2008 Hillary Clinton was long gone from the presidential race, defeated by Barack Obama, but that didn't matter, the master planners were after something much bigger. The Court agreed to hear the case three months later, and then David Bossie replaced James Bopp.

Bossie bumped bop for a new Hot Shot attorney named Ted Olson. By 2008 Olson was already famous in master plan circles. He'd been a founding member of the Federalist Society and the bush campaign's mouthpiece at the Supreme Court in Bush v Gore, which decided the 2000 election. Supposedly, David Bossie had seen Olson win a Republican lawyer of the Year Award at an event in Washington, DC in October 2008 where another attorney called Olson the quote, “winningest Supreme Court lawyer.”

So when bossie’s challenge was accepted at the High Court The following month, he told his co-founder that they should ditch old James Bopp in Terre Haute and pick up Olson instead like leaving prom with the popular girls.

When Olson took over the Citizens United case, he slightly reformulated Bopp's argument. He focused on the idea that Hillary: The Movie was not what the McCain Feingold campaign finance law was actually supposed to prohibit. It was a documentary movie that viewers had to seek out on video on demand, not a screeching election ad that couldn't be avoided on cable TV.

ARCHIVAL SUPREME COURT AUDIO (TED OLSON):Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court, participation in the political process is the First Amendment's most fundamental guarantee yet, that freedom is being smothered by one of the most complicated, expensive and incomprehensible regulatory regimes ever invented by the administrative state.

DAVID: It was Olson who first brought up the word “corruption.”

ARCHIVAL SUPREME COURT AUDIO (TED OLSON):The government cannot prove, and has not attempted to prove, that a 90-minute documentary poses any threat of quid pro quo, corruption or its appearance. Indeed, this documentary is the very definition of robust, uninhibited debate about a subject of intense political interest, that the First Amendment is there to guarantee.

DAVID: Olson argued with a straight face that Hillary the movie wasn't an election focused ad governed by campaign finance laws, despite the fact that it was dropped in the middle of an election and spends 90 minutes insisting that Hillary Clinton was unqualified for the presidency and was, I'm paraphrasing here, basically the Antichrist. Justice Souter for one wasn't buying. It.

ARCHIVAL SUPREME COURT AUDIO (DAVID SOUTER):Doesn't this one fall into campaign advocacy. I mean, I've got the government's brief open at pages 18 and 19, with the quotations. She'll lie about anything. She's deceitful. She's ruthless, cunning, dishonest. Do anything for power. Will speak dishonestly, reckless, a congenital liar, sorely lacking in qualifications, not qualified as commander in chief. I mean, this sounds to me like campaign advocacy.

DAVID: Yeah, you think? In response, the master planners on the Supreme Court pretty much hijacked the oral arguments the same way your crotchety uncle pulls the ‘well actually’ move to steer the Thanksgiving dinner conversation towards his bizarre theories. For example, instead of a discussion about money, influence, election buying and corruption, what the case was actually about justice, Sam Alito forced the government's defense lawyer into an absurd debate about book banning. Here's Kennedy.

ARCHIVAL SUPREME COURT AUDIO (ANTHONY KENNEDY):Suppose it were an advocacy organization that had a book, your position is that, under the Constitution, the advertising for this book or the sale for the book itself could be prohibited within the 60 or 30 day period

ARCHIVAL SUPREME COURT AUDIO (TED OLSON):if the book contained the functional equivalent of Express advocacy, that is, if it was subject to no reasonable interpretation

DAVID: They proceeded to get into an even more ludicrous debate about e-books that are accessed via satellite

ARCHIVAL SUPREME COURT AUDIO (TED OLSON):within the 60 30, day period. If it comes from a satellite, it can be prohibited under the Constitution and perhaps under the statute.

DAVID:I mean, this is a case about a movie. What are they even talking about? I feel like I'm Steve Martin in Planes, Trains and Automobiles.

“Planes, Trains and Automobiles”:When you're telling these little stories, here's a good idea: Have a point. It makes it so much more interesting for the listener.

DAVID:The FEC’s lawyer tried to steer the justices back on track.

ARCHIVAL SUPREME COURT AUDIO:It can't be prohibited, but a corporation could be barred from using its general treasury funds to publish the book, and could be required to raise funds to publish the book using its PAC.

DAVID:That was the actual point. And unfortunately, the FEC’s lawyer didn't make it very well. It wasn't really about whether the government could or would prohibit the publication of a book that urged its readers to vote or not vote for a specific candidate. It was about a corporation being able to anonymously funnel money from its coffers into election communications with no restrictions, and the government was arguing that they'd have to use a regulated PAC or explicitly disclosed political money instead.

It's worth reiterating that none of this is what the original case was asking about. But as the ever more twisted and deranged arguments went on, the conservative justices like Anthony Kennedy kept insisting that it was a free speech question, even though it really wasn't. Then an hour later, it was over.

ARCHIVAL SUPREME COURT AUDIO (JOHN ROBERTS): Thank you, Counsel. The case is submitted.

ULA:What happens behind the scenes when the justices vote on this case is kind of my favorite part of the story.

DAVID:This is producer Ula Culpa, to tell us about when things got really interesting.

ULA:So after oral argument, the justices meet in private and have a round of initial votes on the case. It falls basically along ideological lines, with the four liberals against Citizens United and the five conservatives, including Anthony Kennedy, in favor of saying that McCain-Feingold [Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act] did not apply to Hillary: The Movie, Roberts gets to work on a narrow opinion saying that, but Kennedy writes a concurrence that argues that they should go way bigger and invalidate any campaign finance restrictions on allegedly independent political groups like Citizens United.

DAVID:So Roberts and the other conservatives then compare drafts, and they love Kennedy's idea so much that Roberts withdraws his more narrow opinion and lets Kennedy write the majority

ULA: Exactly. And this is where the drama hits after Justice Souter sees what Roberts and Kennedy are planning to do. He gets pissed and writes a dissent, and it has become infamous in legal circles because it was this Full Tilt bridge burning attack on the logic of his fellow justices, which is something that almost never happens, and definitely not like this. Reportedly, Souter berated not only the conclusions that Roberts and Kennedy had come to, but the like intellectual depravity to step outside of and way beyond what this case was asking in the first place.

DAVID: Finally, someone was calling bullshit. Okay, so read us some excerpts.

ULA:Well, I can't.

DAVID: Wait. Why?

ULA:Because very few people have actually ever seen Souter's dissent, and that's because not long after he drafted it, just as David Souter has informed the White House, he will retire at the end of a Supreme Court term in June. God, it's exactly like that scene from Half-Baked.

“HALF-BAKED”: Fuck you, Fuck you, fuck you… You're cool…Fuck you. I'm out

ULA: Totally and then John Roberts basically makes sure Souter’s dissent never gets published as part of the official record. Because instead of the ruling coming out at the end of the court's term, like you might expect, Citizens United is suddenly scheduled for re-argument in the fall.

DAVID:What the hell is reargument?

ULA: It's when the Court asks the lawyers to write all new briefs about all new questions. In this case, Roberts asked them to address big constitutional questions that signaled that the court wasn't going to issue a narrow ruling about one movie. It was going to follow Kennedy's lead and go really, really big.

DAVID: So here we are in the fall of 2009, things still seem all Hopey-and-Changey over in the White House, but only a few blocks away at the Supreme Court. Shit is about to go down. The Master planners had taken over the court with Roberts and Alito. James Bopp had given Anthony Kennedy the chance to go big, and Roberts figures out a way to make it all happen. This is like the master planners a team moment.

DAVID: So six months after the first argument in the Citizens United case, David Souter is retired. His barn burning warning about the end of democracy is nowhere to be found. The ideological Terminator John Roberts rewinds the clock and lets Federalist Society luminary Ted Olson make a whole new argument to the court,

ARCHIVAL SUPREME COURT AUDIO (TED OLSON):Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court.

DAVID: This was no longer a little argument about a specific campaign finance law and a dumb documentary, but a robust debate about candidates for elective office is the most fundamental value protected by the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech.

Olson and his client Citizens United were now resurrecting the old free speech arguments from Buckley v. Valeo and from Lewis Powell's Bellotti ruling that you heard about in episode five. Essentially, they argued that money is protected speech. They also argued that corporations, therefore have a constitutional right to spend unlimited money in elections, as long as it's not directly coordinated by candidates, and that such independent spending isn't a corrupting force. The justices seem supportive of that view. John McCain said they seemed totally out of touch with reality.

ARCHIVAL NEWS FOOTAGE (JOHN MCCAIN): I was rather disappointed in some of the justices apparent naivete as to how corporate and union and unlimited money affects the legislative process. Does anyone believe that the rights of average citizens to be heard in Washington would not be overridden by massive, unlimited campaign contributions from corporations and unions?

DAVID: McCain was correct. Nobody believed that, but that was a feature of the Citizens Unitedcase, not a bug. A ruling in favor of Citizens United would override average citizens' voices and create a society run by corporations and oligarchs, just as James Bopp's fellow Hoosier Ron Swanson had dreamed of back in fictional small town, Indiana.

“PARKS AND RECREATION”:I think that all government is a waste of taxpayer money. My dream is to have the park system privatized and run entirely for profit by corporations like Chuck E. Cheese. They have an impeccable business model. I would rather work for Chuck E. Cheese.

DAVID: McCain, Feingold and all the Reformers warned that ruling for Citizens Unitedwould deregulate the campaign finance system and basically make Ron Swanson's vision a reality. Politicians and public officials would work for Chuck E. Cheese and every other corporation, and those corporations would be allowed to buy elections. I mean, the Supreme Court was pretty radical, but would it really go that far? That's after the break.

ARCHIVAL SUPREME COURT AUDIO (JOHN ROBERTS): In case 08205, Citizens United v. the FEC, Justice Kennedy has the opinion of the court.

DAVID: On January 21, 2010, just over four months after the second round of arguments, the decision in Citizens United came down this time. It wasn't Chief Justice John Roberts writing the majority opinion. It was the old Sacramento Swamp Thing, former lobbyist and influence peddler Anthony Kennedy in announcing the decision to the public. Kennedy first laid out why the majority had decided to go big. He identified the precedents that were relevant to the case, like the court's ruling a few years prior, that had held up the McCain Feingold campaign finance law. And then, he said, we conclude that those precedents now must be reexamined. The Court has recognized that First Amendment protection extends to corporations. If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens or associations of citizens for simply engaging in political speech.

DAVID: The precedents the court's majority was now dismantling, according to Kennedy, would

ARCHIVAL SUPREME COURT AUDIO (ANTHONY KENNEDY): —allow the government to ban corporations from expressing political views through any media, including media beyond those presented here and in this case, such as by printing books, political speech is indispensable to decision making in a democracy. And this is no less true because the speech comes from a corporation rather than an individual.

DAVID:This is the radical corporations are people concept on steroids, and the opinion was directly built from that Belotti ruling, first authored by Kennedy's immediate predecessor, Lewis Powell, even more radical, Anthony Kennedy, who spent his early years as a lobbyist doling out campaign cash to sway legislators. That same Anthony Kennedy was now also insisting that money in politics was only corrupting when there was an explicit quid pro quo, but all the other things that Anthony Kennedy himself had helped his Sacramento lobbying clients use money to buy stuff like access and influence that stuff was apparently not corrupting. That sounds like an exaggeration, but in his written opinion, Kennedy asserted that campaign donors, quote, may have influence over or access to elected officials, but that did not quote mean that these officials are corrupt. And then Kennedy wrote something so crazy that — hold on, hold on. Can I get a special effect on my voice for this so that it sounds extra evil? Okay, there we go.

Kennedy said, quote, independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption. I mean, think about how insane that is. Anthony Kennedy non ironically, wrote a ruling with the force of law that essentially declares that when a corporation spends $50 million blanketing your state to help one candidate win a US Senate election, there's no corruption or even appearance of corruption when that candidate then does legislative favors for that corporation. Justice Stevens wrote the dissent on behalf of the liberals. It may not have been Souter's barn burner, but it was pretty close. It was 90 pages long and probably bolstered by the fact that Stevens was 90 years old and also nearly ready to retire.

ARCHIVAL SUPREME COURT AUDIO (JOHN PAUL STEVENS): As one of the joint authors of the opinion in McConnell, I must emphatically disagree with today's law changing decision…

DAVID: Stevens’ dissent made the point that up until O'Connor and Rehnquist were replaced by Roberts and Alito, the court had upheld at least some restrictions on corporate spending in elections.

ARCHIVAL SUPREME COURT AUDIO (JOHN PAUL STEVENS): The Court has the point exactly backwards. At the founding Americans took it as a given that corporations could be comprehensively regulated in the service of the public welfare. It is doubtful that the framers believed the freedom of speech would extend to corporations who cannot themselves engage in speech. And is even more doubtful that when they ratified the First Amendment, they thought they were laying down a principle that could be used to insulate corporations from even modest restrictions on electioneering expenditures.

DAVID: After speaking for 20 minutes, twice as long as Kennedy had, Stevens had his mic drop moment.

ARCHIVAL SUPREME COURT AUDIO (JOHN PAUL STEVENS): While American democracy is still imperfect, few outside the majority of this court would have thought its flaws included a shortage of corporate money in politics.

DAVID: Unsurprisingly, when the ruling came down, David Bossie of Citizens Unitedwas giddy.

ARCHIVAL NEWS FOOTAGE (DAVID BOSSIE):This is a monumental day for Citizens United, and more importantly, for the First Amendment and the fundamental rights of people to participate in the political process and the marketplace of ideas, whether you're an individual, whether you're a corporation or a union, it doesn't matter. You can now participate fully and freely in the election process.

DAVID:Here is Senator Sheldon Whitehouse again.

SEN. SHELDON WHITEHOUSE:My recollection, I was on the Senate floor and came back to read the decision.

DAVID: He said the decision was painful to read.

SEN. SHELDON WHITEHOUSE: I live in the immediate political world, and I was watching the Supreme Court buy into a notion about that political world that I knew to be false. They have applied a conceptual paradigm over politics that is complete and utter nonsense.

DAVID:While much of the country reacted to the decision with surprise and anger, White House says that conservative must have had an inkling that this was coming, because right after the decision came down, conservative and business interest groups immediately filed papers to create scores of unregulated dark money groups that could exploit the ruling.

SEN. SHELDON WHITEHOUSE:The fact that they had this whole 501(c)(4) apparatus ready to go sort of proved that this was an expected decision. In fact, you even have Virginia Thomas setting up her organization while the decision is being deliberated, so that on the day it's announced she's ready to go.

DAVID: Whitehouse is referring to Virginia Ginni Thomas, wife of justice, Clarence Thomas, just weeks before the ruling in Citizens United came down, she and Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society filed initial paperwork for a not for profit lobbying group called Liberty Central, a group designed to take advantage of the Citizens Unitedruling Liberty Central is America's public square. We inspire, we listen, we activate ordinary citizens to secure the blessings of liberty.

DAVID:Though it was hidden at the time, later, reporting revealed that Liberty Central's initial $500,000 of funding came from who else the Thomas's favorite billionaire, a guy named Harlan Crow, who'd been funding lavish trips for justice, Thomas on the other side of the aisle, Democrats openly criticized the Citizens Unitedruling. Here's President Obama in his State of the Union address less than a week after the decision

ARCHIVAL SPEECH AUDIO (BARACK OBAMA): Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests including. Foreign corporations to spend without limit in our elections.

DAVID: In the video of the speech, you can see the justices stay seated and look stone-faced as much of the room stands to applaud Obama around them, and then there's Samuel Alito shaking his head and muttering, not true.

SEN. SHELDON WHITEHOUSE: It made me grieve for Sandra Day O'Connor, whose departure had opened the door for Alito particularly, and whose common sense and experience as somebody who had run for office, I think would have headed off Citizens Unitedhad she stayed on the court. So the whole thing was just sort of imbued with sorrow and missed chances, but the result at the end was a completely manufactured simulacrum of what the political world is like, created by the court and imposed on all of us.

DAVID:Whitehouse and John McCain tried to quickly limit the rulings effects. They asked the Supreme Court to at least prevent a lower court in Montana from now using Citizens United to gut that state's 100 year old anti corruption law the Supreme Court refused to even hear the case.

SEN. SHELDON WHITEHOUSE: So at that point, I realized, Oh, my God, this is not an innocent mistake. They are actually deliberately trying to open our political world to right wing political dark money.

DAVID: In my imagination, James Bopp was celebrating back home in Indiana when he read the Citizens United ruling.....

DAVID: He was psyched. But if he doesn't sound 100% excited about the ruling, it's because he kind of wasn't sure he had gotten most of what he wanted. He had created a case that convinced the court to go huge and eviscerate campaign finance laws in a world changing ruling, four years before Citizens United, nonprofits and other non disclosing political groups had spent $0 in the 2006 election cycle. In 2010 right after the ruling, those groups accounted for 47 percent of political spending, $134 million but still, there was one part of the Citizens Unitedruling that stuck in James Bopp's craw.

JAMES BOPP JR.: They upheld a report, the disclosure Yeah, the disclosure report.

DAVID: Remember David Bossie originally asked Bopp to help his group circumvent the McCain Feingold law and letCitizens United air its glorified anti-Hillary campaign ad in the middle of the election. But Bossie also told Bopp he wanted to ignore the McCain-Feingold law's disclosure provisions and hide the names of the ad's funders from the public on that disclosure issue, the court actually ruled against Citizens United.

The court ruled that laws requiring big spenders in elections and politics to be disclosed, those laws were constitutional. We reject Citizens United's challenge to the disclaimer and disclosure provisions. Those mechanisms provide information to the electorate, the resulting transparency enables the electorate to make informed decisions and give proper weight to different speakers and different messages.

DAVID: When he heard this caveat, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse saw an opportunity to call the Supreme Court's bluff. He introduced a bill called the Democracy Is Strengthened by Casting Light On Spending in Elections. Act, a hilariously wordy attempt to get a pithy acronym the DISCLOSE Act.

SEN. SHELDON WHITEHOUSE:The DISCLOSE Act was originally designed to require that you trace back to the actual source of political contributions for any contribution to a political campaign, or a PAC or a Super PAC, over $10,000 in a individual race. That's not a whole lot of people, but at that level, you really are buying influence. And so I think it's important for voters to understand what's going on in their political world around them.

DAVID: Democrats rallied behind the DISCLOSE Act right away, while Republicans like Mitch McConnell contorted themselves to swat it down.

Episode 8:Shock And Awe At The Supreme Court

In a pivotal 12 months, the master planners transformed the judiciary, positioning it to deliver corruption-legalizing precedents.

...

Operatives like Leonard Leo and Brett Kavanaugh aimed to seize the moment and dramatically shift the balance of the Supreme Court, which was still upholding at least some campaign finance laws — and they had their perfect candidates in mind. But when Bush went off script and nominated Harriet Miers, a trusted lawyer from his inner circle, the conservative legal movement launched an insurgency. The result was the creation of the Roberts Court.

By the end of 2005, the master planners’ legal movement, which had been building since the Powell Memo era of the early 1970s, had managed to largely stack the Supreme Court. But one big question remained: Would the last remaining swing-vote justice join the master planners in their quest to deregulate the campaign finance system and gut anti-corruption laws?

evid:

a* ttacks On Daschle:Watch one of the TV ads that aired during Tom Daschle’s doomed 2004 re-election bid to see how his master plan-approved opponent John Thune’s campaign spent millions attacking the senate majority leader for blocking Bush’s judicial nominees.

trans:

2004 election

...ARCHIVAL NEWS FOOTAGE:Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle has lost his job. Daschle is the first Senate leader in half a century to lose a bid for reelection. Republicans have made that defeat one of their top priorities and they threw powerful support behind the challenger John Thune.

In a public radio interview, Thune spotlighted how the issue of judges transformed his entire campaign.

ARCHIVAL RADIO INTERVIEW (JOHN THUNE): It was amazing to me when I’d make speeches early on in the campaign, I’d talk about, you know, openings on the Supreme Court, or getting these appellate nominees confirmed, and people would kind of look at you kinda like, you know “who cares?” Toward the end of the campaign you’d get up and make that statement in a speech and it’d be one of the biggest applause lines.

DAVID:By unseating the leader of the opposition party with a campaign about judges, the master planners had delivered their message to every politician in Washington: If you defy our Federalist Society judicial picks, our machine will activate voters to throw you out of office.

On the same 2004 election night that John Thune’s win in South Dakota warned everyone in Congress about the perils of blocking lower-court nominations, an even louder message about the Supreme Court was sent to the entire country at the top of the ticket.

ARCHIVAL NEWS FOOTAGE:Democratic candidate John Kerry has conceded the state of ohio and with it the presidential election. About an hour ago Senator Kerry called the White House to congratulate President Bush on his victory.

DAVID:During the presidential debates, Bush’s opponent John Kerry had tried to warn the country about the master planners’ plot to take over the courts.

ARCHIVAL SPEECH FOOTAGE (JOHN KERRY):A few years ago when he came to office, the president said — these are his words — “what we need are some good conservative judges on the courts.” And the Supreme Court of the United States is at stake in this race, ladies and gentlemen. The future of things that matter to you — in terms of civil rights, whether we’ll enforce the law… will a woman’s right to choose be protected?

DAVID:But when Bush was pressed on the issue, he stuck with the same script he’d used in 2000. When asked in a town hall debate about who he would choose for the Supreme Court, he first cracked a joke…

ARCHIVAL DEBATE FOOTAGE (GEORGE W. BUSH):I’m not telling.

DAVID:Then, Bush invoked some seemingly innocuous language that was also a dog whistle to the conservative legal movement.

ARCHIVAL DEBATE FOOTAGE (GEORGE W. BUSH): I would pick people that would be strict constructionists. We’ve got plenty of lawmakers in Washington, D.C.. Legislators make law; judges interpret the Constitution. And that’s the kind of judge I’m going to put on there. No litmus test except for how they interpret the Constitution.

DAVID:Having defused the judge issue, Bush went on to swiftboat Kerry, making the Vietnam war hero look like a treasonous French aristocrat, and Bush pulled off a tight reelection victory. And almost immediately after Bush was sworn in for his second term, Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society’s crew and the rest of the master planners went back to work on the courts.

ARCHIVAL PRESS CONFERENCE FOOTAGE:This morning we are here to launch a $3.3 million advertising and grassroots campaign to ensure that President Bush’s slate of well- qualified judges receive and up-or-down vote in the floor of the United States Senate.

DAVID:That’s the president of the ironically named Progress For America — the political group from last episode that was promoting Bush’s judicial nominees. He’s talking about their new offensive for 2005.

ARCHIVAL PRESS CONFERENCE FOOTAGE:We have PR professionals as well as grassroots operatives on the ground in 15 states, and their job is also to continue to spread the word that these nominees deserve an up-or-down vote on the floor of the United States Senate.

DAVID:Another speaker at this press conference stressed that the ads targeting both Democratic and wavering Republican senators were about larger principals – about precedents, about fairness.

ARCHIVAL PRESS CONFERENCE FOOTAGE:At the core this is a matter about a president -- any president’s nominees deserving a simple up-or-down vote when they have majority support in the chamber…

DAVID:The pressure campaign did its job: In May 2005, a group of conservative Democrats joined with a group of Republicans in a deal that limited Democrats’ power to use the filibuster against judicial nominees. In effect, the Democrats reverted to their normal, soft, flaccid, pushover form, relinquishing the last shred of their power to stop the master planners’ judicial nominees.

So if you’re a master planner in mid-2005, you’ve got control of the senate, conservative democrats are scared, you have lab-grown terminator judges ready. You’re all set for the final showdown.

And then — as if on cue — comes the bombshell that would change everything.

ARCHIVAL NEWS FOOTAGE:Justice Sandra Day O’Connor announced her retirement from the U.S. Supreme Court today. She said she wants to spend more time with her family. O’Connor was the first woman to sit on the court chosen by President Reagan in 1981…

...

DAVID:You know, the career where he helped clients try to kill off a program to lower prescription drug prices and weaken the ADA, and helped Republicans hijack the 2000 election. Bush cast that career not as the methodical rampage of a Terminator, but instead as the highest form of venerable public service and altruism.

ARCHIVAL SPEECH FOOTAGE (GEORGE W. BUSH):John Roberts has devoted his entire professional life to the cause of justice and is widely admired for his intellect, his sound judgment and personal decency.

DAVID:You could almost see the dollar signs in the eyeballs of corporate lobbyists and CEOs when Roberts was nominated — one lawyer gushed to the Los Angeles Times that Roberts was, quote “the go-to lawyer for the business community” who “definitely is a friend of the chamber.” And the U.S. Chamber of Commerce quickly endorsed its former lawyer Roberts for the job, saying in a press release that he “brings substantial experience advocating for the nation’s leading businesses on matters ranging from the supremacy of federal law to the proper interpretation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.”

The National Association of Manufacturers also jumped into a confirmation battle for the first time in its 110-year history, and officially endorsed Roberts. In the weeks before Roberts nomination, the Wall Street Journal reported that group had been creating a new committee of executives to “vet any White House nominee based on his or her business rulings” — and that Roberts had “drawn interest in corporate circles because [he] represented companies on regulatory matters.”

Liberal groups tried to mount an opposition by spotlighting Roberts’ social conservatism. Critics also raised concerns about his relatively short tenure as a judge, which lasted barely two years, and they spotlighted his ties to Leonard Leo’s Federalist Society.

But even though that Federalist Society affiliation may have helped land Roberts on the shortlist for a judgeship in the first place, Roberts suddenly pretended he barely even knew what the Federalist Society was.

ARCHIVAL NEWS FOOTAGE:Roberts has spoken to the group several times and though his name appears in a 1997 Federalist Society directory, he says he can’t remember ever being a member or accepting any kind of role with the group. Here’s how the White House said it:

“He has participated in events and panel discussions. He’s given speeches at Federalist Society forums, but he doesn’t have any recollection of ever paying dues or joining the organization.”

DAVID:This was the old bait-and-switch that Lewis Powell had perfected 50 years prior during his Supreme Court nomination — the game where, to paraphrase one master planner, you need to be conservative enough to get nominated, but then seem liberal enough to get confirmed.

Roberts’ performance garnered praise in the media for his credentials, etiquette, and alleged moderation....

ARCHIVAL NEWS FOOTAGE:Chief Justice William Rehnquist died last night of thyroid cancer. He served on the court for 33 years, 19 of them as chief justice…

DAVID:This was unprecedented. Two years after O’Connor and Rehnquist had defied the master plan with their campaign finance ruling in the McCain case, they were both suddenly gone.

This was the moment the master plan had been preparing for — for more than 40 years — and things started moving faster than warp speed.

...

MIERS

She also was a longtime corporate shark with real conservative credentials — she ran a major corporate law firm where she had defended behemoths like Microsoft and Disney, and she had played a big role in the conservative movement’s political campaign to make it harder to file lawsuits against corporations.

But here’s the thing: Miers did not have a clear-cut Federalist Society pedigree — at least not like other Bush officials. At this point, the Federalist Society has become so ubiquitous and powerful that reporters started asking White House press secretary Scott McClellan about Miers and her connection to the group.

...

DAVID:Inside the White House, Brett Kavanaugh noted in an email that Miers’ nomination “will cause major reverberations among conservatives,” and he called it a disaster.

And this is when the master planners’ dark-money turned on Harriet Miers.

....

It’s a wide open list right now for possibilities. Michael LuTTig, from the Federal Court of Appeals in Virginia, Samuel Alito from New Jersey, Karen Williams out of South Carolina, and finally Priscilla Owen of Texas. ...

DAVID:Democrats tried to pick apart Alito’s past, including his membership in a conservative Princeton Alumni Group that had criticized the school for reducing legacy admissions while increasing admissions of racial minorities… but Alito played dumb.

...

:Republicans invoked precisely that elitist caricature to attack Kerry again — White House spokesman Scott McCllelan noted that Kerry had originally phoned in his Alito filibuster demand from a trip hanging out at a glitzy billionaire conference in Europe.

ARCHIVAL WHITE HOUSE PRESS CONFERENCE: It was a pretty historic day. This was the first time ever that a Senator has called for a filibuster from the slopes of Davos, Switzerland. I think even for a Senator, it takes some pretty serious yodeling to call for a filibuster from a five-star ski resort in the Swiss Alps.

DAVID:To be sure, many of Kerry’s fellow Democrats agreed that Alito would push the Supreme Court further to the right. But they weren’t eager to follow his lead. The bitter filibuster fights over lower court nominees had left them divided and cautious.

Meanwhile, several Democratic senators facing re-election in Republican-leaning states didn’t want to take the political risk. Two had already pledged to vote for Alito and others firmly opposed the filibuster. Once again, these red-state Democratic senators remembered what happened to Tom Daschle.

In fact, Kavanaugh joked in an email to a Bush colleague that when South Dakota’s remaining Democratic Senator Tim Johnson announced his support for Alito, the lawmaker was refusing to be “Daschled.”

Yes, the conservative legal movement had gone from complaining about being “Borked” to now proudly bragging about making sure Democrats get “Daschled.”

In the end, only 24 joined Kerry’s effort to filibuster Alito, and Alito was confirmed by a comfortable margin in the final vote....

. No longer was this the age of judges like John Roberts pretending to not know the Federalist Society. This was a coming out party emceed by Leonard Leo, who hammed it up.

ARCHIVAL GALA AUDIO (LEONARD LEO):Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. It is a pleasure to stand before 1,500 of the most little known and elusive of that secret society or conspiracy we call the Federalist Society. Thanks so very much for your support and involvement. You may pick up your subpoenas on the way out.

...

DAVID:The installation of the two Terminators — Roberts and Alito — bolstered the conservative legal movement. Within a week of Alito’s confirmation, master planner B.K. — Brett Kavanaugh… the legal operative embedded inside the White House…he was nominated for a judgeship on the lower D.C. court that Roberts had just left.

Kavanaugh had been nominated a few years earlier, but had been blocked during Democrats’ last-stand against Bush’s nominees. At the time, Liberal watchdog groups had labeled him “an ideological warrior for the extreme right wing” and pointed out that Kavanaugh’s legal career has been “almost entirely devoted to right-wing partisan and ideological pursuits that raise deeply troubling questions.” But because Senate Democrats were under threat of being Daschled, there wasno stand against this new Terminator.

After the Senate confirmed him by a comfortable margin, federal Judge Kavanaugh would end up on his own glidepath to the Supreme Court....

===

Sep 24, 2024

:{MASTER PLAN:{, Ep 7: The Federalist Society Strikes Back}:

To get the rulings you want, build the Supreme Court you need....

In the first of two episodes about the creation of the Roberts Court, we use never-before-reported internal emails to expose how the master planners plotted to install new judges who would be guaranteed to deliver the rulings they wanted.

The political environment of the early Bush era provided master planners with a pivotal opportunity to mobilize the legal machine they had been building since the Powell Memo era. Their machine had started small: just a handful of student clubs at law schools around the country. But by 2000, the Federalist Society had become the nation’s most powerful network of conservative lawyers.

The group had allies working within the Bush White House and set about installing their most loyal acolytes in lower-level federal courts, where they could issue conservative rulings and potentially be on a glidepath to the Supreme Court. One of their first and most prized lower-court judicial nominees was a polite, soft-spoken lawyer who depicted himself as an impartial umpire — but who master planners saw as their ideological Terminator.

EVID

Brett Kavanaugh’s never-before-reported emails. Read correspondence showing how Federalist Society poster boy Brett Kavanaugh was a pivotal player within the White House working to nominate Federalist Society-approved judges. As a Bush Administration staffer, Kavanaugh constantly referenced the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo, showing just how embedded the conservative legal movement was within the executive branch.

TRANS:

...ARCHIVAL CONGRESSIONAL HEARING (JOHN ROBERTS):Umpires don’t make the rules, they apply them. The role of an umpire and a judge is critical. They make sure everybody plays by the rules. But it is a limited role. Nobody ever went to a ballgame to see the umpire.

...

In fact, less than a year before Roberts’ TV appearance — in a case that would preview the McCain-Feingold decision from last episode — Republican-appointed justices helped block an attempt to destroy campaign contribution limits. Here’s one of them — Justice Sandra Day O’Connor spotlighting the problem of soft corruption during the oral arguments of that case:

ARCHIVAL SUPREME COURT AUDIO (SANDRA DAY O’CONNOR): I suppose the most likely scenario for significant contribution would be the notion that I will give this money and expect in return that if and when I ever call this particular official, if the official is elected, they’ll pay attention to me. They’ll receive that call, respond, get in touch with me, and take seriously what I have to say.

DAVID:Republican appointees David Souter, John Paul Stevens, and Chief Justice William Rehnquist joined O’Connor to uphold the legality of campaign contribution limits at the state level. Justice Stevens went even further in a concurrence, declaring that “money is property — it is not speech.”

...

DAVID:Reagan understood that the Federalist Society wasn’t just some kooky low-budget campus debate club. This was a group funded by master planners from the Powell Memo era that we’ve mentioned before — John Merril Olin, Richard Mellon Scaife, and the Koch brothers. They took seriously the Powell Memo’s call to build a counter-force of smart, young minds who could fight on behalf of free enterprise.

These oligarchs delivered millions ofdollarsto the Federalist Society to help provide a safe space to cultivate and promote conservative lawyers…people like…Ronald Reagan’s attorney General, Ed Meese.

ARCHIVAL SPEECH AUDIO (ED MEESE):I’m very proud that the founders and leaders of this organization many of them are in fact serving with me in the Department of Justice…

DAVID:Meese, a longtime Reagan confidante andan early advisor to the Federalist Society, was obsessed with getting conservative judges onto the courts....

Bork became the first Supreme Court nominee to be voted down by the Senate in almost two decades. And that rejection became a catalyzing moment for the conservative legal movement, as recounted here by Meese.

...

Federalist Society leaders and other master planners were incensed — but they had a chance to avenge Bork when only a few years later, another Federalist Society darling got his own nomination to the Supreme Court. Ladies and gentlemen, the one you’ve been waiting for, Mr. Clarence Thomas.

ARCHIVAL SPEECH AUDIO (CLARENCE THOMAS):Conservatives need to realize that their audience isn’t simply lawyers. Our struggle is not simply another litigation piece or technique. This is a political struggle…

DAVID:This was Thomas speaking at a Federalist Society Student Symposium in 1988. The “political struggle” he’s talking about is part of his encouragement to his Federalist Society brethren to use the courts as a vehicle for their conservative activism.

This time around, with Clarence Thomas’s nomination in 1991, the master planners didn’t just wait around to be Borked. They instead launched a preemptive attack. Conservative groups funded ads against Democratic Senators who had been questioning Thomas’s ethics.

ARCHIVAL POLITICAL AD:Judge Clarence Thomas, endorsed by the U.S. Senate as a fighter for civil rights. Nominated to the Supreme Court.

DAVID:This ad was sponsored by a political action committee called Citizens United — yes, the same conservative group that would prompt the infamous Citizens United Supreme Court case 20 years later. Don’t worry, we’ll get to that case in a future episode.

ARCHIVAL POLITICAL AD:But who opposes Clarence Thomas? The liberal special interests and the soft-on-crime crowd. They call Clarence Thomas not qualified to sit on the Supreme Court just because he won’t bow to their liberal litmus test. Call your senator and urge support for Clarence Thomas. His values are our values

DAVID:Another set of groups launched ads touting Thomas as a model American.

ARCHIVAL POLITICAL AD:Clarence Thomas’ life has been exemplified by hard work, discipline, and self-reliance. He’s the role model to whom we can all look with pride.

DAVID:By the time Thomas’s confirmation hearings began scrutinizing Anita Hill’s allegations of sexual harassment, an emboldened Thomas wasn’t interested in answering questions — he focused on portraying himself as another Bork being wrongly persecuted.

ARCHIVAL CONGRESSIONAL HEARING (CLARENCE THOMAS):This is a circus. It is a national disgrace. It is a high-tech lynching for uppity-blacks, and it is a message that, unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you.

DAVID:The conservatives’ pressure campaign and strategy paid off. The Senate, which was controlled by Democrats at the time, narrowly confirmed Clarence Thomas on October 23, 1991.

One of the conservative activists working on Thomas’s confirmation team was an ambitious 25-year-old from New Jersey named Leonard Leo, who had formed his own Federalist Society chapter at Cornell University around the time of the Bork fiasco, and who had become friends with Thomas while clerking for a judge.

Thomas’s brutal confirmation process left an indelible mark on Leo. He immediately took a job with the Federalist Society to expand its assault on the judiciary.

He focused on recruiting and nurturing lawyers for the conservative judicial machine. I like to imagine a factory assembly line like in the movie Terminator. This factory was cranking out these conservative robots who could pass as regular humans during confirmation hearings but who would never deviate from their ideological programming once they’re on the court. Here’s Leo describing that assembly line in a Federalist Society video.

...

ROBERTS WORLED ON B V GORE]

DAVID:In the end, Roberts and other Bush lawyers secured the infamous Bush v. Gore ruling. In this particular case, enough of the Republican appointees –– including the squishier ones like O’Connor and Rehnquist –– stuck together in a 5-4 opinion that halted the vote count and installed popular-vote-loser George W. Bush into the White House.

The implications of that ruling for the future of the court itself were obvious from the moment the decision was handed down.

ARCHIVAL NEWS FOOTAGE:Now that the court has jumped into the middle of presidential politics, experts fear more questions about the court’s independence. And with George Bush perhaps nominating future justices, Democrats tonight promised an even tougher road to confirmation.

DAVID:Once Bush was sworn in in January 2001, the master planners got to work. Federalist Society vice president Leonard Leo focused on making sure that he and his fellow conservatives would be the loudest voices in the room when it came to choosing judges.

ARCHIVAL NEWS FOOTAGE:After 50 years of special status the American Bar Association will no longer have a leading role in vetting candidates for federal judgeships. The White House notified the ABA today that it will no longer get advanced word on prospective nominees.

...

DAVID:Roberts had showed flashes of his ideological commitment early in his career: In the 1980s, he joined the Reagan administration to help spearhead its efforts to limit the Voting Rights Act. Roberts penned a memo defending a push for judicial term limits on the grounds that federal judges were engaging in behavior that “usurps the roles of the political branches” What sort of crazy political behavior? Protecting abortion rights and mandates for airbags and seat belts in new cars.

Roberts’ memo was important: it showed that at an early age, he was a conservative soldier on a relentless mission to challenge judicial liberals.

...

DAVID:By the turn of the millennium, Roberts had been sharpening his skills as a cutthroat lawyer for corporate interests. He had helped Toyota with its case aiming to weaken the Americans with Disabilities Act. And he had also helped the U.S. Chamber of Commerce try to dismantle a program that aimed to lower prescription drug prices for people without insurance.

And now here in 2001, Roberts was on the White House list for a lower court appointment because, as a former steering member of a Federalist Society chapter, he seemed like a sure thing for the conservative legal movement — a jurist with a very bright future.

...

BK STARR]

After the Florida recount, Roberts got a court nomination, while Kavanaugh scored a sweet job in the White House counsel’s office. His main focus? Judicial appointments, working closely with lawyers in a special division of the Justice Department… called the Office of Legal Policy.

DAVID: That’s the office that Reagan’s attorney general Ed Meese set up in the 1980s and staffed with Federalist Society members, right?

JARED:Yeah. Ed Meese, one of the O.G. conservative legal activists. We heard his voice earlier talking about the Federalist Society. As Attorney General in the ‘80s, Meese built this behind-the-scenes team of lawyers to push and defend Reagan’s conservative policies. They also helped pick and vet potential federal judges for Reagan to nominate.

DAVID: So the Office of Legal Policy was like the plumbers for the judicial pipeline that Leonard Leo was talking about.

JARED: Sure. And you saw it when the Bush administration first hired its staff for the first term, journalists and officials in other departments of the government looked at people like Kavanaugh and offices like the OLP and raised complaints that there were too many Federalist Society members in key White House roles

DAVID:Now, officially, Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society were still insisting that there was nothing to see here — that they basically had no political power and they’re just a friendly debate

JARED: Yeah, exactly — in early 2001, Leo actually wrote a letter to White House counsel Alberto Gonzales saying that.

He stated, “The Federalist Society leaves political agendas, and political advocacy to other groups and individuals,” and emphasized that the organization “does not recommend nominees or candidates for public office.” While acknowledging that Federalist Society members quote “often have tried to provide lists of people worth considering,” Leo made it clear they’re speaking for themselves, not the Society.

DAVID:But the emails we found reviewed a different story, right?

JARED: Yeah, I’d say. They tell the opposite story. From the get-go, Leo seemed to be on White House speed dial, and all over White House officials’ correspondence about judicial nominations.

DAVID: And one person who seemed to be in regular contact with Leo and other conservative legal activists was B.K., right?

...

The day before Bush announced the nomination of Roberts and other conservative judges in 2001, Kavanaugh even asked to have White House officials send Leo a binder of information. Eventually, an email to Kavanaugh from another White House official said Leo and his staff would be “helping coordinate outside coalition activity regarding judicial nominations.”

DAVID: And Leo seemed to be interested in how the judiciary affected Big Business.

JARED:Yeah, we found one email where Leo is pitching presentations to industry groups about “Business and Courts.” The reply includes attachments, focusing on “business interest,” “business case examples,” and “business certainty.”

DAVID:That email from Leo is right around the time that one of the O.G. master planners, former Reagan and Bush administration lawyer C. Boyden Gray, was courting business support for a new group called the Committee For Justice to push conservative judicial nominees — and air ads attacking Democrats who were opposing them.

Gray, a Federalist Society stalwart, reportedly launched the group in 2002 at the urging of Bush’s political adviser Karl Rove and Senate Republican Leader Trent Lott. With the Supreme Court arbitrating so many issues of interest to big business, the new committee was filled with corporate lobbyists whose clients included banks, tech and telecom giants, defense contractors, and drug companies.

...

JARED: B.K. also had one-on-one calls with Ed Meese, naturally. And he corresponded with Ginni Thomas, Clarence Thomas’s wife, who was working as a kind of White House liaison for the Heritage Foundation.

...

JARED:Well, their definition of “progress” was probably different. Progress for America was described by the Washington Post as a group that has “raised millions of dollars, which it uses to promote Bush’s agenda of tax cuts, energy legislation, conservative judicial appointments, and free trade.”

The White House emails we reviewed show the group was tightly integrated into weekly meetings and conference calls using their funds for PR campaigns — op-eds, talk radio appearances, mail campaigns, and interviews to push President Bush’s judicial nominations.

...

DAVID:Seated among the rose bushes were Leonard Leo, Ed Meese and a conservative lawyer named Jay Sekulow, who was a legal activist representing the Christian Right.

This new coalition, bringing in the muscle of the Christian Right, aimed to build off Roberts’ confirmation to the lower court and continue transforming judicial nominations from a niche topic into an issue that the average voter would care about.

...

===

sep 17

MASTER PLAN, Ep 6: The Maverick Vs. The Corruption Machine

MASTER PLAN, Ep 6: The Maverick Vs. The Corruption Machine

After John McCain got caught up in a corruption scheme, he went to war with his own party to try to make sure it never happened again.

80’s

...It wasn’t such a surprise, then, when five U.S. senators got caught in 1989 for allegedly trying to pressure a federal bank regulator to go easy on savings and loan magnate Charles Keating. But what no one expected was that one of the so-called “Keating Five,” a relative newcomer named John McCain, would do far more than apologize for his mistakes; he’d transform into the staunchest campaign finance reformer since Watergate.

McCain would need his unpredictable “maverick” energy for the fights ahead. Because once he set his sights on wrangling the dark money out of politics, he’d find himself butting heads with two powerful members of his own party — a senator who’d been called the “Darth Vader of campaign finance reform,” and a governor-turned-president backed by big donors.

evid

...

LAURA: So Congress changed FECA again in 1979, reducing the disclosure requirements and allowing the national parties to spend money on “get-out-the-vote” drives and other “party-building activities.” And unlike individual candidates, the national political parties were allowed to raise unlimited amounts of cash for these programs — including from corporations.

DAVID: When you say “party building,” I’m imagining convention centers filled with campaign buttons, American flag-colored kazoos and lunatics wearing those Uncle Sam hats while yelling “Four more years.”

That seems pretty harmless, no?

LAURA: Sure, but that’s not really what this “soft money” was for — it couldn’t be used to directly promote a candidate, but the line between that and the legally-allowed “party-building activities” was pretty thin. It was another pretty big loophole. It’s complicated stuff, so I talked to Trevor Potter, who understands campaign finance inside and out.

...

DAVID: Trevor Potter was the Chairman of the Federal Election Commission. He was also general counsel to John McCain’s 2000 and 2008 presidential campaigns. And he’s currently the president of the Campaign Legal Center.

LAURA: Potter told me that the key to all this was the fiction of what were called “independent expenditures.” Back in 1976, with the Buckley case, the court protected unlimited spending on elections, as long as the spender was “independent” and did not directly coordinate the spending with specific candidates. And then there was one other loophole —something called “sham issue ads” or “issue advocacy.” The Buckley decision said that campaign ads couldn’t be regulated as long as they avoided some “magic words.”

...

LAURA: Good try, but not quite. The Buckley decision had this footnote –- footnote 52 –- that listed them –- it’s stuff like “vote for,” “elect,” “support,” “vote against,” “defeat,” “reject” — you get the drift. As long as those magic words weren’t invoked, political parties or PACs could raise and spend unlimited amounts of corporate money on ads supporting or attacking any political candidate. Here’s Trevor Potter again.

TREVOR POTTER:Money was being spent right before the election for ads that said, “Candidate Smith has voted twice to raise your taxes and has voted to let murderers out of jail. Call Candidate Smith and tell him you disagree with him.”

LAURA:Here’s probably the most famous example, the infamous Willie Horton ad from the 1988 presidential contest between the Democratic Governor of Massachusetts, Michael Dukakis, and Republican Vice President George H.W. Bush.

ARCHIVAL CAMPAIGN AID:Bush and Dukakis on crime. Bush supports the death penalty for first-degree murderers. Dukakis not only opposes the death penalty, he allowed first degree murderers to have weekend passes from prison. One was Willie Horton, who murdered a boy in a robbery, stabbing him 19 times. Despite a life sentence, Horton received ten weekend passes from prison. Horton fled, kidnapped a young couple, stabbing the man and repeatedly raping his girlfriend. Weekend prison passes — Dukakis on crime.

DAVID: That Willie Horton ad famously changed the course of the entire 1988 election, and represented the kind of “independent” spending that became huge in the 1980s and into the 1990s, just as the master planners wanted. It became a way to legally bribe members of Congress, who were basically selling access in order to raise enough money for their campaigns, and to get other “independent” groups to spend big on their behalf.

TREVOR POTTER:You would have written invitations that would say, you know, come speak to the leader or the committee chair of the Tax Writing committee, $10,000 for breakfast. Or give $50,000 to the RNC and have access to leadership retreats and at least two meetings a year with X or Y. And you saw that on both sides.

DAVID:Hang on. This sounds like the kind of access that Charles Keating had bought for himself - the kind of thing that was at the center of that huge scandal, right?

LAURA: Exactly. Most of the 1990s were like one big Keating Five scandal, only I’m not sure you can call it a scandal when it was kind of the political norm. Everyone was in on it — Republicans and Democrats — because that was the only way to successfully run for office. These were the waters they were swimming in. But it did not sit well with Senator McCain — a point he made to reporters right after he finished testifying about Keating to the Senate Ethics Committee.

...

DAVID:McCain introduced the Senate Campaign Finance Reform Act of 1995, co-sponsored by the junior Senator from Wisconsin, Democrat Russ Feingold. It called for limits on soft money, eliminating PACs from federal election activities, and amending FECA to strengthen election spending limits — a direct challenge to the master planners’ previous win in the Buckleycase.

..,

ARCHIVAL NEWS FOOTAGE:President Clinton today insisted the Lincoln Bedroom in the White House was not for sale. The Lincoln bedroom was never sold. That was one more false story we have had to endure. But White House documents, some in the President’s own handwriting indicate the Lincoln Bedroom was at least on the market to major political donors.

DAVID:Not surprisingly, the public was aghast. Polls from that time period showed that 90 percent of Americans thought campaign finance regulation should be overhauled or better enforced. Seizing the moment, McCain and Feingold introduced another version of their bill in January 1997. Senator Mitch McConnell — who public interest groups had taken to calling the Darth Vader of campaign finance reform — took a special interest in the bill. McConnell saw money as instrumental to success in politics; he’d said as much in lectures he gave when he taught law back in the 1970s. More money meant an increased chance at winning and McConnell liked to win. He also borrowed from the playbook of master planners Ralph Winter and John Bolton, who argued in the Buckley case that money was a constitutional freedom — and that restrictingmoney was the same as restricting speech.

...

[camp fin pop on stump in NH? v pioneers]

DAVID:For as much money as Bush was raking in, he was also spending like crazy to keep the McCain campaign at bay, after McCain’s anti-corruption message had powered him to a huge upset victory in the New Hampshire primary. By the time that debate in Los Angeles took place, the Bush campaign had already blown through close to $70 million, just to win the Republican nomination. And that didn’t include the money that other groups were covertly spending on Bush’s behalf. Here’s Trevor Potter again.

TREVOR POTTER:There was a group called Republicans for Clean Air that was a phony organization. A couple of Texas billionaires established an entity which then ran ads with pictures of belching smokestacks, saying that John McCain was in favor of pollution…

...

Campaign Reform Act of 2001 — or BCRA. Really rolls off the tongue…

Among other things, BCRA prohibited political parties from raising or spending any money that wasn’t subject to the federal limits laid down by FECA. It also required campaigns to disclose where their money came from and where it was spent. And it put limits on when those scammy issue advocacy ads could be run. In short, it pushed for all the things the master planners hated — radical things like “disclosure” and “spending limits”.

And the master planners were pissed.

...

ARCHIVAL NEWS FOOTAGE:Enron had grown into the seventh largest company in the country ahead of IBM and AT&T. But the energy trading business was undone by murky accounting and growing doubts about its finances.

DAVID:Now, the Enron debacle was a huge business scandal — but it also intersected with campaign finance. The company had been a large and prominent donor to the Republican party — especially its CEO, Ken Lay. Ken — or ”Kenny Boy” to George W. Bush — had been palsy-walsy with Bush when he was governor, sending him letters, Christmas cards, CDs of Hootie and the Blowfish… while also making suggestions on how Bush could help his company Enron.

Kenny Boy was also a Pioneer and one of Bush’s earliest donors. But perhaps more importantly, when Enron collapsed, McCain pointed to it as proof that campaign finance reform was needed now more than ever.

...

In the 1980s, the U.S. government was anything but clean. After the landmark Supreme Court cases we told you about in Episode 5 turned money into “speech” in the 1970s, cash began flowing into elections unchecked. Big donors also expected big favors.

IFrame Content

It wasn’t such a surprise, then, when five U.S. senators got caught in 1989 for allegedly trying to pressure a federal bank regulator to go easy on savings and loan magnate Charles Keating. But what no one expected was that one of the so-called “Keating Five,” a relative newcomer named John McCain, would do far more than apologize for his mistakes; he’d transform into the staunchest campaign finance reformer since Watergate.

McCain would need his unpredictable “maverick” energy for the fights ahead. Because once he set his sights on wrangling the dark money out of politics, he’d find himself butting heads with two powerful members of his own party — a senator who’d been called the “Darth Vader of campaign finance reform,” and a governor-turned-president backed by big donors.

...

In a 300-page opinion, the Court upheld the ban on soft money and limits on sham issue ads. Here’s Justice Rehnquist, reading the opinion on December 10, 2003.

ARCHIVAL SUPREME COURT AUDIO (WILLIAM REHNQUIST)The joint opinion concludes that this prohibition is an appropriate response to Congress’ legitimate concerns with preventing the actual and apparent corruption threatened by large soft money contributions and preserving the integrity of the federal election process.

DAVID:In essence, the Court agreed that if money is speech, then putting some restraints on speech was justified in order to counteract the decline in citizen participation and citizen faith in American democracy. This was a high water mark for those trying to prevent the wealthy from polluting elections with money. It was a moment to celebrate. But even Roger Witten knew it might not last....

[but then we get roberts]

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ep 4

This includes three secret meetings of a “Powell Memo Task Force” — including one at Disney World. These gatherings drew together America’s most powerful businessmen, a future president, and an ambitious young media consultant named Roger Ailes.

“reform” FEC act of 1971 congr jerry ford

MANY MISS EPS

MASTER PLAN, Ep 10: The Master Planners’ Heist Of The Century

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file:///C:/Users/patmc/AppData/Local/Temp/ExpressZip-37996-2/Master%20Plan%20(E-Book)-1756500737599.zip/Master%20Plan_Sirota-Maher_Lever%20Books%20Ebook_2025.pdf

Not long after the bill’s passage in 2000, I was sitting in my tiny

Washington, D.C., apartment. It was a tense time in America—just two

weeks had passed since the Supreme Court’s controversial decision in

Bush v. Gore handed the presidency to George W. Bush. That evening, I

heard the news: The prescription drug program had hit a wall.

Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala, citing

what she claimed were serious flaws and loopholes in the legislation,

announced that the administration would not implement the program.

In a letter to President Clinton, she insisted that the bill could not guar-

antee savings for American consumers. Without her certification, the

law’s provisions were rendered meaningless. The congressional plan to

reduce Americans’ medical costs by importing cheaper prescription

drugs was now effectively dead.

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Introduction 3

1 Milk Money 11

to “put so much money directly at your disposal” into Nixon’s

campaign.8

The deal was clear. Nixon’s Agriculture Department, which had pre-

viously declined to increase milk price supports, would guarantee federal

prices covering 85 percent of the dairy industry’s costs. 9 Nixon went “all

out” on milk, as the president put it. And in return, Connally would

shake them down for campaign cash, Nixon said.

Nixon’s chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, added specifics. The dairy

producers were committing a million dollars to Nixon’s reelection

efforts, with $90,000 funneled monthly into newly established dummy

committees. 10 These committees bore benign names like “The League

of Dedicated Voters” and “Americans Working to Build a Better

Community” 11—names designed to obscure their true purpose: con-

cealing the dairy industry’s massive contributions

...

s. Reflecting on his first campaign for

Congress in 1946, Nixon noted it had cost only $25,000 to run. By

1971, he estimated that no House race could be mounted for less than

Milk Money • 15

$100,000, except in the safest districts. While on camera, Nixon claimed

to favor reforms to limit campaign expenses. “We do favor a limitation

on expenses,” he said. “There is no question about that.” 16

But behind the scenes, the Nixon administration was working furiously

to kill campaign finance reform legislation.17 A memo unearthed from

the National Archives reveals just how openly cynical Nixon aides were.

White House counsel John Dean wrote to aide Chuck Colson, urg-

ing him to mobilize business trade groups to oppose the legislation.18

Dean even suggested that these groups “quietly go to the Hill and tell

members of the House and Senate that if they continue to support this

legislation, they will be cutting off financial support from these groups.”

...

Despite these efforts, Congress moved forward. The Federal Election

Campaign Act (FECA), designed to cap campaign ad spending and

increase transparency in political financing, passed by overwhelm-

ing margins—334–20 in the House and 88–2 in the Senate. Every

Republican senator voted in favor, except for the two from Arizona:

Barry Goldwater and Paul Fannin.... LBJ HAD PUSHED FOR STRONGER

...

IT was days before key provisions of FECA were set to take effect and

inside CREEP’s offices, staffers were in overdrive. Political campaigns

were no strangers to handling money, but this was unprecedented. The

amounts were staggering. One top executive from Pennzoil arrived

with $150,000 in cash, $550,000 in checks, and stock certificates.27 A

New Jersey financier sent over $200,000 in neatly wrapped hundred-

dollar bills inside a worn leather bag. 28 Howard Hughes’s representatives...LIDDY 60 DAY LOOPHOLE

,,,Milk Money • 21

candidates had received and from whom. “We issued press releases

for each member of Congress on their report, the total contributions

raised, the total expenditures they made,” Wertheimer said. “And we also

monitored whether they were filing in the states.” 44

Over the course of the 1972 campaign, Common Cause uncovered

a staggering number of violations of the new law, filing complaints

against 128 Democrats and 98 Republicans in congressional races. For

many candidates, it was a shock to discover that someone was actually

watching.45

But Common Cause’s ultimate focus was on the presidential

race. Common Cause also knew that other campaigns were following

CREEP’s lead and exploiting loopholes to collect anonymous donations

during the disclosure-free window. Gardner’s group called on all presi-

dential candidates to provide full disclosure of donations received prior

to the April 7 deadline.

The excuses rolled out like a well-rehearsed script. The law didn’t

require disclosure. It would be unfair to donors. Other campaigns hadn’t dis-

closed yet. Even after other campaigns began releasing donor lists, CREEP

held firm. 46 “They said, ‘Nuts to you.’ They fought us,” Wertheimer said.

Common Cause, however, adopted a novel legal strategy that relied

on the Federal Corrupt Practices Act—the outdated law that FECA

had just replaced. While the Corrupt Practices Act was deeply flawed,

offering no regulatory authority to enforce reporting, no public disclo-

sure requirements, and no penalties for noncompliance, it did require

that contributions over $100 be reported. Therefore, Common Cause

argued, even though FECA’s disclosure rules had not yet taken effect, the

older law was still in force. The lawsuit posed a serious threat to Nixon’s

White House, not just because it risked exposing the secret bags of cash

that had marched into CREEP’s offices, but also because it threatened to

unravel efforts to cover up the Watergate debacle.

Coincidentally—or perhaps not—shortly after Common Cause filed

its lawsuit, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) launched an investigation

into the organization’s tax-exempt status.

...

• $1,000,000 from Clemens Stone, a Chicago insurance magnate

rumored to be in line for an ambassadorship to Great Britain.

• $800,000 from Richard Scaife of the Mellon family.

• $300,000 from Arthur Watson, a former ambassador to France.

• $255,000 from John Mulcahy of New York, who had hosted

Nixon during a trip to Ireland.

...

Nine months after the lawsuit was filed, a federal judge finally

ordered the White House to hand over the list.52 On June 14, 1973, the

White House confirmed it had the document, though an assistant press

secretary insisted Nixon had never seen it.

The list was staggering—more a tome than a sheet of paper—measuring

an inch and a half thick. It detailed $19 million 53 in undisclosed dona-

tions to Nixon’s reelection fund, part of a total haul of $55 million. 54

Adjusted for inflation, that’s equivalent to $407 million today.

...

What they uncovered was damning. Witten and his team traced

the funds paid to the Watergate burglars back to illegal campaign con-

tributions, but they wanted to go further, examining the motivations

behind these secret donations. Why were Nixon’s backers so eager to

avoid disclosure? What influence were they buying?

The names of contributors and companies came from multiple

sources: members of CREEP, Nixon’s personal lawyer, investigative

journalists like Woodward and Bernstein, and the Rose Mary’s Baby

list. Familiar corporations emerged, including Gulf Oil, Ashland Oil,60

Northrop, 61 Phillips Petroleum,62 Goodyear, 63 Occidental.64

...

2 The Powell Memo 29

...Step 1: Take Over Higher Education

Step 2: Influence the Media

Step 3: Dominate the Political Arena

Step 4: Take Control of the Courts

...Yet for all its importance, the Powell Memo remains omitted from the official history of this country. It is often dismissed as a kind of conspiracy theory—like some boogeyman manufactured by liberals desperate to explain their loss of power. Even when it does get mentioned, it can sound almost too outrageous to be real.

Take, for example, actor Dick Van Dyke, who once brought it up in an interview on CNN before the 2016 election. “Are you familiar with the Lewis Powell Memorandum?” he asked. “It said there’s too much democracy, and it’s a threat to capitalism.”14 While Van Dyke’s summary may sound exaggerated, it’s not far off the mark. The memo warned that democratic movements—unions, consumer advocates, and environmentalists—posed a direct threat to free enterprise.

Oddly enough, Powell’s official biography, written by one of his former Supreme Court clerks, doesn’t mention the memo at all in its more than seven hundred pages.15 In fact, the document seems to have been deliberately downplayed or erased from much of Powell’s legacy...

As a member of Philip Morris’s board and a legal adviser, Powell helped craft sophisticated PR campaigns, lobbying strategies, and legal defenses designed to confuse the public and protect industry profits. The key insight was that the industry couldn’t simply react to regulation; it needed to go on the offensive. Joseph Cullman stepped up as the tobacco CEO who was willing to lead the charge, even appearing on national television to defend the company’s product.

“It’s true that babies born from women who smoke are smaller,” Cullman infamously stated on Face the Nation in January 1971. “But they are just as healthy as the babies born to women who do not smoke. Some women would prefer having smaller babies.”33

The backlash to that comment was swift, but Philip Morris did not back down—and neither did Powell. In a letter to Cullman, Powell praised the company’s aggressive approach to discrediting the American Cancer Society, which had been a vocal critic of the tobacco industry. “At the very least,” Powell wrote, “the American Cancer Society is likely to be more restrained in the future.”34

...

While Powell was advising Philip Morris, another force loomed large in his life: a deep fear of communism. Starting in the 1960s, Powell regularly corresponded with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover41 and his top deputies. Newly uncovered documents reveal that Powell served as what the Bureau referred to as an “SAC contact,” a designation for trusted informants.42 Powell shared information about suspected communist activities, particularly within the legal profession, and as part of this friendly relationship he received intelligence about left-wing organizations, including detailed financial reports on activist groups.

Powell’s correspondence with the FBI revealed his growing alarm about a new breed of political activists—college organizers, anti-war protesters, and the New Left. One report Powell reviewed, titled Confrontation Politics, analyzed the rhetorical techniques of these radical groups.43

Cartha DeLoach, assistant to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and widely regarded as Hoover’s most trusted lieutenant, was a frequent correspondent of Powell. DeLoach provided Powell with real-time research and strategic insights about activist tactics, drawing directly from FBI intelligence.

“[M]ay I suggest that you might like to consult a newly published book, Revolution for the Hell of It by Abbie Hoffman,” DeLoach wrote, referencing Hoffman, a leader of the Youth International Party (the “Yippies”). “This book might give you some insights into the New Leftist mentality,” Hoover’s deputy added.44

While Powell’s exchanges with the FBI were private, his public speeches began to echo similar themes.45 In a 1970 address titled The Attack on American Institutions, Powell decried what he saw as the growing threat of radicalism. “Today there are others with quite opposite goals who insist with equal fervor that civil disobedience of laws deemed to be unjust is a legitimate means of asserting desired rights,” Powell said. “Tyranny is the inevitable result of this form of anarchy.”4...

Powell replied in his classic genteel Southern manner: “I think the answer is affirmative, Mr. President. I’m a fairly patriotic guy.”

He was more than just patriotic. For Nixon, choosing Powell at this moment was a political masterstroke. Powell had strong backing from the Chamber of Commerce, and his mild manner and reputation for moderation made him an easy sell to a Democratic-controlled Senate. Privately, Nixon referred to him as a “corporation lawyer” in a call with California Governor Ronald Reagan—and that’s precisely what he wanted.65

On November 4, 1971, Powell and Rehnquist appeared before the Senate. Rehnquist, the conservative movement firebrand, faced tough questioning over his record on civil rights. Powell, by contrast, sailed through with measured and reassuring answers on race and civil disobedience. “The Senate reserved two days for debate but didn’t need them,” one news anchor marveled. “There wasn’t even a whisper of dissent.” The vote: 89–1. The lone opposition: Senator Fred Harris of Oklahoma, warning that Powell was “an elitist with no compassion for the little people.”66

But to Nixon—and the business elites cheering quietly from the sidelines—that sounded a lot like praise.

Powell’s confirmation seemed inevitable, but there’s an alternate reality worth considering. The FBI, under Powell’s pen pal J. Edgar Hoover, conducted Powell’s background check and interviewed dozens of friends, colleagues, and coworkers.67 Yet the agency conveniently excluded his memo from the report sent to Congress, along with any mention of Powell’s correspondence with Hoover or his inflammatory rhetoric comparing liberal activists to Adolf Hitler. Powell was the last person anyone would have expected to be the author of a revolutionary new doctrine. Had the Powell Memo surfaced during the confirmation hearings, Powell’s nomination might not have been so assured.

“It’s very possible that, had Justice Powell’s strong pro-business views as expressed in the Chamber of Commerce memo been known, he might never have made it onto the Supreme Court,” observed UCLA law professor Adam Winkler.6...

“It was eerie when I first read the contents of that memo,” said Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. “So much of what you see right now, playing out at the hands of the far right, was recommended in that memo. That you needed to control the court. That you needed to control the media. That you needed rapid response on college campuses.”74

Whitehouse sees the memo as the blueprint for the corporate takeover of American democracy. “You can see the elements operating in plain view,” he explained, pointing to the rise of corporate lobbying, political front groups, and strategic litigation that Powell had prescribed.

Critics today echo this analysis. Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich described the Powell Memo as “the start of the corporate takeover of American politics.”75 Others call it “a corporate call to arms” or “a playbook for capitalist forces to mobilize against the general population.

...

3 The Secret Task Force 49

DALLas ypo ailes, art taylor CBS

scaife koch coors

4 Corporations Are People 67

The argument behind Buckley v. Valeo didn’t come out of thin air. Buckley had already criticized FECA on the Senate floor, repeatedly citing a booklet written by Yale law professor Ralph K. Winter and published by the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.10 (Notably, Winter’s coauthor was a recent Yale Law School graduate named John R. Bolton—now better known as the mustachioed neoconservative who later served as a national security advisor to both George W. Bush and Donald Trump.)

Winter’s radical thesis equated money with speech, claiming that limits on campaign spending were inherently unconstitutional. “Setting a limit on candidate expenditures sets a maximum on the political activities in which American citizens can engage and is thus unconstitutional,” Winter wrote.11 This argument—that spending limits crushed outsider candidates—became the cornerstone of Buckley’s case.

When the case first came before a federal court, the judges upheld FECA, reasoning that its limits were necessary to prevent corruption and maintain the integrity of elections. But Buckley and his co-plaintiffs quickly appealed to the Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments on November 10, 1975.12

...

Winter represented Buckley and the other plaintiffs, alongside Bolton, Washington lawyer Brice Clagett, and the New York Civil Liberties Union’s Joel Gora.13

Typically, the job of defending federal laws in the Supreme Court would fall to the solicitor general. And indeed, one of the lawyers arguing in defense of FECA was the famed Archibald Cox. However, Cox wasn’t representing the federal government per se—he was there on behalf of FECA’s chief Senate sponsors, Edward M. Kennedy and Hugh Scott.

Cox’s involvement was prompted by an unusual move from the actual solicitor general at the time: Robert Bork. Bork—who had infamously acted as Nixon’s hatchet man, firing Cox as special prosecutor during the “Saturday Night Massacre”—had returned to his post as solicitor general under President Ford after Nixon’s resignation. Like Winter, his fellow Yale Law School colleague, Bork personally opposed FECA, believing campaign finance limits were an inherent violation of the First Amendment. Ford, who had reluctantly signed the FECA amendments, had also made clear that his administration had reservations about key parts of the law.14

Rather than mounting a full-throated defense of FECA, Bork and Attorney General Edward Levi took the extraordinary step of filing two separate briefs.15 The first, filed on behalf of the government, nominally defended FECA. The second—filed as an amicus brief—reflected Bork’s true views, arguing that significant parts of the law were unconstitutional. Though Bork stopped short of outright opposing FECA, the message to the justices was unmistakable: The administration wouldn’t object if the court struck it down. The dual-brief strategy infuriated the FEC and campaign finance advocates like Common Cause, who had expected a unified defense of the hard-fought reforms.

Thus, the stage was set for a battle between the conservative legal theories of Robert Bork and the anti-corruption advocacy of Archibald Cox...

When Virginia defended its advertising ban in the Supreme Court by claiming that commercial speech wasn’t protected under the First Amendment, Morrison reframed the case around the rights of listeners, arguing that consumers had their own constitutional “right to know” the information being withheld. By focusing on how the ban deprived the audience of vital information, he argued that commercial speech was just as deserving of First Amendment protection as any other form of speech because it empowered consumers to make better decisions.24 Again, Morrison’s argument resonated with Justice Blackmun, who delivered the Supreme Court’s ruling in May 1976. Blackmun wrote, “We further hold that so-called commercial speech is not wholly outside the protection of the First and Fourteenth Amendments. The individual consumer and society, in general, may have strong interests in the free flow of commercial information.”25

The ruling was celebrated as a major win for consumer rights and a triumph for Ralph Nader’s movement. Reporting from the steps of the Supreme Court, Fred Graham of CBS News noted, “Today’s decision is also expected to spell the end of laws against advertising the price of eyeglasses and funerals, and perhaps advertising by doctors, dentists, and maybe even lawyers.”26

Beneath the surface, however, this seemingly clear victory for the underdog set the stage for an ironic twist. The same reasoning that empowered consumers to shop around and save money would soon be used to empower corporations to assert their own First Amendment rights. The law of unintended consequences was about to play out, with a pivotal assist from none other than Justice Lewis Powell.

Powell, who had previously attacked Ralph Nader in his now-famous Powell Memo as one of the most dangerous figures in America, was hardly an ally of Public Citizen. He firmly rejected Morrison’s First Amendment listeners’ rights theory, writing in his notes during deliberations on the pharmacy case that “there is no Const[itutional] right to know.” To Powell, the First Amendment existed to protect the speaker, not the audience, and he saw the advertising restrictions on businesses, particularly pharmacists, as especially troubling.27

In the end, Powell joined the majority in striking down the ban on drug price advertising. But what began as a triumph for consumers was about to become a cornerstone of corporate influence, paving the way for a new and powerful interpretation of free speech rights. Powell’s strategic pivot would turn this seemingly unrelated case into yet another step in the master plan

...

The Buckley case looms large in the history of campaign finance law. But there’s another lesser-known case that truly laid the groundwork for decisions like Citizens United decades later: Bellotti. Formally known as First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, this case featured none other than Powell playing a leading role. It marked the culmination of a series of Supreme Court decisions in the 1970s that reshaped campaign finance law and enshrined corporate rights under the First Amendment.

To understand Bellotti, it’s helpful to briefly revisit the rulings that paved its way. First, there was Buckley v. Valeo, which declared that spending money in campaigns was a constitutionally protected form of speech. As Chief Justice Warren Burger stated in the majority opinion: “The court holds that the expenditure limitations are violative of First Amendment guarantees and they are unconstitutional.” Then, just a few years later, the court ruled in Virginia State Board of Pharmacy v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council that businesses had at least some of the same First Amendment protections as individuals. “We further hold that so-called commercial speech is not wholly outside the protection of the First and Fourteenth Amendments,” announced Justice Harry Blackmun.28

By the time Bellotti reached the court in 1977, the master planners were poised to solidify their strategy. This wasn’t just another ripple in the judicial landscape—it was a seismic shift.

The story began in Massachusetts, where the state legislature passed a law barring corporations from spending money to influence ballot measures, unless the measure directly affected their business.29 At first glance, the law seemed like a straightforward reform to ensure fairness in the democratic process. But in 1976, lawmakers proposed a constitutional amendment that would introduce a graduated income tax, raising taxes on the wealthy.

This proposed tax infuriated powerful executives like Richard Hill, the head of First National Bank of Boston. Although Hill and others could still spend their personal wealth opposing the measure, the restriction on corporate funds felt, to them, like an unjust muzzle. When Massachusetts Attorney General Francis X. Bellotti told First National that the bank’s campaign spending would break the new law and that he planned to enforce it, Hill filed a lawsuit against Bellotti and the state...

Powell’s Corporate Rights Doctrine

To understand Powell’s worldview on this issue, it’s worth revisiting a moment from late 1972, just weeks before Powell took his seat on the Supreme Court. At a private dinner held in his honor by the Forum Club in Richmond, Virginia, Powell was celebrated by a group of businessmen from State Planters Bank/UVB—long standing clients of his law firm, Hunton & Williams. As they toasted Powell and gave speeches in his honor, the evening was mostly jovial and celebratory. But Powell’s own remarks, captured in an audio recording, took on a more thoughtful tone.35

Throughout a lawyer’s career, Powell explained to his peers, they often represent numerous individuals and, at times, corporations, even if they may not fully sympathize with them. Sometimes, they advocate for business interests whose public value they might even question. “Our system provides for and indeed depends upon the right of every individual—and every corporate enterprise—to be represented by counsel whose duty it is to do the best he can to see that justice is done for that individual, or that entity.”

It’s worth pausing on this statement, a rare moment of introspection in an otherwise raucous evening. Powell’s remarks revealed the heart of his worldview: a belief that corporations and individuals were equally entitled to legal rights and protections. For Powell, there was no meaningful distinction between the two under the law. This perspective would prove pivotal in shaping his approach to corporate personhood and the role of businesses in society during his time on the Supreme Court.

...

By the time it came to decide Bellotti in 1978, Powell had fully embraced this worldview. While his colleagues leaned toward a narrower ruling, Powell pushed forcefully for a broader decision. He wanted the court to declare outright that corporations should enjoy the same First Amendment protections as individuals, free to spend their money on any political matter without government interference. Initially, Powell stood alone in that view, and Justice William Brennan was assigned to draft the majority opinion in favor of a narrower ruling.

However, Brennan experienced a crisis of confidence. He realized that leaving the broader question unresolved would likely invite future litigation. Justice Brennan circulated a typed memo to his colleagues, expressing his struggle to write a narrow opinion that would avoid addressing the broader constitutional question. “Corporate spending as a corrupting influence in the political process has long been a national concern and has produced numerous corrupt practices acts, federal and state, ever since Theodore Roosevelt some seventy-five years ago urged their passage,” he wrote. He warned that striking down Massachusetts’s law could jeopardize the constitutionality of campaign finance laws nationwide, which had long been justified as safeguards against political corruption. Concerned that his approach lacked majority support, he asked his fellow justices to confirm their positions, noting that if most disagreed, the opinion should be reassigned.36

This unexpected development was Powell’s golden opportunity. In the margins of Brennan’s letter to the justices, Powell scribbled, “Wow!” with an exclamation point (see Figure 4).37 Sensing his moment, Powell volunteered to write the majority opinion. He seized on the court’s recent ruling in Virginia State Board of Pharmacy, reminding his colleagues that they had already held that the public had a right to hear corporate speech.38 By that logic, Powell argued, Massachusetts voters also had a right to hear what corporations like First National Bank had to say about ballot measures.

It worked. Powell swayed just enough justices to form a slim 5–4 majority. In his opinion, Powell declared: “The First Amendment’s primary concern, and therefore, the court’s concern, always has been the preservation of free and uninhibited dissemination of information and ideas.” He went further, stating that this principle held true “whether the speech comes from a corporation or an individual.”39...

By the late 1970s, corporate money was pouring into politics. Political Action Committees (PACs), once mainly used by labor unions, had become powerful tools for corporations to bundle donations, boost business-friendly lawmakers, and target opponents. Between 1974 and 1980, the number of PACs quadrupled, with corporate-affiliated PACs accounting for almost half.42

This surge reflected the vision first strategized in gatherings of the Powell Memo Task Force and advanced by allies like President Gerald Ford, who had lobbied to carve loopholes into the 1974 FECA amendments (see Chapter 3). These changes allowed government contractors—and, by extension, large multinational corporations represented by the Chamber of Commerce—to donate to federal elections and helped supercharge groups like the Business-Industry Political Action Committee (BIPAC). Meanwhile, Bellotti built on Buckley by striking down limits on corporate spending in ballot initiatives, further affirming corporate political rights.

Although PACs were still subject to disclosure rules and spending restrictions, corporations—with their far deeper pockets than unions— were better positioned to take advantage. Between 1976 and 1978 alone, corporate PAC spending jumped by 128 percent, compared to just 24 percent for labor PACs. By the 1980s, corporate PACs were rivaling labor PACs in contributions to Democratic incumbents.43

The floodgates were open, and the master planners’ vision was well underway. But not everyone was content to let this system stand unchallenged. Among the critics was a surprising figure—a conservative Republican senator from Arizona named John McCain. Burned by his own involvement in a campaign finance scandal, McCain would dedicate his political career to taking on what he called “an elaborate influence-peddling scheme in which both parties conspire to sell the country to the highest bidder.”44

That’s where our story heads next

5 The Maverick 83

6 The Machine 101

7 Shock and Awe 121

NO COPY; cu HIT ADS ON

CU hit ads pro clarence ~ biden teddy Cranston; dc and home states; 52-48 leo 25 yo cornell fed soc worked on nom, for a judge --> worked for fed soc

backlash to clarence, got tough eg Roberts nom to judge; vlinton ADM BLOCK SO WENT FOR CLERKS tt WHITE SHOE; TILL 2000

B43 NO LIB JUDGE, STRICT CONSTRUCT; NADER LED TO TIE

CNN CALLED FLA FOR GORE THEN 180 NOTE 28

LEO STRIP ABA OF CAND VET BC ~ BORK ORRIN HATCH //

ROBERTS SOL GEN OFFICE B 41, CORP WINS SCOTUS; ~ VRA; ~ ADA; COC ~ RX FOR UNINSURED; GOP DEFECT --> STALL --> BRET K

PAUL W HERIT, SEAN RUSH GROVER FEDSOC MEESE; GINNI NOTE 51

CBG 2002 COMM FOR JUSTICE KARL R TRENT LOTT ASKED; LOBBY PHARMA BANK TELECOMM;

PROGRESS FOR AM EX DIR B-C 2000 SFT MONEY; EASTMAN ON BILL O

ROBRTS NOM ~ ALL FR j; JAY SEKULOW LEO

ED WHELAN BE CONRV ENUF TO GET NOM, CTR ENUF FOR CONFIRM;

NAM ENDORSE 1ST; DENIED MEMB FEDSOC DEMAND RETRACT BUT YRS LATER DIRECTORY; P FAM ADS; REHQ DIED SUDDEN, SO GIG SHIFT; DAN INO ~ ; PFA AD PRAISE DEMS; AGREE MOD THUS MIERS ~ RUSH BORK BRET DARK MONEY ATTACK ADS; -> ALITO PFA 400K$ ADS; NO RECALL FED SOC; BK NOM CIRCUIT

CH 8 GO BIG

8 Going Big 137

JUST KENNEDY LOW PROFOLE THO ~ CAMP FIN; --> SWING

BOPP

OVERTURM MCC-F YRS AFTER RHENQ UPHELD IT P 134 MAGIC WORDS, EMP STRKES BACK

BOSSIE HILLARY

BOPP WANTED WATERSHED FOR CAMP FIN // BROWN V BD

OLSON SOUTER

ROBERTS NARROW KENNEDY BD

BO AND KICK ~

GINNI 504C WEEKS BEF DECISION; LEO ON DEC

NOTE 47 STATS 47% INDEP $; 72% BARRED 4 YRS BEF; C4 134M$ 2010

9 The Heist 157

AFP V BONTA KICK CATO PAC LEG LEO; JCN ~ MERICK G AND PRO 3 GOP

NAACP V ALAB; ZEPH SAYS JUST AND DNOROS HAVE REASON TO HIDE; // GO AFTER IRS NEG ADS ROVE

BOLO TP --.=> BS MCCON BACKMAN WORSE THAN WATERGATE; V4 NO DISCLOSE

CORRPUPT NO EXIST SKILLING BOB MCDONNELL VA BOPP JAY SEK, h&WMS

BRIDGEGATE, HOUSEHOLDER OHIO

HOFMAN DILLER ~ LINA K

LEO CONCORD

22 STATES 842 CITIES 28TH, BUT --> PUBLIC FIN

10 High Water 179

11 Biden Our Time 191

DNC EDISON ELEC, REYNOLDS TOB BLUE CRISS MS,

ZT ON BIDEN CORP $

KATIE PORTER CRYPTO --. ELECT RIG --> ~

Afterword 203

4.3 B DK MONEY POST CU; BRN CTR; 1.9B$ 2024 ALONE; 4.5B LOBBYING 2024; COC

60 PARDONS NOT JAN 6 POLS CRIM, 1 IN 5 TIES TO TRUMP;

AZ 2025 BAN CORP MONEY IN PRIMARIES

BILL ACKMAN SUPERPAC ~ MAMDANI

Chronology 211

Cast of Characters 214

Bibliography 22