FED SOCIETY 2
6/16
fedsoc tag also, see also Leo tag lnrd
SEE THREE
main lost content 4/17
fedsocbak is recovery of text, extensive
fedsoc218 capt
3/19 capt
see ct judic capt takeover
see legal suppression
see stack
see clarence clerks (mafia) ginni hub, carrie severino
see leo TENEO dark $ hub tag lnrd
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RE THIEL YALE LAW TALK --> JDV:
Key conservative entities at the school and their associated funders include:
- The Federalist Society: The prominent conservative and libertarian law student organization (founded at Yale) relies on large, national conservative foundations. Its network is heavily bankrolled by groups like the Searle Freedom Trust, the Scaife Foundation, and DonorsTrust, as well as the dark money network overseen by conservative activist Leonard Leo. , [2, 3]
- Institutional Portraits & Specific Initiatives: Major conservative initiatives at the law school have been funded by specific high-profile Republican megadonors. For example, Texas billionaire Harlan Crow provided a $105,000 donation in 2018 to commission and install the official portrait of Justice Clarence Thomas in the law school. [1]
For more than two decades, Yale Law School has also served as a focal point for the broader political ecosystem, helping to foster high-profile conservative leaders and their financiers in Silicon Valley and beyond. [1, 2]
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GIBNEY DOCU 2025 HBO MAX
JONATHAN RIEHL SIC
DISS : file:///C:/Users/patmc/Downloads/The_Federalist_Society_accessible.pdf
POLITICO
The Weekend at Yale That Changed American Politics
Aug 27, 2018 Five months after the heady weekend at Yale, it was official: The Federalist Society, technically the Federalist Society for Law & Public Policy Studies, was a national, nonprofit corporation.
Amazon
https://www.amazon.co.uk › Inside-Federalist-Society-Conservatives-Constitutional › dp › 0742562670
Inside the Federalist Society: How Conservatives Are Remaking ...
Jonathan Riehl is a lecturer in communication studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He was a political reporter for Congressional Quarterly (2002-2007) and the head writer and project director for political consultant and pollster, Frank Luntz (1998-1999).
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Publication date : 1 Oct. 2008
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an 12 24
In early June, Federalist Society President Eugene Meyer announced his retirement from the right-wing judicial outfit. Meyer made it clear, however, that he wasn't leaving right away and planned to stick around until a suitable replacement was found.
The Federalist Society is still deciding on a replacement for Meyer. The New Republic's Steve Kennedy discusses that search in an article published on December 12, stressing that the group has been enormously influential on the right.
"Under Meyer's decades-long leadership," Kennedy explains, "the Federalist Society has become a powerhouse on the right, boasting massive funding and powerful allies in all branches of government. During Donald Trump's first term, FedSoc was almost a shadow presidency, handpicking judicial appointments for federal judgeships, as well as being hugely influential behind the scenes in terms of the Cabinet and administrative agencies. Meyer has specifically been seen as an influential player in helping to bridge the gap between institutionalist conservatives and the conservative legal movement's more aggressive firebrands, so whoever ends up as his successor may give us an idea of the organization's future direction — and who will inherit the organization's future."
READ MORE:**Analyst claims Alina Habba 'gave away the game' on Trump’s plans in Fox News interview**
Kennedy adds, "With Trump — an unquestioning enabler of the organization's grand designs —preparing for his second term, the new leader of the Federalist Society is destined to have a significant impact on the country."
The Federalist Society has played a major in the U.S. Supreme Court's move to the far right.
Six of the High Court's nine justices were appointment by GOP presidents, including Trump's three appointees: Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett.
According to Kennedy, "five candidates" may be "in serious contention" for the position Meyer is vacating.
READ MORE:**Don't expect huge jump in oil production — even if Trump slashes regulations: economist**
One of them is Robert Alt, president and CEO of the Buckeye Institute and a National Review columnist. Others include Michael Fragoso (who has served as chief council on nominations for the Senate Judiciary Committee) and Ryan Newman (Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' chief counsel).
"Time will tell who is chosen — and what their selection says about the direction of the organization," Kennedy explains. "But whoever the Federalist Society chooses as its next president, this collection of policy views and work experience should be pretty alarming to anyone who cares about bodily autonomy, public health and safety, and any moves toward a more equitable and just society."
===
an 12 24
*ProPublica
Sen. J.D. Vance, whom Donald Trump named as his vice presidential running mate Monday, told a group of influential young conservatives in a closed-door speech in 2021 that they should stand up for “nonconventional people” who speak truth, such as Infowars founder Alex Jones.
“If you listen to Rachel Maddow every night, the basic worldview that you have is that MAGA grandmas who have family dinners on Sunday and bake apple pies for their family are about to start a violent insurrection against this country,” Vance said. “But if you listen to Alex Jones every day, you would believe that a transnational financial elite controls things in our country, that they hate our society, and oh, by the way, a lot of them are probably sex perverts too.”
Vance went on, “Sorry, ladies and gentlemen, that’s actually a hell of a lot more true than Rachel Maddow’s view of society.”
He said that every person in attendance for his speech believed “something that’s a little crazy.” In his case, he said, “I believe the devil is real and that he works terrible things in our society. That’s a crazy conspiracy theory to a lot of very well-educated people in this country right now.”
Vance made these remarks at a September 2021 gathering of the Teneo Network, an invitation-only group of young conservatives that counts elected officials, pro athletes, financial executives and media figures among its members. Vance joined Teneo six years ago. ProPublica and Documented obtained a video recording of his 30-minute speech and question-and-answer session, which has not been previously reported.
Vance’s remarks at the conference — which you can read a transcript of or watch in full below — give a rare unvarnished look at his thinking and illustrate how aligned he is with various factions within the conservative and MAGA movements. “I’ll throw out the standard campaign speech,” he began his Teneo talk. “[I’ll] actually just try to level with you guys about what I do see is the big — a few big problems that are in our country right now.”
According to tax records, the Teneo Network’s chairman is Leonard Leo, the legal activist who built a pipeline of lawyers who interpret the Constitution based on the “original intent” of the framers or the meaning of the words in the text when they were written. One of the most influential conservatives of the past three decades, Leo helped confirm all six conservative justices currently serving on the U.S. Supreme Court. Leo-aligned judges have pushed to restrict abortion rights and rein in the government’s power to regulate corporations.
Leo has said he views the Teneo Network as a way to extend his influence beyond the judiciary to industries including finance, media, government and Silicon Valley. The network identifies and cultivates conservative leaders in “other areas of American culture and American life where things are really messed up right now,” as Leo put it in a Teneo video.
According to internal Teneo documents, Vance joined Teneo in 2018, several years before he ran for Senate in his home state of Ohio. His book, “Hillbilly Elegy,” had already become a bestseller, and Vance was a commentator for CNN while running his own nonprofit and investment fund backing startup companies outside of Silicon Valley.
Spokespeople for the Trump campaign, Leo and Teneo did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
By the time Vance spoke at Teneo’s 2021 conference, he had joined the race to fill outgoing Sen. Rob Portman’s seat. Despite his past criticisms of Trump, which included calling the former president an “idiot” and comparing him to Adolf Hitler, Vance won Trump’s endorsement in 2022 and cruised to a comfortable victory.
Vance’s connection to Teneo could form a bridge between different factions of the Republican Party that seem to be at odds. Previous news stories have reported that Trump and Leo, who advised the former president on judicial nominees during his administration, are no longer as close as they once were. Russ Vought, a Trump ally, publicly denigrated the Federalist Society, the legal networking group Leo and others built into a juggernaut.
Adding Vance to the ticket bolsters the connections between Leo’s network and the Trump 2024 campaign. It also strengthens ties between Trump’s reelection bid and the Project 2025 blueprint, which outlines plans for a second Trump administration, including firing thousands of career civil servants, shuttering the Department of Education and replacing ambitious goals to combat climate change with ramped-up fossil fuel production. In a recent TV interview, Vance said the document contained “some good ideas”but claimed that “most Americans couldn’t care less about Project 2025” and that the Trump campaign wasn’t affiliated with it.
In his Teneo remarks, he bemoaned that decades ago major corporate CEOs reliably donated money to Republicans but now they give heavily to Democrats. He lamented that conservatives had “very few oligarchs on our side,” had “lost every institution in American society” and needed to make corporations “taking the side of the left in the culture wars feel real economic pain.”
“So we’ve not just lost the academy,” meaning universities, “which we’ve lost for a long time; we haven’t just lost the media, which has been on the side of the left for a long time; we now find ourselves in a situation where our biggest multinational corporations are active participants in the culture war on the other side,” he said. “It’s really been a few of us over the past few years who have recognized that the big corporations have really turned against conservatives in a very big and powerful way.”
He argued that conservatives needed to take action against corporations that, say, defended abortion rights or punished employees who spoke out against abortion access. “If we’re unwilling to make companies that are taking the side of the left in the culture wars feel real economic pain, then we’re not serious about winning the culture war,” he said.
He said that Americans were “terrified to tell the truth” and “point out the obvious,” including that “there are real biological, cultural, religious, spiritual distinctions between men and women.” He added, “I think that’s what the whole transgender thing is about, is like fundamentally denying basic reality.”
Shortly before he spoke at the Teneo conference, Vance drew criticism when he tweeted that “Alex Jones is a far more reputable source of information than Rachel Maddow.” Jones, founder of the online show Infowars, gained a following with his promotion of conspiracy theories about the Sept. 11 terrorist attack. More recently, judges in several states ordered him to pay $1.5 billion to the families of the victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting, which Jones had called a hoax.
Vance told Teneo members that he was “just trolling” with his defense of Jones, but added “that doesn’t mean what I said is in any way untrue.”
“Look, I think there’s a not-terrible chance that one of you is going to be sharing cellblock 12A in Premier Harris’ prison detention camp in a few years,” he explained, seemingly referring to Vice President Kamala Harris. “If we’re going to all end up in that place, we might as well have a little fun while we get there. It’s OK to troll when you make and speak fundamental truths. But, look, I do think what I said was correct.”
If the conservative movement was going to survive, he continued, its members needed to “speak for truth.” He mentioned donors in Ohio who had asked him if he would condemn inflammatory remarks made by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
“And I say, ‘Why? Why do you want me to denounce this person?’” Vance said. “‘Well, she believes these crazy things.’ Who cares?”
He went on, “Believing crazy things is not the mark of whether somebody should be rejected. Believing important truths should be the mark of whether we accept somebody, and if they believe some crazy things on the side, that’s fine. We need to be OK with nonconventional people.”
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guk 3 24
when the former president Donald Trump appointed the Texas attorney James Ho to the fifth circuit court of appeals in 2017, lawyers at the prominent law firm Gibson Dunn – where Ho worked before his appointment – had a problem: how to replace the politically connected Ho. Turns out, they didn’t even need to change the home address for his replacement. Ho’s wife, Allyson, moved into her husband’s position and his old office.
Meet the Hos.
Few people outside of legal circles have heard of the Hos, yet the couple is tied to the case before the US supreme court that will determine women’s access to mifepristone, a drug commonly used in medication abortions. The court hears arguments in the case on Tuesday.
Ho served on the three-judge panel last summer that ruled to restrict access to mifepristone. The legal group behind the mifepristone case, Alliance Defending Freedom, made at least six payments from 2018 through 2022 to his wife, Allyson, a powerhouse federal appellate lawyer who has argued in front of the supreme court and has deep connections to the conservative legal movement that has led the attack on the right to abortion in the US.
The payments don’t violate the court’s code of conduct, according to Stephen Gillers, a New York University emeritus professor of law and author of Regulation of Lawyers: Problems of Law and Ethics. But some court watchers argue that Ho’s failure to recuse himself from the case illustrates why public trust in the judiciary is eroding. One recent survey found that 63% of judges noted a dip in the public’s positive perception of them.
“When Americans see a case like this – so clearly concocted and motivated by special interests, and with evident connections between those interests and the judges on the case, it does tremendous damage to the reputation of the courts, and to the public trust in their ability to give all litigants an even shake,” said Alex Aronson, the executive director of the non-partisan group Court Accountability and a former chief counsel to the Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse.
In an email to the Guardian, James Ho wrote that he “consulted our court’s ethics advisor prior to sitting in that case, and was advised that there was no basis for recusal. In any event, my wife’s practice is to donate honoraria to charity.”
The Hos are just one of the increasing number of power couples in the conservative movement in which the wife of a prominent official works in the background, laying the groundwork for Republican policies that their spouses will rule upon or legislate. In the mifepristone case, the wife of the Missouri senator Josh Hawley, Erin, is the attorney of record for Alliance Defending Freedom and argued the case before Ho. The supreme court justice Clarence Thomas rankled the legal world when he refused to recuse himself from a case involving questions about the January 6 insurrection and the “Stop the Steal” campaign to which his wife, Ginni Thomas, was closely tied.
For Aronson, these are examples of “serious concerns about what is becoming an apparent pattern of coordinated activity by some of these couples in this extremist movement, including the Thomases, Hawleys and Hos”.
Ho’s rulings have included zealous language, referencing what he called in one decision “the moral tragedy of abortion”. He has suggested that protection orders in domestic violence cases “are too often misused as a tactical device in divorce proceedings – and issued without any actual threat of danger”. Orin Kerr, a University of California, Berkeley, law professor, tweeted that one of Ho’s opinions “reads like a politician’s op-ed, not a legal opinion; judges should stick to law”.
What Alabama’s IVF ruling reveals about the ascendant Christian nationalist movement
Read more](https://yyy.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/02/christian-nationalism-alabama-ivf-ruling-politics)
In the mifepristone case, in which Ho supported rolling back decisions made by the Food and Drug Administration to loosen restrictions on the drug, he wrote: “Unborn babies are a source of profound joy for those who view them. Expectant parents eagerly share ultrasound photos with loved ones. Friends and family cheer at the sight of an unborn child. Doctors delight in working with their unborn patients – and experience an aesthetic injury when they are aborted.”
He has chafed legal traditionalists from the moment of his swearing-in, when he opted for the ceremony to be held in the private library of Harlan Crow – the conservative mega-donor who, ProPublica revealed, has lavished Clarence Thomas with trips on his yacht and paid the$6,000-a-month private school tuition for the justice’s great-nephew. Ho worked as a clerk for Thomas in 2005.
Ho vowed to boycott hiring Yale Law School graduates as clerks after students interrupted conservative speakers on campus, noting “cancellations and disruptions seem to occur with special frequency” at the Ivy League school.
His caustic writings have drawn the spotlight while his wife, Allyson, has been working more inconspicuously, helping lay the legal foundation for conservative policies in her own work.
She appears frequently as a speaker for the Federalist Society, the group that has led the conservative effort to reshape the judiciary. She has also worked pro bono for the Christian right organization First Liberty Institute, a group that describes its mission “to defend and restore religious liberty in our schools, for our churches and houses of worship, inside the military, and throughout the public arena”.
It’s unclear what Alliance Defending Freedom paid Allyson Ho to do, yet ending abortion is central among the organization’s goals. The group helped writethe Mississippi law that led to the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v Wade and ended the 50-year-old constitutional right to an abortion.
Her husband’s financial disclosures list descriptions of “Academy” or “Freedom Summit”, next to some of the payments. The ADF hosts various legal trainings as part of its ADF Legal Academy that “seamlessly combines outstanding legal training with an unwavering commitment to Christian principles” and a Young Lawyers Academy.
The Alliance Defending Freedom said: “ADF often invites lawyers of various backgrounds and experiences to speak at events. ADF offers honorariums for speaker participation. Allyson Ho is an exceptional lawyer with vast and diverse legal experience.”
A request to speak with Allyson Ho sent to Gibson Dunn has not been answered.
The Texas senators Ted Cruz and John Cornyn, both Republicans, appointed Allyson to the state’s committee responsible for recommending and vetting its recommendations to fill judicial vacancies. Neither Cruz nor Cornyn’s offices responded to the Guardian’s request for the names or dates of service for the judicial vetting committee nor did they respond to questions about what role, if any, Allyson had in her husband’s nomination to the bench.
[
‘They hate God’: US anti-abortion activists aim to fight back on 51st Roe anniversary
Read more](https://yyy.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/22/roe-v-wade-abortion-anniversary-2023)
In 2023, the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, hired Allyson and Gibson Dunn, at a rate of $1,313 per hour – with a $7m cap – to represent the state in a decade-long legal battle in which a federal judge determined Texas had failed to protect foster children. The state had previously been represented by attorneys on its own payroll. The move to hire Allyson and her firm signaled that Texas could be looking to fight backagainst court orders mandating Texas comply with federal monitors appointed to ensure the safety of vulnerable children in its care by appealing district court rulings to the fifth circuit court of appeals – the court on which James Ho serves.
The mifepristone case might just be the beginning of the Hos’ influence, Gillers, the NYU professor, said.
“If Trump wins the election, you’ll see Ho on the short list of nominees to the supreme court,” he said. “He is obviously behaving in a way that makes him a very prominent candidate in a Republican administration.”
That appointment could once again leave an empty office – one that some might want Allyson to fill.
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ALSO CRUZ
bush v gore democ labs
Supreme Court has three lawyers who worked on Bush v. Gore
Justices Clarence Thomas voted to suspend the vote count in Florida that ended up with George Bush Jr. as president. Three other justices worked on the Bush team including John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Comey Barrett. All three were later appointed to the Supreme Court! Roberts was appointed by Bush
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an 11 23
despite facing four criminal indictments and a variety of civil lawsuits, Donald Trump is showing no signs of losing his frontrunner status in the 2024 GOP presidential primary. Trump leads the second-place candidate, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, by 58 percent in a Harvard University/HarrisX poll released on November 20 and by 40 percent in a NBC News poll conducted November 10-14.
Moreover, some polls are showing Trump with narrow leads in a hypothetical Trump/President Joe Biden matchup.
The fact that Trump could return to the White House in January 2025 not only worries Democrats — some conservatives are sounding the alarm as well, including three legal experts: attorney George Conway, retired Judge J. Michael Luttig and former Rep. Barbara Comstock (R-Virginia).
The three of them, The Guardian's Martin Pengelly reports, have proposed a new conservative legal group that would be called the Society for the Rule of Law Institute — which would challenge, from the right, Trump and his allies' "anti-constitutional" and "anti-democratic" actions.
In an op-ed published by the New York Times on November 21, Conway, Luttig and Comstock lament that the Federalist Society — a major right-wing legal group — "has failed to respond in this period of crisis," arguing that a non-MAGA "conservative legal movement" is badly needed.
"We need an organization of conservative lawyers committed to the foundational constitutional principles we once all agreed upon: the primacy of American democracy, the sanctity of the Constitution and the rule of law, the independence of the courts, the inviolability of elections and mutual support among those tasked with the solemn responsibility of enforcing the laws of the United States," the legal experts argue. "This new organization must step up, speak out and defend these ideals."
*Read George Conway, J. Michael Luttig and Barbara Comstock's full New York Times op-ed at this link (subscription required) and The Guardian's full report here.
no lnx
three prominent US legal thinkers have announced a new organisation to champion conservative legal theory within the rule of law, to fight the threat of a second Donald Trump term.
“Our country comes first,” the three wrote in the New York Times, “and our country is in a constitutional emergency, if not a constitutional crisis. We all must act accordingly, especially us lawyers.”
The authors were George Conway, an attorney formerly married to Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s White House counselor; J Michael Luttig, a retired judge and adviser to Trump’s vice-president, Mike Pence, who became a prominent January 6 witness; and Barbara Comstock, a former Republican congresswoman from Virginia.
The authors also rebuked prominent rightwing groups including the Federalist Society for not resisting the former president and his authoritarian ambitions.
Their new group, the Society for the Rule of Law Institute, would “work to inspire young legal talent … focus on building a large body of scholarship to counteract the new orthodoxy of anti-constitutional and anti-democratic law … [and] marshal principled voices to speak out against the endless stream of falsehoods and authoritarian legal theories … propagated almost daily,” they said.
The Federalist Society and its chair, Leonard Leo, played a key role in Trump’s judicial appointments, installing three hardliners on the supreme court who helped hand down rightwing wins including removing abortion rights and loosening laws on gun control, affirmative action, voting rights and other progressive priorities.
Conway, Luttig and Comstock emerged among prominent conservative opponents of Trump, warning of his authoritarian threat before and after January 6, when rioters attacked Congress in an attempt to block Joe Biden’s 2020 election win.
Ninety-one criminal charges and assorted civil threats notwithstanding, Trump is now the clear frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination while polling strongly against Biden in battleground states.
“American democracy, the constitution and the rule of law are the righteous causes of our times, and the nation’s legal profession is obligated to support them,” Conway, Luttig and Comstock wrote.
“But with the acquiescence of the larger conservative legal movement, these pillars of our system of governance are increasingly in peril. The dangers will only grow should Donald Trump be returned to the White House next November.”
Trump, they said, would stock a second administration “with partisan loyalists committed to fast-tracking his agenda and sidestepping – if not circumventing altogether – existing laws and long-established legal norms.
“This would include appointing … political appointees to rubber-stamp his plans to investigate and exact retribution against his political opponents; make federal public servants removable at will by the president himself; and invoke special powers to take unilateral action on first amendment-protected activities, criminal justice, elections, immigration and more.”
Saying Trump tried such attacks when in power but was blocked by lawyers and judges, the authors said the former president would if re-elected “arrive with a coterie of lawyers and advisers who, like him, are determined not to be thwarted again”.
“That is why we need an organisation of conservative lawyers committed to the foundational constitutional principles we once all agreed upon: the primacy of American democracy, the sanctity of the constitution and the rule of law, the independence of the courts, the inviolability of elections and mutual support among those tasked with the solemn responsibility of enforcing the laws of the United States.
“This new organisation must step up, speak out and defend these ideals.”
..nyt
By George Conway, J. Michael Luttig and Barbara Comstock
The writers are lawyers. Mr. Conway was in private practice. Mr. Luttig was a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit from 1991 to 2006. Ms. Comstock represented Virginia’s 10th District in Congress from 2015 to 2019. They serve on the board of the newly formed Society for the Rule of Law Institute.
American democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law are the righteous causes of our times, and the nation’s legal profession is obligated to support them. But with the acquiescence of the larger conservative legal movement, these pillars of our system of governance are increasingly in peril. The dangers will only grow should Donald Trump be returned to the White House next November.
Recent reporting about plans for a second Trump presidency are frightening. He would stock his administration with partisan loyalists committed to fast-tracking his agenda and sidestepping — if not circumventing altogether — existing laws and long-established legal norms. This would include appointing to high public office political appointees to rubber-stamp his plans to investigate and exact retribution against his political opponents; make federal public servants removable at will by the president himself; and invoke special powers to take unilateral action on First Amendment-protected activities, criminal justice, elections, immigration and more.
We have seen him try this before, though fortunately he was thwarted — he would say “betrayed”— by executive branch lawyers and by judges who refused to go along with his more draconian and often unlawful policies and his effort to remain in office after being cast out by voters. But should Mr. Trump return to the White House, he will arrive with a coterie of lawyers and advisers who, like him, are determined not to be thwarted again.
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an 2 24 --> guk
see 14th disqual
the man behind the conservative effort to move the judiciary to the right has ties to many of the groups and people arguing that Donald Trump should stay on the ballot in a case heard before the US supreme court this week.
Leonard Leo’s advocacy and financial network played a major role in Trump’s judicial nominations and confirmation hearings as part of his years-long push to make the courts more friendly to conservatives and their causes. Justice Clarence Thomas once joked that Leo was the “No 3 most powerful person in the world”.
US ethics groups hail Senate subpoenas for Leonard Leo and Harlan Crow
Read more](https://www.theguardian.com/law/2023/nov/30/supreme-court-ethics-scandal-leonard-leo-harlan-crow)
Leo is the co-chairman of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal organization that counts five of the current nine justices as current or former members. He also heads a well-funded financial network that works to advance rightwing causes, having received a massive $1.6bn donation to boost his work. His maneuvers have been part of the recent scandals at the supreme court, including a payment he directed to be paid to Thomas’s wife, Ginni, the Washington Post reported in 2023.
Through this extensive network, he is tied to several of the filers of amicus briefs in the 14th amendment case that could prevent Trump from running for re-election. In those briefs, a variety of conservative groups argue against Trump’s removal, aligning with Trump’s arguments that he should remain on the ballot.
The consequential case has brought in amicus briefs on both sides from outside groups, historians, law professors and elected officials, who’ve parsed through legal language and the implications of removing a presidential candidate from the running.
According to research by Accountable.US, a non-profit that focuses on calling attention to special interests in US politics, Leo has ties – including professional associations, funding through his own groups or those he’s exchanged money with, and allies in the Federalist Society – to a handful of groups that filed amicus briefs against Trump’s removal.
The ties are part of a pattern, documented by Politico, of Leo himself and his network being connected to amicus briefs in high-profile supreme court cases in recent years. The Politico review also found “multiple instances of language used in the amicus briefs appearing in the court’s opinions”.
In this instance, Accountable.US found ties between Leo and the following groups or their lawyers that filed amicus briefs in the 14th amendment case: Citizens United, the Public Interest Legal Foundation, the Claremont Institute, Landmark Legal Foundation, Judicial Watch, Jones Day, Wyoming’s secretary of state Chuck Gray and America’s Future.
Democrats plan to subpoena Leonard Leo over perks to supreme court justices
Read more](https://www.theguardian.com/law/2023/oct/31/leonard-leo-subpoena-harlan-crow-supreme-court)
Citizens United, a conservative group whose name is synonymous with the 2010 supreme court ruling that allows unlimited political spending by outside groups and corporations, filed a brief alongside Steven Calabresi, Leo’s fellow co-chair of the Federalist Society. Other lawyers tied to the society are signed on to the group’s brief as well.
The Public Interest Legal Foundation’s brief is co-filed with a man who has been featured in more than 100 Federalist Society events, and the group has received funding from groups tied to Leo. The Claremont Institute has also received funds from groups tied to Leo’s funding network, and the brief’s author wrote a book that includes a quote from Leo on the back cover and featured in society events.
Leo has complimented the chairman of the Landmark Legal Foundation as a “great patriot” and 
”. The Judicial Watch president is also president of the Council for National Policy, which Leo has reportedly been involved with. Jones Day, a conservative law firm whose attorneys authored an amicus brief for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, has given money to the Federalist Society, and the firm is where Leo, Trump and others met to come up with a list of supreme court candidates.
The lawyers who filed Wyoming secretary of state Gray’s brief include a Federalist Society contributor who’s received a fellowship from the group. America’s Future has gotten funding from a group that’s exchanged millions with Leo’s financial network.
“It’s no surprise that Leonard Leo is backing efforts to support Trump at the supreme court,” said Accountable.US president Caroline Ciccone. “Leo helped Trump draw up his supreme court nominee shortlist – many of whom are justices on the bench set to hear this critical case – and now, Leo’s deploying his rightwing network in support of Trump as he faces consequences for his violent insurrection. It couldn’t be clearer where Leo stands.”
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an 2 24
four House Republicans have sent a letter to Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith challenging his standing to prosecute former President Donald Trump.
The letter — which was co-signed by Reps. Eric Burlison (R- Missouri), Michael Cloud (R-Texas), Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) and Anna Paulina Luna (R-Florida) — asserts that there has not been appropriate congressional oversight of Smith's office or his investigation into Trump. The letter's signatories are asking Smith to provide them with "all documents and communications concerning your authority" to empanel grand juries in the two federal court districts where he's prosecuting the former president, as well as Smith's authority to have those grand juries return indictments, and his authority to offer immunity in exchange for testimony as well as documents pertaining to DOJ oversight.
"We respectfully request a response from you on or before 1pm [on] February 9, 2024," Burlison, Cloud, Greene and Luna wrote.
:{:{Conservatives have argued that because Smith was not formally appointed by the president of the United States and confirmed by the US Senate, he is merely a private citizen and does not have the Constitutional authority to prosecute Trump.}:
Ed Meese, who was attorney general under President Ronald Reagan, filed an amicus curiae ("friend of the court") brief before the DC Circuit Court of Appeals last month arguing that Smith's appointment was improper and that his prosecution of Trump is therefore null and void.:}:
"Not properly clothed in the authority of the federal government, Smith is a modern example of the naked emperor," Meese's brief read. "Illegally appointed, he has no more authority to represent the United States in this Court, or in the underlying prosecution, than Tom Brady, Warren Buffett, or Beyoncé."
Meese further argued that the statutory authority Attorney General Merrick Garland claimed gave him the power to appoint Smith as special counsel did not authorize "the appointment by the Attorney General of a private citizen to receive extraordinary criminal law enforcement power under the title of Special Counsel," adding that "there is no statute specifically authorizing the Attorney General, rather than the President by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to appoint such a Special Counsel."
However, the DC Circuit is unlikely to take that argument seriously, as there have been three special counsel appointments not confirmed by the US Senate. In 1999, then-Attorney General Janet Reno appointed John Danforth as special counsel to investigate the siege of cult leader David Koresh's compound in Waco, Texas. Then in 2003, then-Deputy Attorney General James Comey — following the recusal of Attorney General John Ashcroft — appointed Patrick Fitzgerald as special counsel to oversee the Valerie Plame affair. And in 2017, Robert Mueller was appointed special counsel by then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to look into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election after Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself.
READ MORE:Jack Smith just tore apart Trump's 'startling' absolute immunity argument
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'Fascist' and 'tyrant': DeSantis blasted for ousting another elected Democratic state attorney
David BadashandThe New Civil Rights MovementAugust 09, 2023
Editor’s note: This article has been corrected. Mr. Warren is not Black.
Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis Wednesday morning, for the second time, suspended an elected Democratic State Attorney and replaced them with an appointee of his own choosing.
DeSantis, who is also running for president, says he is suspending Florida State Attorney Monique Worrell “for neglecting her duty to faithfully prosecute crime in her jurisdiction.”
“I am appointing Judge Andrew Bain to step in and take over the duties of the State Attorney’s Office in the 9th Circuit,” DeSantis announced on social media. “The people of Central Florida deserve a State Attorney that will prosecute criminals and keep our communities safe.”
Florida State Attorney Monique Worrell won her office in 2020. Her term runs for four years. Judge Bain, a member of the right-wing Federalist Society, was appointed to the bench by Gov. DeSantis in 2020.
READ MORE: Trump Spins Wild Attack Against Fulton County DA Fani Willis Ahead of Possible Indictment
One year ago, almost to the day, Governor DeSantis suspended from office Andrew Warren, another Democratic elected State Attorney, also for alleged “neglect of duty.”
The New York Times on Wednesday called Gov. DeSantis’ removal of the state attorneys a “drastic and exceedingly rare step.”
“Critics, and even a federal judge,” The Times reported, “decried Mr. DeSantis’s ouster of Mr. Warren as politically motivated. But Mr. Warren remains out of office — and Mr. DeSantis mentions his removal in just about every campaign stump speech.”
Critics are again blasting DeSantis.
“This is literally just a dictator overruling the people, kicking out a duly elected official he doesn’t agree with and putting in his own pawn. This shouldn’t happen in America. And the guy who did it shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the White House,” said David Rothkopf, a noted foreign policy, national security and political affairs expert and commentator.
U.S. Rep. Maxwell Frost, Democrat of Florida, blasted Gov. DeSantis as a “Fascist” who “hates democracy.”
“Struggling to raise money for his failing campaign and trailing by 40 points in the polls, Ron DeSantis removes a Black woman, Monique Worrell, from her duly elected office in Florida in a desperate, antidemocratic ploy to win MAGA voters,” observed attorney, former White House aide, author, and political commentator Keith Boykin.
READ MORE: Trump Disparages America’s Transgender Service Members at Rally: ‘We Had It Banned’
“This is absolutely disgusting,” wrote Florida state Democratic Rep. Anna V. Eskamani. “State Attorney Monique Worrell is a duly elected official and the only Black woman serving as State Attorney in Florida right now. Her removal is a complete slap in the face to Orange and Osceola County residents and another example of Governor DeSantis eroding our local control and democracy. This politically motivated action by the Governor in a predominantly democratic part of the state should alarm everyone. DeSantis is extreme, unfit to serve, and must be held accountable.”
U.S. Rep. Ritchie Torres, Democrat of New York, slammed the Florida governor.
“Ron DeSantis not only punishes corporations, like Disney, for advancing causes, like LGBTQ rights, that he disfavors. He also removes from office duly elected officials who dare criticize the imperial Ron DeSantis. The latest victim is a Florida State Attorney, Monique Worrell, a black woman elected by the people, only to be removed by a tyrant.”
“The self-proclaimed small-government conservatives are actually authoritarians who are all too willing to use big-government power to enforce cancel culture against their political opponents,” Torres added. “There’s a word for this: hypocrisy.”
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for decades, Florida had a reputation for being an incredibly volatile swing state. Floridians often split their tickets, and President George W. Bush won the state twice before it went to President Barack Obama in both 2008 and 2012. Democrats and Republicans had to work extra hard with Florida voters because the Sunshine State was neither ultra-Democratic Massachusetts nor ultra-Republican Alabama.
But that was before the Ron DeSantis era, which has found Florida moving way to the right. Republicans now dominate all three branches of Florida's state government: executive, legislative and judicial.
In a report published on June 20, Washington Post reporters Beth Reinhard and Josh Dawsey describe DeSantis and his allies' campaign to push the Florida Supreme Court way to the right.
READ MORE: Ron DeSantis accuses teachers of 'forcing' students to pick pronouns
"For decades, the ambitions of Florida's Republican governors were stymied by the liberal-leaning (Florida) Supreme Court," Reinhard and Dawsey explain. "That is, until Ron DeSantis was elected. The Court let him erase a congressional district with a large Black population. It opened the door to a law making it easier to impose the death penalty. Now, it's poised to rule on the governor's plan to outlaw most abortions in the third-most-populous state."
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The reporters emphasize that theFlorida Supreme Court's "hard-right turn" was "by design" —and encouraged by the right-wing Federalist Society.
"DeSantis seized on the unusual retirement of three liberal justices at once to quickly remake the court," according to Reinhard and Dawsey. "He did so with the help of a secretive panel led by Leonard Leo — the key architect of the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority — that quietly vetted judicial nominees in an Orlando conference room three weeks before the governor's inauguration."
Leo, known for his many years as vice president of the Federalist Society, played a major role in the demise of Roe v. Wade. And Reinhard and Dawsey stress that Leo helped give Florida "one of the most conservative state supreme courts in the country."
READ MORE: Ron DeSantis vows to 'destroy leftism' and 'woke ideology' if elected president
"(DeSantis) repeatedly points to his overhaul of the state court as a sign of how he would approach the (federal) judiciary if elected (president)," the reporters note. "He has called Justice Clarence Thomas 'our greatest living justice' and pledged to move the U.S. Supreme Court even further to the right than President Donald Trump did."
READ MORE: 'Boxed in': Why Trump’s 2020 fixation is a 'fundamental problem' for Ron DeSantis
Read The Washington Post's full report at this link (subscription required).
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https://www.alternet.org/playing-fast-loose-megadonor-watchdog/
How a Republican megadonor is 'playing fast and loose' to push 'dangerous, extreme agenda': watchdog
Maya Boddie June 18, 2023
Republican billionaire Leonardo Leo's trust fund, Marble Freedom Trust's latest Internal Revenue Service (IRS) filing, revealing the former President Donald Trump donor's mission to control right-wing politics, Truthout reports.
Progressive watchdog Accountable.US obtained the recent IRS filing, which according to Truthout, shows the Federalist Society leader "has dumped at least $411 million into fueling right-wing infrastructure in the U.S. since mid-2020."
Furthermore, according to Truthout, the filing reveals "Leo has spent at least $182 million during the Biden administration to fund right-wing groups from May 1, 2020, through April 30, 2022," noting, "This surge has come as Leo has become more publicly outspoken in attacking reproductive rights as well as efforts to protect our environment and crucial measures that advance Americans' equality."
READ MORE: Conservative activist arranged for Clarence Thomas’ wife to get secret payouts
Additionally, it "adds to the growing public knowledge of how Leo's for-profit business works in tandem with nonprofit groups he funds to change the rules in our democracy, and also provides a glimpse of how lucrative this effort is."
The news outlet reports prior to Accountable's findings, "the Campaign for Accountability filed an IRS complaint against Leo based on other filings showing that seven of his affiliated nonprofits had sent $73 million to his for-profit CRC Advisors."
Truthout also notes:
As Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) has noted, before the public learned of the existence of Marble Freedom Trust, Leo rose to prominence as a volunteer advising Trump by creating the list of Supreme Court candidates that Trump chose from, as well as by helping to secure the confirmation of three controversial high court nominees — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett (and helped get numerous other lower court judges appointed). As True North documented, Leo's network played a central role in this right-wing court packing, raising over $600 million from 2014 through the 2020 election. This dark money network has received more than $2 billion when accounting for Marble.
Accountable President Kyle Herrig told Truthout he believes "Leonard Leo is playing fast and loose with his $1.6 billion slush fund, enriching himself and doling out paychecks and favors for his cronies," adding, "This kind of corruption is par for the course for Leo. It clearly pays to do his bidding."
READ MORE: Charities often move 'dark' money that shapes public policy: report
Herring said, "This is just the latest development in Leonard Leo's decades-long scheme to push his dangerous, extreme agenda and get rich while doing it. From personal enrichment for himself and his inner circle to his machine of nonprofits advancing the MAGA agenda, we’ve only scratched the surface of Leo’s devastating impact on our democracy."
READ MORE: 'Largest political donation ever': Trump ally received $1.6 billion through Federalist Society contact
Truthout's full report is available at this link.
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https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-education/how-the-federalist-society-won
a few minutes before Roe v. Wade was overturned, Sherif Girgis sat in his office at Notre Dame Law School, desperately clicking refresh on the Supreme Court’s Web site. Girgis had been looking forward to this precise moment for months. He’d been gaming out the arguments for years, really.
Conservatives of an older generation, who suffered a Supreme Court betrayal in 1992—when a trifecta of Republican-appointed judges upheld the constitutional right to an abortion, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey—couldn’t believe that Roe would ever truly fall. But Girgis, who is thirty-six, came up in a different era. “I was in kindergarten when Casey was decided,” he said. Unlike his jaded elders, he believed that the Court would one day follow through on the simple, powerful idea that animates the conservative legal movement: that a judge’s job is not to make value judgments or to speculate about the potential consequences of his or her decisions but, rather, to decide cases by looking solely at how the Constitution was understood at the time it was written. This method of interpretation, called originalism, would inevitably lead to the end of Roe.
girgis, a professor who specializes in philosophy and the law, embodies a young, energized, traditionalist wing of the conservative legal movement that will likely be galvanized by Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the decision that overturned the constitutional right to abortion. Early in his career, Girgis clerked for Samuel Alito, the Justice who wrote the majority decision in Dobbs. He’s a rising star in the Federalist Society, a powerful network of conservatives and libertarians that has a chapter at many major law schools, as well as dozens of professional chapters across the country. The organization prides itself on being a forum for ideas, even those which some conservatives hate, which is part of what drew Girgis to become a member when he was a student at Yale Law School, in 2011. “The Federalist Society is not a ghetto within each law school,” he said. “At its best, it is—or ought to be—a cheerful and willing debating partner.” Girgis is a frequent speaker at chapter events. A longtime member described him to me as a “brilliant, beautiful soul.” One of his mentors, Princeton’s Robert George—a heavyweight in the relatively small world of élite conservative academics—frequently hypes him on Twitter, like a coach cheering on Rocky in the ring.
In 1982, when the Federalist Society was founded, the conservative legal movement was still finding its footing. Law-school campuses were predominantly liberal, and there was a prevailing sense among students and professors that the conclusions in Roe and other major Supreme Court decisions of the prior thirty years—on issues such as birth control, racial integration, and voting rights—were both morally good and legally correct. But an ideological counter-revolution was beginning. Lee Liberman Otis—one of the Federalist Society’s founders, who was then a law student at theUniversity of Chicago—recalled thinking, It’s funny that there are these ideas about law which Reagan seemed to have run on, in part, and nobody’s talking about them. She helped organize the first Federalist Society conference; its speakers included Antonin Scalia, then a law professor, and Theodore Olson, then an Assistant Attorney General in the Reagan Administration. Otis could tell that the conference was the start of something. Four years later, Scalia would ascend to a seat on the Supreme Court, and Olson would eventually become one of the country’s most accomplished Supreme Court litigators.
“I don’t recall Roe being an issue in any such conversations I had concerning [the] creation of Fed Soc,” Olsonwrote to me, in an e-mail. “It was all about creating a forum/venue for debate. Not taking sides on any particular issue.” And yet Roe symbolized something to the Federalist Society’s founding members. “For someone like me, a lawyer, Roe was really not about abortion,” John McGinnis, a conservative law professor at Northwestern University, said. (McGinnis was an early member of Harvard’s Federalist Society chapter, back when it could fit in a “broom closet,” he said.)
Roe, he told me, “was the culmination of the Court diverging from the text of the Constitutionand essentially—this is not too strong of a word—fabricating the law.” One of the core holdings of the decision, that abortion had to remain legal before the point of fetal viability, seemed to conservatives to be summoned out of thin air. Some prominent left-leaning legal scholars, despite being pleased with the outcome of the decision, said the same: John Hart Ely commented that Roe was “not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.” (The current conservative majority on the Court happily cited this line when overturning Roe.)
During the next four decades, the conservative legal movement set about radically changing the way that the law was talked about. They promoted a mode of legal interpretation that was purportedly value-neutral, based on their understanding of what the Founders wrote. The movement’s most powerful tool was its people: the Federalist Society started functioning as a kind of Rolodex for legal jobs around the country, especially clerkships and judgeships. And yet the process was slow going. In 1987, the U.S. Senate rejected the nomination of Robert Bork, an early Federalist Society figure, to the Supreme Court, based in part on his strong opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Anthony Kennedy and David Souter—Republican appointees without strong Federalist Society ties—drifted to the left during their time on the bench, siding with their liberal peers in Casey, along with Sandra Day O’Connor, Reagan’s first nominee to the Court. Slowly, though, originalist Justices started taking their seats.Today, all six members of the conservative majority run in Federalist Society circles. All voted to effectively end the federal abortion rights that have been in place for the past fifty years.
The Dobbs case also illustrates the Federalist Society’s broader influence beyond judicial appointments. The conservative movement now has a legal intelligentsia of academics, writers, and national advocacy groups who fundamentally shaped how Roe was overturned. The Alliance Defending Freedom (A.D.F.), a conservative Christian legal firm, helped Mississippi legislators draft the fifteen-week abortion ban that eventually made its way to the Supreme Court, which the Justices upheld in Dobbs, and then later served alongside Mississippi’s legal team as it presented its arguments to the Court.A.D.F.’s general counsel, Kristen Waggoner, a Federalist Society member, told me that the firm closely monitored the scholarship on abortion while shaping Mississippi’s litigation strategy—which was led by another Federalist Society regular, Mississippi’s solicitor general, Scott Stewart.
The Court depends on this scholarship, too; the Dobbs decision is heavy with footnotes debating the minutiae of how abortion was historically viewed. To Girgis, whose own scholarship has touched on subjects such as the nature of marriage, religious liberty, and constitutional principles, this is what’s compelling about his job: “The legal academy is not like other academic disciplines, because it is tied to the real world in a very concrete way,” he said. “It’s at least supposed to be serving the bench and bar.” Dobbs is exciting, he added, in part because it shows that “a theory of interpretation can actually lead to real-world results.”
While originalism may sound intuitive and straightforward, many in the legal world feel cynical about its true aims. Critics of the conservative legal movement view the approach as a theoretical fig leaf used to justify decisions that line up with conservatives’ policy preferences. When I asked Girgis about this, he said that originalism is supposed to achieve the opposite: it’s a way to make sure the law doesn’t just reflect the preferences of the ruling party. (Or, as Girgis put it, to guarantee that judges “don’t cheat.”) Dobbs was satisfying, in his view, precisely because it was argued according to a set legal theory that has clear rules and little room for personal opinion. To Girgis, it’s not a sign of bad faith that originalist decisions often reach conservative outcomes, because both are philosophical approaches anchored in the past.
still, other critics believe that originalism, even when applied in good faith, often has unacceptably harmful consequences. The three liberal Justices’ dissent in Dobbs is in part a scathing critique of the originalist approach: the Founders, they wrote, “did not recognize women’s rights. When the majority says that we must read our foundational charter as viewed at the time of ratification . . . it consigns women to second-class citizenship.”
Conservatives don’t always agree on how originalism should be applied. For example, Neil Gorsuch, the originalist all-star who replaced Scalia, wrote the 2020 decision that extended workplace protections to L.G.B.T.Q. employees. In the opinion, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and the Court’s liberal Justices, Gorsuch made his argument on strictly textualist grounds, but the outcome rankled many conservatives who believed that nineteen-sixties-era anti-discrimination laws were never intended or understood to protect gay and trans people. During the same term, Roberts put the brakes on overturning Roe out of a desire for the Court to practice restraint, despite eagerness from the movement to see that decision in the ash heap of history; he continued to make his uneasiness clear in his concurrence in Dobbs, even as the majority overruled him.
Common wisdom has it that the Federalist Society is roughly divided between libertarians and more traditionalist types—religious conservatives like Girgis, who converted to Catholicism in high school. Some on the traditionalist side have claimed that the occasionally unexpected outcomes of originalism demonstrate the movement’s failures—that the theory doesn’t necessarily lead to moral results in the hardest cases. Girgis’s loose impression is that among law students and Federalist Society members there’s more of an appetite for a style of legal interpretation which would promote conservatives’ vision of a good society, along the lines of Adrian Vermeule’s “common-good constitutionalism.”
And yet Dobbs “was a huge boost for the conservative legal movement as a practical, sociological matter,” Girgis said. The decision proved that the traditionalists inside of the conservative legal movement aren’t just the Charlie Brown to a libertarian Lucy’s football; the long strategy of creating an alternative intellectual milieu in the law actually succeeded.
Now that conservatives have won, the legal work begins. One effect of Roe and Casey was to make abortion-related policy and scholarship feel somewhat low-stakes. Conservative legislators could introduce any bill they wanted, knowing it would eventually be struck down by the courts. Scholars could make any theoretical argument they wanted, knowing that Roe’s viability standard would ultimately guide abortion jurisprudence. But, in post-Roe America, “the legal nerd in me is intrigued by the very difficult and mostly unsettled legal questions about the kinds of policies that states are likely to pursue,” Girgis said. Can Texas stop its residents from travelling to another state to obtain an abortion? Can Mississippi ban abortion drugs, even when they’re approved by the Food and Drug Administration? Can the federal government limit or expand abortion access without an act of Congress? These questions have taken on “a new practical urgency, and there’s not a ton of law on some of them,” Girgis said. “That combination is exciting for me. Because it means that your expertise is both needed and practically relevant.”
But, although the conservative legal movement was united in its belief that abortion is not a constitutionally protected right, it has always been divided on the question of whether abortion should be illegal. In May, leaders of some of the top pro-life activist groups in the country signed a letter opposing “any measure seeking to criminalize or punish women” for abortions. This came after a Louisiana legislator had introduced a bill allowing prosecutors to charge women who terminated their pregnancies with murder. “The penalties that should be imposed should be on the supply side—essentially those who are profiting from the death of children,” Waggoner, of A.D.F., told me. The Louisiana bill died, but there’s only so much control that legal élites will have on the next phase of abortion policy in America. “Part of the problem is that, on abortion, there aren’t many people in the academy leading the strategy” when it comes to legislation, Mary Ziegler, a professor of law at the University of California, Davis, said. When I asked Girgis whether state legislators actually listen to guys like him when they’re drafting new laws, he laughed. “I suspect that many don’t care,” he said. “But I also suspect that at least some do, if only because they want a good assessment of how likely their law is to be held unconstitutional by courts.” (That being said, he added, “Academics very easily overestimate their own relevance.”)
Some people in the conservative legal movement are more philosophical about the consequences of overturning Roe. In their view, the error of the original ruling—a “constitutional deformity,” as one Federalist Society insider put it—has been corrected. Now the democratic process begins. “I do think that things tend to settle out,” Otis, the Federalist Society founder, who now leads the organization’s faculty division, said. “By the time a law gets through, it does usually reflect, when it’s adopted, the views of the people.”
Girgis is usually cautious not to inject his personal views into his legal analysis. But, a few days after Dobbs came out, he briefly traded the detached voice of a legal academic for that of someone who cares deeply about the pro-life cause. “A year from now, there will be infants going from milk to soft foods because Dobbs triggered laws and shuttered clinics on Friday and not Monday,” he wrote, on the popular legal Web site SCOTUSblog. “Now gestating, they’ll learn to walk, catch fireflies, fall in love, comb gray hair, because of appointments canceled last Friday. Not just by good fortune but—for the first time in generations—by legal right.” The legal world he was writing for still largely misunderstands the moral motivations on the conservative side, he told me: “The moral stakes on both sides of the issue are about to become much more visible and textured for everybody.” Girgis, who has two young kids and another due in September, said that as a parent “you have a more immediate encounter with the nature of human life.But you also have a more immediate encounter with the potential burdens of parenthood, and the ways that they make very serious and life-altering demands on people.” It’s an insight that would never show up in an originalist legal decision—that moments like this have consequences.
no lnx
Young Federalist Society members spout 'radical new theories' at 'alarming' gathering: report
Matthew Chapman and Raw Story March 17, 2023
A Texas-based gathering of the right-wing legal group the Federalist Society saw members pushing "radical new theories" about election laws — and possibly secession from the United States,reported POLITICO on Friday.
The Federalist Society -- which is best known for training an army of conservative lawyers for jobs on the federal bench, where they have undermined everything from abortion rights to labor laws to the basic ability of the civil service to pass rules -- was long a champion of "judicial restraint," as it was founded in an era when the judiciary was far more liberal than it is today.
Now, wrote, Ian Ward, their gathering for the National Student Symposium in Austin — an event that brought out Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to give a speech, the tables have turned — and it's "alarmingly clear" that attendees are more interested in using judicial power to overrule liberal democracy itself.
"'Democracy is what philosophers call an ‘essentially contested concept,’' said Daniel Lowenstein, a professor of law emeritus at UCLA and an expert in election law, during a panel on Friday evening. 'Differences that seem on their surface to concern the meaning of the word ‘democracy’,' he added, are actually struggles to advance particular and controversial political ideas,'" said the report. "What democracy does not mean, Lowenstein argued, was 'plebiscitary democracy,' or simple rule by democratic majorities. Citing the Federalist Papers — the namesake of the Federalist Society — Lowenstein suggested that governance based on simple mathematical majorities would enable 'tyrannical domination of the minority by the majority.'"
This rhetoric, explicitly rejecting the idea of the U.S. as a democracy, has grown more common in GOP circles, even being pushed by some Republican senators — and it obscures the fact that the U.S. electoral system is in fact the reverse, with the Senate's structure in particular letting a small minority dominate the majority.
Some attendees didn't stop at rejecting democracy, but rejected the idea of the United States as a country.
"Later on in the same panel, Joel Alicea, a law professor at the Catholic University of America, diagnosed the apparent threats facing American democracy today — political violence, abuses of governmental power, and attempted election subversion, to name a few — as symptoms of a deeper malaise," and threw in a jab at transgender rights, saying, “At this point in our society, we can’t even agree whether somebody is a man or a woman.” "Alicea advised the attendees to embrace conversion rather than coercion, but in the question-and-answer session after the panel, an audience member proposed a third option: a full-scale national divorce, of the sort recently proposed by Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia."
In recent years, President Joe Biden has responded to the new flood of Federalist Society affiliated judges former President Donald Trump installed — who recently defeated a proposed ethics rule limiting their affiliation with the group while on the bench — by appointing another wave of more civil-rights oriented jurists in record numbers at a record pace.
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Four U.S. Supreme Court justices attended the black-tie dinner gala at the first Federalist Society convention since the court overturned Roe vs. Wade in its controversial Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Healthdecision.
Associated Press correspondent Mark Sherman reported Justices Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh were in attendance at the group’s 40th-anniversary celebration.
Sherman noted it is four-fifths of the majority of the court that overturned Roe. Controversial Justice Clarence Thomas was the fifth.
Three of the four justices in attendance were nominated by Donald Trump.
“Leonard Leo, [Federalist Society] co-chair, helped Trump vet judicial nominees. Group says it’s independent of partisan politics,” Sherman reported. “But there is close alignment with GOP priorities.”
Former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance wondered if the justices at the dinner had forgotten their job.
“As with so many of our institutions, the judiciary can only do its work when the public has confidence in it,” Vance noted. “Some of our judges seem to have forgotten that and that they have life tenure to serve the American people, not the political agenda of the people who put them in place.”
During his four years in the White House, Donald Trump — with the help of then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell — appointed not only three U.S. Supreme Court Justices (Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch), but also, a long list lower federal court judges. One of them wasU.S. Circuit Judge James C. Ho, who, according to Reuters, is now boycotting Yale Law School clerks because of “cancel culture.”
During a Federalist Society speech in Kentucky on Thursday, September 29, Ho claimed that Yale “not only tolerates the cancellation of views — it actively practices it.” And Ho, stressing that he is no longer hiring law clerks from Yale, encouraged other right-wing judges to boycott Yale as well.
Ho said of Yale, “Cancellations and disruptions seem to occur with special frequency.”
READ MORE: These Supreme Court cases 'could reshape the 2024 election': report
One of the incidents Ho cited involved Kristen Waggoner, who now heads the far-right Christian fundamentalist legal group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). The Southern Poverty Law Center considers ADF, based in Scottsdale, Arizona, an anti-gay hate group.
During a March 2022 appearance at Yale, Waggoner was disrupted by pro-gay law students.
Ho told Reuters, “I don't want to cancel Yale. I want Yale to stop cancelling people like me."
Ho, born in Taiwan in 1973, has lived in the United States since childhood and is well-known in right-wing legal circles. The judge has had his critics on the libertarian right, but he is popular among social conservatives and Christian fundamentalists and was once a law clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas. Known for being a major culture-warrior, Ho has been active in the Federalist Society since the 1990s and has also worked with theFirst Liberty Institute (a right-wing Christian fundamentalist legal group). After Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death in 2020, Trump considered nominating Ho for the Supreme Court but ending up picking Barrett instead.
mma https://www.mediamatters.org/national-review/flashback-ed-whelan-defended-chief-justice-roberts-leaving-federalist-society-his
Right-wing media figures -- including National Review Online blogger and Ethics and Public Policy Center president Ed Whelan -- have been baselessly suggesting that judicial nominee Goodwin Liu was trying to hide something by submitting additional writings and statements as a supplement to his Senate Judiciary Committee questionnaire.
University of Minnesota law professor Richard Painter, a former assistant White House counsel during the Bush administration, pretty much destroyed those arguments, noting of Liu's additions, “most of these items are the types of things that law professors do routinely and frequently” and are thus “nearly impossible to keep track of” and stating: “Professor Liu also apparently does not have a photographic memory. It appears to me, however, that his original answers to the questions were a careful and good faith effort to supply the Senate with the information it needed to assess his nomination.” Painter continued: “He provided a lot more information than many nominees do in response to these questions. He has now provided the additional information the Senate wants. I doubt the Senators will learn anything new from it.”
Since Painter's definitive debunking hasn't stopped the attacks, we thought it was worth remembering that Chief Justice John Roberts omitted his affiliation with the Federalist Society from the questionnaire he submitted as a court of appeals nominee in 2001. That questionnaire asked Roberts to “list all bar associations, legal or judicial-related committees or conferences of which you are or have been a member.” Roberts listed several legal organizations but did not list the Federalist Society -- an influential conservative legal organization to which many of President Bush's judicial nominees belonged -- in response to that question. However, according to The Washington Post, the Federalist Society listed Roberts' name in its 1997-98 “leadership directory.” The Post reported that the Federalist Society listed Roberts “as a member of the steering committee of the organization's Washington chapter and includes his firm's address and telephone number.”
And who was busy excusing Roberts for not listing the Federalist Society on his questionnaire? Ed Whelan.
From the Post:
Whelan, who has been a member of the Federalist Society but said he had no recollection of his own membership on the steering committee, said the society is tolerant of those who come to its meetings or serve on committees without paying dues.
“John Roberts probably realized pretty quickly he could take part in activities he wanted to” without being current on his dues, Whelan said.
It should be noted that the questionnaire Roberts filled out for his Supreme Court nomination asked if Roberts to list all the organizations to which he currently belonged, had ever belonged, or in which he participated. This time, Roberts stated:
According to recent press reports, in 1997 I was listed in brochures as a member of the Washington Lawyers Steering Committee of the Federalist Society. The same reports indicate that one could be on the Committee without also being a member of the Society. I have no recollection of serving on that Committee or being a member of the Society. I have participated in Society events, including moderating a panel in 1993 and more recently speaking before a lunch meeting of the Washington chapter on October 30, 2003.
From the Post article:
Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr. has repeatedly said that he has no memory of belonging to the Federalist Society, but his name appears in the influential, conservative legal organization's 1997-1998 leadership directory.
Having served only two years on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit after a long career as a government and private-sector lawyer, Roberts has not amassed much of a public paper record that would show his judicial philosophy. Working with the Federalist Society would provide some clue of his sympathies. The organization keeps its membership rolls secret, but many key policymakers in the Bush administration are acknowledged current or former members.
Roberts has burnished his legal image carefully. When news organizations have reported his membership in the society, he or others speaking on his behalf have sought corrections. Last week, the White House told news organizations that had reported his membership in the group that he had no memory of belonging. The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today and the Associated Press printed corrections.
Over the weekend, The Post obtained a copy of the Federalist Society Lawyers' Division Leadership Directory, 1997-1998. It lists Roberts, then a partner at the law firm Hogan & Hartson, as a member of the steering committee of the organization's Washington chapter and includes his firm's address and telephone number.
Yesterday, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Roberts “has no recollection of being a member of the Federalist Society, or its steering committee.” Roberts has acknowledged taking part in some Federalist Society activities, Perino said.
The Federalist Society was founded in 1982 by conservatives who disagreed with what they saw as a leftist tilt in the nation's law schools. The group sponsors legal symposia and similar activities and serves as a network for rising conservative lawyers.
[...]
Membership in the sense of paying dues was not required as a condition of inclusion in a listing of the society's leadership, Leo said. He declined to say whether Roberts had ever paid dues, citing a policy of keeping membership information confidential.
Whelan, who has been a member of the Federalist Society but said he had no recollection of his own membership on the steering committee, said the society is tolerant of those who come to its meetings or serve on committees without paying dues.
“John Roberts probably realized pretty quickly he could take part in activities he wanted to” without being current on his dues, Whelan said.
These may seem like fine distinctions, but Roberts has insisted on them. In 2001, after he was nominated by President Bush for the seat he currently holds on the court of appeals,Roberts spoke to Post reporter James V. Grimaldi and asked him to correct an item Grimaldi had written that described Roberts as a member of the Federalist Society. In a subsequent column, Grimaldi wrote that Roberts “is not and never has been a member of the Federalist Society, as previous reported in this column.”
ginni clerk mafia all fedsoc?
trying to get the stank off? rcp boosted eastman, claremont...
no lnx
The Federalist Society Stood by the Law, Not Trump
COMMENTARY
.By Jonathan D. Urick February 12, 2021
In the aftermath of the election, critics have pounced on the conservative legal movement for its role in the Trump administration. But they miss the crucial role of those who boldly defended the rule of law.
President Trump notably selected many federal judges from the Federalist Society, the country’s leading association of conservative and libertarian lawyers. Even more society members joined his administration. These members faced significant pressure to ignore the facts and law, as Trump launched a months-long effort to overturn his election loss, culminating in the infamous assault on the U.S. Capitol.
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But Trump’s efforts resoundingly failed precisely because of Federalist Society members’ deep, abiding commitment to the rule of law. Unfortunately, this common commitment has been largely overlooked.
Respect for the rule of law is fundamental to the Federalist Society, as reflected in its statement of purpose. All members share this basic commitment, but they often disagree in good faith about how it applies. As a result, the Federalist Society is an incredibly big tent, home to a wide spectrum of views. Individual members do not define the society. Nor do its national and local-chapter leaders. The Federalist Society takes no official position on members’ behalf about any specific policy or legal questions.
The Federalist Society instead fosters vigorous, civil debate, including with those outside its ranks, on all sorts of legal questions with enormous implications for liberty and democracy. Challenging ideas sharpen members’ thinking, strengthening the organization’s commitment to its fundamental principles. All agree, however, on two core principles: Every argument must be debated and ultimately judged according to the rule of law. And the law’s content does not depend on politics or raw power.
Because of these shared principles, many Federalist Society members courageously rejected Trump’s attempts to overturn the election. Across the country, dozens of Republican-appointed judges, including many of Trump’s own appointees, dismissed meritless election lawsuits. Off the bench, former appellate Judge J. Michael Luttig, Vice President Pence’s attorney Greg Jacob, and Berkeley law professor John Yoo all advised Pence that he could not unilaterally reject duly certified electoral votes. Based on the Constitution’s clear text, they convinced Pence that he had no such authority.
Senior Department of Justice leaders also resisted “really intense” pressure to support Trump’s efforts to sue states directly in the Supreme Court and launching unfounded investigations against Georgia. Attorney General Bill Barr, his acting successor, Jeffrey Rosen, and acting Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall all refused because they saw no factual or legal basis for such actions. And they received strong support from other Federalist Society members, such as Assistant AG Steven Engel and White House counsel Pat Cipollone.
Recently, some observers have suggested that the Federalist Society is somehow complicit in Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, pointing in particular to the actions of John Eastman. But Eastman was overwhelmingly the exception to the many other Federalist Society members who opposed those efforts.
On the Trump administration’s way out of power, Federalist Society judges and lawyers followed the law neutrally and dispassionately, despite enormous political pressure. They assessed their legal duty based on the text of the Constitution and relevant statutes — regardless of the implications for conservative policy goals, the Republican Party, and Donald Trump. “We are all textualists now,” Justice Elena Kagan once observed, but it was not always so. That widespread consensus reflects the remarkable success of the Federalist Society’s nearly 40-year effort to create and foster a legal culture dedicated to the proposition that law is not merely politics in disguise.
History will not kindly remember Donald Trump’s meritless attempts to frustrate the peaceful transition of power, but ironically, his greatest legacy may be the very judges and lawyers he selected from the Federalist Society who rejected those efforts. Their principled courage ensured that our government remains one of laws rather than of men. It also demonstrated the strength of the conservative legal movement. Whatever threatens the rule of law, the Federalist Society has been and remains the answer — it is emphatically the solution, not the problem.
Jonathan D. Urick is a Washington, D.C., attorney and has been a member of the Federalist Society since he entered law school in 2010. The views expressed here are his own.
Related Topics: Election Challenge, Election 2020, Judiciary, Judges, Federalist Society, Politics
https://news.yahoo.com/attorneys-remade-supreme-court-now-110017179.html
no lnx many
lawyers for Trump: These lawyers remade the Supreme Court. Now they're fighting to limit voting.
Lisa Riordan Seville and Sally Bronston
November 1, 2020·
Way back in February, before the pandemic, the lockdowns and the epic lines at polling places, election officials in the battleground state of Michigan got a letter. It said voter registration in 19 counties was "abnormally" high, indicating that they weren't maintaining their rolls.
"Michigan's failure to provide accurate voter rolls violates federal law [and] jeopardizes the integrity of the upcoming 2020 federal election," the letter warned. If officials didn't clean up rolls "bloated with ineligible voters," they'd be taken to court.
:{The group spearheading the letters, called the Honest Elections Project, describes its mission as a nonpartisan effort to fight fraud, protect every American's right to vote and instill faith in the electoral process.
"Elections should be above the political fray," Executive Director Jason Snead told NBC News. "We're talking about elections from a point of principles, not politics."}:
Behind Snead's group, however, is a network that includes some of Washington's most powerful conservative figures, with close ties to the Republican Party and the Trump administration. Hundreds of pages of financial records and other documents, some not previously reported, lead back to Leonard Leo, an adviser to President Donald Trump and former executive vice president of the influential conservative legal group known as the Federalist Society.
Although he doesn't hold public office, Leo has spent three decades helping to shift the American judiciary, including the Supreme Court, to the right. Now his network, backed by millions of dollars in untraceable "dark money," is working to reshape the American vote.
Alongside lawyers who also work for the Republican National Committee, Leo and his team during this election cycle have teed up lawsuits about voter rolls, run ads and filed court briefs to support litigation against mail-in voting. Leo is also on the advisory board of Lawyers for Trump, which is recruiting a battalion of lawyers ready to go to court in the wake of the election.
Whatever the outcome of the race, some see Leo's efforts as part of a longer-term strategy by conservatives to hold onto power in the face of demographic shifts that aren't going their way.
"It's a small circle of Republican advisers and donors who are all wrapped up in the same project," said David Daley, the author of "Ratf**ked," a book about gerrymandering, and a senior fellow at FairVote, which advocates for electoral reform. "The project is using redistricting, voting rights and the courts to ensure long-term Republican power."
:{Since 1988, Republicans have won the popular vote in a presidential election just once, in 2004. In March, Trump said on Fox & Friends that if the $3.6 billion congressional Democrats had requested to support elections during the pandemic had been approved, "you'd never have a Republican elected in this country again."
"The president always says the quiet part out loud," said Sarah Longwell, a veteran Republican political strategist who broke with the party to co-found Republican Voters Against Trump.}:
Longwell pushes back against the idea touted by some liberals that the GOP has been engaged in a long-term effort to disenfranchise voters.
She spent years in Republican circles, she said, and "never heard anybody talk about suppressing the vote." But in this cycle, she said, "the lengths a lot of the Republicans are going to affect voting, those to me do look suppressive. Nakedly suppressive."
'Bloated' voter rolls
In June, the Honest Elections Project made good on its threat over voter rolls, joining a local conservative activist to file suit in Michigan. Trump won the state by just 12,000 votes in 2016, the thinnest margin in the country.
Michigan's Democratic secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, who is fighting the lawsuit, rejects the characterization of state rolls as "abnormally" high. A spokesperson for her office said the project's methodology, which compares current voter registrations to slightly older population estimates, "misleads the public and misunderstands our nation's laws."
"The goal is 100 percent voter registration, and any suggestion otherwise is antithetical to democracy," the spokesperson said. "Michigan's registration rates are strong because we have had one of the best motor-voter systems in the country."
Snead rejected claims that the suit seeks to suppress the vote, pointing out that Michigan now allows same-day voter registration.
"I would strongly object to the notion that we're trying to stop people from voting when we're talking about cleaning up voter rolls," Snead said. "What we're talking about should be no more controversial than throwing out a spoiled container of yogurt."
Michigan is among at least six swing states that have faced litigation this year over their voter rolls from conservative groups who said keeping voter rolls "clean" protects against election fraud. Voting rights advocates describe them as "purges" that disenfranchise low-income, minority and young voters, who tend both to move more and to vote Democratic.
In a statement, the Trump campaign's deputy national press secretary, Thea McDonald, said: "President Trump has clearly and consistently advocated for stable, understandable rules that will give every American faith in the election's results.
"Democrats have duped the mainstream media into advocating for states to ignore the fact that their voter rolls are inaccurate and outdated," McDonald said, "so that there are tens of thousands unclaimed ballots out there for harvesters to snatch and illegally cast, diluting the will of every eligible voter."
The rolls should be kept up to date, experts said, but officials need to weigh the risk of fraud against that of disenfranchisement.
"There's very, very little evidence of voter fraud based upon voter rolls," said Paul Rosenzweig, a security expert and senior fellow at the R Street Institute, a right-leaning think tank. "There's a lot of evidence that purging voter rolls ends up purging legitimate voters."
Claims of widespread voter fraud have been largely debunked by experts, including Trump's own commission. The organization perhaps best known for asserting them is the Heritage Foundation, whose voter fraud database Snead managed before he moved to the Honest Elections Project. Last year, he was also in Heritage's private election fraud briefing with Republican secretaries of state and active members of the Justice Department, as ProPublica first reported.
While Snead insists that his organization doesn't fight for either party, the lawyers working with him are also leading the Republicans' legal battle over rules for the 2020 contest.
:{
William S. Consovoy, a former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas,}: is the head of a boutique Washington, D.C., law firm whose clients include the Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign. His firm has been paid $2 million this year for legal work on behalf of the Republican National Committee and the campaign, according to election filings, which included litigation against mail-in voting in Wisconsin. He is also one of Trump's private attorneys.
Before helping Trump with his fight to keep his financial records secret, Consovoy was on the winning side of the Supreme Court case that gutted a key section of the Voting Rights Act, which had prevented areas with histories of racial discrimination from changing their voting rules without federal approval.
Jason Torchinsky, listed as a plaintiff's counsel on the Michigan lawsuit with Consovoy, is a well-known lawyer for conservative dark money groups, including several linked to Leo. He has also represented the Republican National Committee in the past, and he is general counsel for the National Republican Redistricting Trust, the GOP group gearing up to do battle over redrawing state legislative and House district maps in 2021. In September, he represented Pennsylvania's GOP state senators in their unsuccessful Supreme Court petition to block the state's counting of late mail-in ballots.
Further behind the scenes is Leo. A dapper Washington figure who wears distinctive round glasses, he has played a role in placing every one of the six conservative justices on the Supreme Court. In 1991, two years out of law school, he helped prep Thomas for his confirmation hearings.
This year, Leo's network helped to push the confirmation of the court's newest member, Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died Sept. 18, creating a vacancy. Leo's network immediately pledged to spend millions to advocate for Trump's right to fill the vacancy before the election.
The White House said in a statement that Barrett and Leo didn't speak "after the vacancy arose."
"As President Trump has said, he has no more solemn obligation and no greater honor than to appoint Supreme Court Justices and, as such, it was his decision alone to nominate this well-qualified jurist," White House deputy press secretary Judd Deere said.
Should the election go to the high court, as many think it will, the justices Leo helped to seat will decide it.
Soft power
Leo's influence came from his position at the top of the Federalist Society, which he was instrumental in building. Thirty years ago, the organization was a scrappy island for conservatives in what they viewed as a sea of left-leaning legal institutions. Today, its 70,000 members range from law school students and leading legal scholars to Supreme Court justices and Trump's personal attorneys.
:{
}:The Federalist Society doesn't litigate or take policy positions. It doesn't have to, because its members have come to occupy positions of power across the legal landscape, said Steven Teles,a political science professor at Johns Hopkins University who wrote a book about the conservative legal movement.
"That's where a lot of the power comes from," he said. "It can coordinate, even in an informal way, across boundaries that government often tends to stovepipe."
Leo moved smoothly across those borders. When a seat on the Supreme Court opened up under a Republican president, he'd take leave from the Federalist Society to organize "the outside coalition efforts," as he did with the confirmations of Justice Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts.
Until recently, he worked largely "behind the scenes," said Amanda Hollis-Brusky, an associate professor of politics at Pomona College in Claremont, California, and the author of a book about the Federalist Society. "Leo's influence really hasn't been fully felt until the Trump administration."
It began during the 2016 campaign, after the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia that February.
Don McGahn, a longtime Federalist Society member who served as the Trump campaign's counsel and would become the White House counsel, realized early that the judiciary could help rally a fractured Republican Party behind a controversial candidate. He pulled together a tight team to talk with Trump about who should fill Scalia's seat.
In March 2016, Leo had a quiet meeting with Trump at McGahn's D.C. law firm, Jones Day. Soon after, the Trump campaign did something unheard of: It released a list of potential Supreme Court nominees, a signal to conservatives that he would do right by them with the judiciary.
"It ended up being the single biggest issue that brought Republicans home to someone they were largely troubled by," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., told The New York Times.
Leo has always insisted that his mission is intellectual.
"I'm engaged in the battle of ideas, and I care very deeply about our Constitution and the role of courts in our society," Leo told The Washington Post in the paper's investigation into his work. "And I don't waste my time on stories that involve money and politics."
But money and politics have been crucial to his success.
The network
Not long after Trump's victory, Leo stood in the gilded lobby of Trump Tower after a meeting with the president-elect.
Beside him was Kellyanne Conway, Trump's campaign manager and counselor. Leo and Conway knew each other well. Her husband, George, was a longtime Federalist Society member; he has since become one of the right's most ardent "Never Trumpers." And according to ethics filings, in the year before she joined the administration, she did consulting work for at least seven companies and nonprofits with close ties to Leo.
In addition to Leo's role at the Federalist Society, where tax filings show he made about $400,000 a year, he was involved in a constellation of nonprofits and companies supporting conservative causes, fueled by tens of millions of dollars of largely untraceable cash.
For years, Leo's presence in this tangled web "was visible, but it wasn't official," said Anna Massoglia, a researcher at the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, who first wrote about Leo's connection to the Honest Elections Project. "He's been effectively leaving breadcrumbs all over. It's just a matter of finding them and putting it together."
One of the most prominent of the interconnected groups was the Judicial Crisis Network, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit that has been the public relations machine supporting the nomination of conservative, originalist judges to the country's courts. The group has an office in the same building as the Federalist Society.
:{After Scalia died, the Judicial Crisis Network kicked into gear. Its $7 million campaign helped block President Barack Obama's nominee, keeping Scalia's seat open for the next president to fill.
In January 2017, the group announced that it would spend $10 million to back Trump's pick, who was soon revealed as Neil Gorsuch. Working with the Judicial Crisis Network were several figures who are now official partners in Leo's consolidated dark money network.}:
There was Greg Mueller, the head of powerful CRC Public Relations, who ran point, according to a news release. He serves with Leo on the board of the anti-abortion rights group Students for Life of America. Leo would later join Mueller at the firm.
There was also Gary Marx, a political strategist and Judicial Crisis Network senior adviser, who worked to build support in key states. Marx now leads the two main tax-exempt groups in Leo's new network, corporation filings show.
In 2018, the network rallied around the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh, which survived the most contentious set of hearings since Thomas faced Anita Hill in 1991. McGahn, the White House counsel at the time, coached Kavanaugh, who disputed accusations that he had assaulted Christine Blasey Ford as a teenager.
Leo's network threw millions at the cause, including buying ads to pressure Democratic senators in red states to vote for confirmation.
CRC reached out to reporters offering quotations from former Kavanaugh clerks. The PR firm was, according to Politico, also behind an ultimately embarrassing effort to exonerate Kavanaugh by claiming that someone else might have assaulted Ford.
After Kavanaugh was confirmed, supporters gathered in the Senate's Mansfield Room for a private reception, Politico reported. Leo, Marx and Jonathan Bunch, Leo's right-hand man at the Federalist Society,were there.
Their quest undoubtedly was driven by a shared vision of the law and limited government. But it was also lucrative.
:{
All told, at least $330 million flowed through nonprofits linked to Leo from 2015 to 2018}:, according to an analysis by NBC News that built on a Washington Post tally done last year.
Millions flowed back to the men behind it. A company Leo owns in part received nearly $9 million, according to the tax filings of various nonprofits from 2016 through 2018. CRC, Mueller's company, brought in $9.3 million in that period.
During Trump's first term, Leo's network helped him confirm more federal judges than any other administration had done since Jimmy Carter's. In addition to three Supreme Court justices, Trump appointed 220 federal judges, including 1 of every 4 circuit court judges.
No compromises
Leo's network is prepared for whatever follows Election Day.
He began consolidating the existing strands this year. In January, he announced that he was leaving the Federalist Society to officially head up a push to spread "big money and expertise across the conservative movement," as Axios put it.
Leo implied that his effort was an answer to dark money groups on the left, which in 2018 outspent the conservative groups for the first time.
He surrounded himself with a familiar list of names, essentially making his role official in a network he'd helped create.
Leo became chairman of the newly branded CRC Advisors, Mueller's public relations firm. Bunch joined him.
:{To move the "big money," they revamped two tax-exempt organizations already in their network, with Marx at the helm.
One became The 85 Fund, the fiscal sponsor of the Honest Elections Project}:.
"The conservative movement is finally adopting some of the left's tactics, but the left is still spending far more," Marx said in a statement, pointing to the Arabella Advisors network, one of the largest left-leaning dark money networks. Like the Honest Elections Project, Arabella has said it is nonpartisan.
The Judicial Crisis Network became an entity underneath The Concord Fund.It has given more than $2 million to the Republican Attorney Generals Association, financial disclosures show. Some of that money has gone to pay consulting and research fees to CRC.
The Republican Attorney Generals Association backed Barrett's nomination to the Supreme Court. Several Republican attorneys general are also part of Lawyers for Trump, the group marshaling legal power for the election, which also includes Leo and Consovoy, the attorney for the Honest Elections Project suit in Michigan.
Leo didn't respond to an interview request or a detailed list of questions. Neither did Consovoy or Torchinsky, the other attorney on the Michigan suit.The Republican National Committee, for which both Consovoy and Torchinsky have worked, didn't respond to a query.
The Federalist Society, where Leo remains co-chairman of the board, reiterated that it doesn't "take a position on legislation, litigation, candidates for office or judicial nominees." The spokesman who sent that response is a senior vice president at CRC Advisors.
The support for conservative attorneys general could also be a sign of what's to come.
Attorneys general have mounted aggressive political challenges to Washington over the past decade. Republicans in Oklahoma and Texas challenged Obama's environmental regulations and the Affordable Care Act. Their Democratic counterparts banded to block Trump policy changes on immigration and cuts to food stamps.
"If Biden wins, Republican AGs in general are going to be a real thorn in the side of a Democratic administration, much like Democratic AGs have been for the Trump administration," said Paul Nolette, an associate professor of political science at Marquette University who runs a database that tracks litigation by attorneys general.
If they rally together to file multistate litigation, as state attorneys general increasingly do, they will have an advantage — the ability to "forum shop" for like-minded judges, choosing which states and which federal courts in which to file their cases. The Trump administration's appointments have broadened their options.
In a politically polarized landscape in which Congress is often gridlocked, policy fights are likely to land at the judiciary's feet. Some may like it that way.
"For partisans, it's an appealing avenue," Nolette said. "It doesn't force the two sides to come to a compromise."
Like an election, he said, a lawsuit is "largely win or lose."
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/fb-9176491/CAN-BUTCH-SAVE-TRUMP-CONVICTION-MAGA-WILD-BUNCH.html
beware BS
no lnx doc ltr
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9176321/Federalist-Society-founder-says-constitutional-convict-Trump-leaves-office.html
More than 150 scholars from the Federalist Society say it IS constitutional to convict Donald Trump after he leaves office
More than 150 constitutional scholars wrote saying the trial is constitutional
Trump's Senate trial could start within days
They cite Congress' 'sole power' of impeachment
Constitution provides not just for removal but prohibiting holding future office
Trump has not ruled out another run in 2024
Framers feared 'demagogue' intent on 'overthrowing republican government'
By GEOFF EARLE, DEPUTY U.S. POLITICAL EDITOR FOR DAILYMAIL.COM
PUBLISHED: 09:28 EDT, 22 January 2021 | UPDATED: 12:33 EDT, 22 January 2021
More than 150 legal and constitutional scholars – including a co-founder of the conservative Federalist Society – have joined in a letter arguing that President Donald Trump can be impeached despite being out of office.
The letter comes as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has spelled out his preferences on a Senate trial for former President Donald Trump, who was impeached in the House just days before the end of his term.
They point to the text of the Constitution, precedents, as well as the intentions of the Founders in providing a remedy to stop a 'demagogue' who might seek to overthrow the U.S. government.
Among the signers of the letter is Northwestern University Law Professor Steven Calabresi, a cofounder of the conservative Federalist Society, a group that generated lists of many of the conservative judicial nominees Trump installed in the courts.
'More broadly, a singular concern of the Framers in devising our constitutional system was the danger of a power-seeking populist of the type they referred to as a "demagogue" rising to the highest office and overthrowing republican government,' they write.
Steven Calabresi is a confounder of the conservative Federalist Society
'The Framers further understood that the source of such a person's power does not expire if he or she is expelled from office; so long as such a person retains the loyalty of his or her supporters, he or she might return to power. The Framers devised the disqualification power to guard against that possibility, and would surely disagree that a person who sought to overthrow our democracy could not be disqualified from holding a future office of the United States because the plot reached its crescendo too close to the end of his or her term.
Trump would be the first U.S. president impeached after leaving office, but not the first U.S. official.
Trump was acquitted of his first impeachment in February 2020
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has proposed an impeachment schedule that will start early next month
CAN BUTCH SAVE TRUMP FROM CONVICTION FOR THE MAGA WILD BUNCH?
Trump found his new impeachment attorney Karl 'Butch' Bowers through Lindsey Graham.
The South Carolina senator knows Bowers from Republican politics, and also from both serving in the National Guard.
Bowers, 55, has defended two prominent South Carolina GOP figures accused of wrongdoing.
The first was Mark Sanford, then the governor, who faced impeachment when he infamously vanished in 2009 and turned up in Argentina spending time with his mistress.
Sanders was investigated by the South Carolina House but, represented by Bowers, escaped impeachment.
Bowers also represented Nikki Haley before she was South Carolina's governor, when she was accused of using her role in its House for personal gain.
Bowers' hiring suggests Trump may try to defend or at least justify some of his fraud claims. The attorney was briefly a Department of Justice special counsel on voting under George W. Bush and worked for the John McCain campaign in Florida in 2008.
A married father-of-four, he is the state staff judge advocate general corps in the South Carolina Air National Guard.
Another key part of the argument is that the Constitution provides not just for removal but for denying future office.
It states that impeachment 'shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States.
Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer has already said 'there will be a vote on convicting the president for high crimes and misdemeanors; and if the president is convicted, there will be a vote on barring him from running again.'
Other prominent signers on the letter, which was reported by Politico, included Ronald Reagan solicitor general Charles Fried and Michigan State University law professor Brian Kalt, an expert on peculiarities of the Constitution such as impeachment of former officials and the 25th Amendment.
Calabresi, who calls himself an originalist Republican, also penned an op-ed in the New York Times calling Trump's pardons of former chief strategist Steve Bannon as 'corrupt' and possible obstruction of justice, since the longtime advisor could have potentially incriminating information on Trump.
The signers cross the political spectrum, and take no position on whether Trump should be convicted, only on the validity of the procedure, which Trump loyalist Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) has said is unconstitutional.
'The Constitution's impeachment power has two aspects. The first is removal from office, which occurs automatically upon the conviction of a current officer.
The second is disqualification from holding future office, which occurs in those cases where the Senate deems disqualification appropriate in light of the conduct for which the impeached person was convicted.
The impeachment power must be read so as to give full effect to both aspects of this power,' they write.
The Constitution grants the House the 'sole power' to impeach and the Senate the sole power to try all impeachments. The House impeached Trump for 'incitement of insurrection' after the MAGA riot of January 6.
===
clerk mafia amicus "'flotilla" (network via fedsoc?]
raw story
https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/clarence-thomas/
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' right leaning political views have been obvious for decades in his writings for the Court. A new report in the Daily Beast, however, spotlights just how intertwined his financial connections are to an ultra-conservative judicial activist.
When Thomas was looking to promote the release of his memoir last October he chose to hire a public relations firm, CRC Advisors, run by the former chief of the Federalist Society, Leonard Leo. Leo is a top fundraiser for right-wing judicial activist groups. The Daily Beast reports that "Leo has raised hundreds of millions of dollars over the three decades on behalf of right-wing dark money groups to influence the federal judiciary and Supreme Court. He advised and persuaded Republican presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump in their appointments of Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, and Chief Justice John Roberts—and prepped Justice Thomas for his nomination hearings."
The report also says that Leo is the "hub" of dark money groups that stealthily fund and link up with parties who argue cases before the Supreme Court, something that Supreme watchers have dubbed an "amicus flotilla."
Leo’s affiliations with the court - and especially Thomas - are especially pronounced. He made the justice the godfather of one of his children and has hosted him on vacation at his New England retreat.
Paul Collins is a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and author of several books about the high court. He says Thomas’ choice of Leo’s firm is “strange” and “unnecessary.”
“It signals that this world of the Federalist Society is even smaller than we thought,” Collins told The Daily Beast.
fed soc
The Rise of Environmental Nuisance Litigation: Can Municipalities Sue Oil Companies for Climate Change?
The Cornell Club
6 E 44th Street
New York, NY 10017
Speakers:
David Bookbinder • Lindsey M. De La Torre NAM MAP • Richard A. Epstein
Topics:
Environmental & Energy Law • Litigation
Sponsors:
New York City Young Lawyers Chapter
Public Nuisance, Climate Change, and Municipal Litigation
Oct
24
2018
Public Nuisance, Climate Change, and Municipal Litigation
Boston Lawyers Chapter
Omni Parker House
60 School St.
Boston, MA 02108
Speakers:
Lindsey M. De La Torre • Steven Ferrey • Philip S. Goldberg NAM MAP• Donald J. Kochan • James R. May • Kenneth Reich
more
Topics:
Environmental Law & Property Rights
Sponsors:
Boston Lawyers Chapter
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/07/clarence-thomas-trump/593596/
no lnx
The Clarence Thomas Effect
The notoriously quiet Supreme Court justice has had a far-reaching influence on the personnel of the Trump administration, which may be his most lasting legacy.
By Emma Green
JULY 10, 2019
Clarence Thomas is the longest-serving justice currently sitting on the Supreme Court. For much of his tenure, court watchers and critics have dismissed his jurisprudence as largely irrelevant, demoting him to the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s judicial sidekick. In the public imagination, he is most remembered for his worst moment. Last fall’s confirmation hearings for Justice Brett Kavanaugh resurrected the debate over Anita Hill, the woman who famously accused Thomas of sexual harassment during his 1991 confirmation hearings.
And yet, during his time on the Court, Thomas has written prolifically and introduced ideas that have gradually gained influence among other justices. Of all the Supreme Court justices, Thomas takes an approach to the law that is arguably the purest embodiment of the conservative judicial philosophies known astextualism, which holds that the plain meaning of the text of a law is all that matters in judicial interpretation, and originalism, which holds that the Constitution should be interpreted only as its authors intended.
The most significant part of Thomas’s legacy, however, may take shape long after he has stopped writing opinions.Personnel is policy. Thomas’s vast network, more than that of any other justice, has defined President Donald Trump’s administration and the federal judiciary Trump has built. Through his clerks and mentees, the notoriously silent justice may end up with an outsize voice in the legal system for years to come.
Numbers are the first evidence of the sizable Thomas effect. He has had more of his former clerks nominated to federal judgeships under Trump than any other justice, past or present: 10, compared with Anthony Kennedy’s seven and Scalia’s five. Roughly one-fifth of Thomas’s former clerks either are in the Trump administration or have been nominated to the federal bench by the president. The clerks whom Thomas trained, has mentored, and actively stays in touch with are taking up lifetime appointments, and on the whole, they are quite young: Allison Jones Rushing, who now sits on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, is just in her mid-30s.
[Read: Conservative women are leading the defense of Kavanaugh]
These relatively small numbers offer insight into the broad influence Thomas has had on the Trump-era legal establishment. Even clerks who aren’t in formal positions of public service have gained prominence under Trump: Laura Ingraham, the conservative commentator who clerked for Thomas during his early years on the bench, has hosted one of the top-rated programs on Fox News since October 2017 and is an outspoken supporter of the president. Another former clerk, Carrie Severino, the chief counsel and policy director of the Judicial Crisis Network, has been one of the most vocal advocates for Trump’s judicial nominees, including Kavanaugh.
The Thomas effect started taking shape early on in the Trump administration. As Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern noted as early as mid-2017, when the pattern was still nascent, “Everywhere you turn in Trumpland, you’ll find a slew of Thomas’ former clerks in high places.” In part, this effect may have been driven by the people making the hires. Gregory Katsas, who clerked for Thomas on the D.C. Circuit and the Supreme Court, joined the Trump administration right after the inauguration as a deputy assistant to the president and deputy counsel. Later, when Katsas was nominated to his own judgeship on the D.C. Circuit Court, he told U.S. senators that he had been involved in “interviewing and recommending candidates for various executive and judicial appointments.”
At least three other people who have worked in Trump’s White House counsel’s office are also former Thomas clerks: John Eisenberg, David Morrell, and Kate Todd. When the Trump administration released its list of potential Supreme Court nominees in November 2017, four former Thomas clerks were included: Thomas Lee, Margaret Ryan, David Stras, and Allison Eid.
Any new administration has a huge number of positions to fill across the executive branch. When Trump took office, he also faced significant judicial vacancies—142 empty seats, according to data from the American Bar Association. By comparison, when Barack Obama took office in 2008, there were only 53 federal judicial vacancies. These jobs are filled like any other: through personal networks and recommendations. Under Trump, the most influential source of potential candidates for these vacancies has been the Federalist Society,a professional network for conservative and libertarian lawyers. “It happens that a lot of the people in the White House counsel’s office are Federalist Society members, and as a result of having been Federalist Society members, they have their own set of contacts,” said John Malcolm, who works on judicial issues at the Heritage Foundation and is chairman of the Federalist Society’s criminal-law practice group. The organization’s executive vice president, Leonard Leo, has had an influential role in advising the Trump administration on possible nominees.
Although stories about the Federalist Society often focus on the intellectual role and legacy of the late Justice Scalia, who was an early faculty adviser to the group at the University of Chicago, Thomas is a central figure in the Federalist Society universe.William Eskridge, a law professor at Yale known for his work on LGBTQ legal issues, told me the Federalist Society is “a social circle. It’s a professional circle. It’s a circle that gives [the justices] law clerks. It’s a circle that gives them positive publicity.” And, he added, “Thomas is at the center of that.”
[Read: The Supreme Court hands a victory to the pro-life movement]
Scalia famously described himself as a “fainthearted originalist,” although he later repudiated that label. By contrast, Thomas’s originalism has been “unflinching,” as one conservative law professor wrote in a recent column for The New York Times.Scalia himself told a Thomas biographer that Thomas does not believe in the legal principle of generally following settled precedent. “Among Federalist Society members, he probably would be their No. 1 favorite justice of anyone on the Court,” Severino told me. “As wonderful as Justice Scalia is, Thomas is someone who has inspired a lot of young lawyers.”
The Thomas effect may be due to more than just the power of networks, however. Thomas has been on the Supreme Court bench since 1991, and his clerks are entering their professional peaks during a Republican administration. Several former clerks told me Thomas goes out of his way to stay in touch with his clerks and cultivate their careers; they have monthly lunches and regularly get together for intergenerational reunions. Each year, Thomas takes his clerks on a field trip to the site of the deadliest battle in the Civil War. “I want them to go to Gettysburgand to think about … the price that was paid for this country to exist,” he said in an interview with the appeals-court judge Diane Sykes at a Federalist Society event in 2013. “I love my law clerks,” Thomas added. “These kids are my family.”
Thomas’s clerks tend to fit a particular profile. They come from all over the country, including law schools outside the Ivy League, which makes them particularly suitable candidates for federal judgeships. “Judges have to have ties to the local area typically,” said Saikrishna Prakash, a former Thomas clerk and professor of law at the University of Virginia. “The Thomas clerks, because they come from more regions in the country, and certainly go to law schools all over the country, are more apt to go outside of the I-95 corridor.” After their clerkships, these lawyers often go into public service, taking up positions in U.S. attorneys’ offices or as professors, which means they don’t mind the pay cut that often comes with a move to the federal bench. (A federal district-court judge can expect to make slightly more than $200,000 a year; by comparison, partners at top-tier law firms can earn multimillion-dollar salaries.)And, like Thomas, they tend to be very conservative, committed originalists and textualists. As Eskridge put it, they are true believers.
The Trump administration’s most marked achievement in terms of shifting the federal judiciary has come through Circuit Courts of Appeals.Trump has far outpaced his recent predecessors, with 42 confirmed appointments to these courts over the past two and a half years; by comparison, Obama had gotten less than half as many appeals-court judges confirmed by this point in his first term. These seats are where Thomas clerks will have the most influence—and are outpacing the former clerks for conservative justices. Former Thomas clerks have now been confirmed to the Fourth, Fifth, Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth Circuits, along with two judges confirmed to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals—Katsas and Neomi Rao, the former head of Trump’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. The D.C. Circuit is particularly influential, because it is responsible for reviewing the actions of federal agencies; in recent years, it has issued important decisions on topics ranging from Obamacare to gun rights.
Thomas is famously silent during oral arguments. But as a writer, he has been prolific:He wrote the most concurrences, dissents, and opinions of any justice during each of the past five terms, according to data from SCOTUSblog. Over time, his work has significantly shifted the window of acceptable legal opinions on various issues, said John Yoo, a former Thomas clerk and law professor at UC Berkeley who is best known for his work on the George W. Bush administration’s torture memos. “When I clerked for him, he published some opinions I thought were really radical, and the legal profession would never be interested,” Yoo told me. “Now those opinions are heavily debated in law schools and are very influential.” He specifically mentioned Thomas’s concurrence in a 1995 case on affirmative action, Adarand v. Peña, and another concurrence in a case on the Constitution’s commerce clause, United States v. Lopez.
On the Court, Thomas’s purist approach may cost him the ability to convince his fellow justices on controversial cases. “He’s less of a traditional politician,” Yoo told me. “I think he’s more interested in saying, ‘This is the correct view of the Constitution,’ rather than assembling five votes. And that’s a trade-off.” Thomas’s views often come out in dissents or concurrences, offered solo or joined by just one or two other justices.“He has not, until recently, written any of the blockbuster majority opinions,” Yoo said, “because to do that, you have to horse-trade to get votes.” (Notable majority opinions by Thomas include a 2001 case concerning the rights of a religious student group, Good News Club v. Milford Central School, and a 2018 First Amendment case involving a crisis-pregnancy center, NIFLA v. Becerra.)
This is all the more reason the rise of Thomas’s former clerks is important. His approach to controversial legal questions—generally opposing affirmative action, favoring limited power for federal agencies, defending gun rights, and more—has been developed and popularized over his decades on the bench, and will be carried forward by a new generation of judges. He openly defies what he sees as bad precedent—just last month, Thomas wrote in a concurrence that “the Constitution itself is silent on abortion.”
[Adam Cohen: Clarence Thomas knows nothing of my work]
Other conservative justices’ clerks have had a significant footprint in the Trump administration. Two of former Justice Anthony Kennedy’s clerks, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, now sit on the Supreme Court. Trump’s secretary of health and human services, Alex Azar, and his solicitor general, Noel Francisco, both clerked for Scalia, as did the White House counselor Emmet Flood and the recently confirmed Seventh Circuit judge, Amy Coney Barrett, who is widely thought to be on Trump’s short list for any potential future Supreme Court slots.
Thomas’s influence, however, is particularly broad, reaching from the Department of Justice to the White House to the federal bench. Thomas is now 71 years old. If he follows the path of his colleagues Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who are both in their 80s, he could easily have a decade or more to go on the Supreme Court. His greatest legacy, however, may be in the intellectual seeds he has planted in the generation of lawyers who came up studying his work.
Olivia Paschal contributed reporting to this article.
Emma Green is a former staff writer at The Atlantic.
===
raw story
https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/clarence-thomas/
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' right leaning political views have been obvious for decades in his writings for the Court. A new report in the Daily Beast, however, spotlights just how intertwined his financial connections are to an ultra-conservative judicial activist.
When Thomas was looking to promote the release of his memoir last October he chose to hire a public relations firm, CRC Advisors, run by the former chief of the Federalist Society, Leonard Leo. Leo is a top fundraiser for right-wing judicial activist groups. The Daily Beast reports that "Leo has raised hundreds of millions of dollars over the three decades on behalf of right-wing dark money groups to influence the federal judiciary and Supreme Court. He advised and persuaded Republican presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump in their appointments of Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, and Chief Justice John Roberts—and prepped Justice Thomas for his nomination hearings."
The report also says that Leo is the "hub" of dark money groups that stealthily fund and link up with parties who argue cases before the Supreme Court, something that Supreme watchers have dubbed an "amicus flotilla."
Leo’s affiliations with the court - and especially Thomas - are especially pronounced. He made the justice the godfather of one of his children and has hosted him on vacation at his New England retreat.
Paul Collins is a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and author of several books about the high court. He says Thomas’ choice of Leo’s firm is “strange” and “unnecessary.”
“It signals that this world of the Federalist Society is even smaller than we thought,” Collins told The Daily Beast.
==
https://www.alternet.org/2021/12/global-christian-right/
an 12 21
an investigation by the media outletopenDemocracy revealed Friday that the dark money groups masterminding the far-right assault on reproductive freedoms in the U.S. have also spent at least $28 million in recent years on efforts to roll back the rights of women and LGBTQ+ people worldwide.
The new analysis shows that prominent anti-abortion groups including the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the Federalist Society, the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, the Family Research Council, and Focus on the Family and Heartbeat International have "been involved in recent efforts to limit reproductive rights in Europe and Latin America."
The organizations form what openDemocracy describes as "the 'dark money' global empire of the U.S. Christian right," which is exporting its legal strategy, army of lawyers, and resources overseas to forestall and reverse international progress on abortion access.
ADF, a far-right Christian legal advocacy group with ties to Justice Amy Coney Barrett, has spent years laying the groundwork for the draconian Mississippi abortion ban at the heart of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, a Supreme Court case that could imperil reproductive freedoms across the U.S.
But ADF's influence extends well beyond its home country. According to openDemocracy, the organization—whose global arm is called ADF International—spent $15.3 million between 2016 and 2019 on efforts to gut abortion rights overseas.
"The European offices of ACLJ and ADF have intervened in dozens of European court cases against sexual and reproductive rights," the outlet notes. "Last year, Poland's constitutional court voted to ban abortion in cases of fetal defects. [ACLJ] submitted arguments in favor of the new restrictions, condemned by the Council of Europe as a grave 'human rights violation.'"
"The European branch of ACLJ also intervened for the first time at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights," openDemocracy observes. "The government of El Salvador, where abortion is illegal in all circumstances, was sued for the imprisonment and death of a woman who had experienced a miscarriage."
As for the Federalist Society—of which all six current right-wing Supreme Court justices are either current or former members—"Europe was the main destination of foreign spending," openDemocracyfinds.
"Europeans are too naive in thinking that achievements in women's rights and sexual and reproductive health are irreversible," said Sophie in 't Veld, a Dutch member of the European Parliament, told the outlet. "The anti-choice movement does not only have a lot of money, they also have a plan and the determination. Europe should wake up, and it should wake up fast."
While under U.S. tax law the far-right groups have largely succeeded in keeping their funding sources hidden from the public, openDemocracy examined "financial information disclosed by grantmakers" showing that the National Christian Foundation (NCF) and Fidelity Charitable donated $93 million to the organizations between 2016 and 2020.
Feminist researcher Sonia Corrêa of Sexuality Policy Watch said openDemocracy's report "exposes once again the long-running organic connections between anti-abortion forces in the U.S. and Latin America."
Neil Datta, secretary of the European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive Rights, similarly argued that the findings "further demonstrate the growing trend of religious extremists forging cross-border alliances to advance... pseudo-legal arguments and engaging in formal legal processes aiming to unstitch the fabric of human rights protection."
In an op-ed for the New York Times on Thursday, openDemocracy's Mary Fitzgerald argued that if the U.S. Supreme Court upholds Mississippi's abortion ban and undercuts Roe v. Wade, the nation will "join of a small cadre of increasingly authoritarian countries that have become more restrictive on abortion in recent years."
Fitzgerald went on to cite specific examples:
Poland's constitutional tribunal ruled on a retrograde abortion ban last year which effectively banned abortion in all cases apart from rape, incest or threat of life or health to the mother, after the ruling Law and Justice party packed the court.
Hungary's Viktor Orban is ramping up its talk on "family values," and a 2016 United Nations report criticized the country for obstructing abortion access.
Vladimir Putin's Russia has just joined the misleadingly titled Geneva Consensus Declaration: a document co-sponsored by the United States under the Trump administration with repressive governments including Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil, Mr. Orban's Hungary, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi's Egypt, and signed by dozens more of the world's most repressive regimes from Saudi Arabia to Uganda. (President Biden announced in January that the United States would withdraw.) The declaration's authors also claim that there is no international right to abortion.
"Later this month President Biden will host the Summit for Democracy, with a key focus on promoting human rights around the world," Fitzgerald noted. "But as U.S. courts continue to dismantle basic rights enjoyed in countless other modern democracies, the most pressing question must be: How can democracy do its job at home if only half the population is granted full human rights?"
jane mayer che
...More controversial still were Law and Economics seminars that the Olin foundation funded for judges. The seminars were initiated by Henry Manne, who had become dean of the George Mason University School of Law, which he was trying to transform into a hub of libertarian jurisprudence. The seminars treated judges to two-week-long, all-expenses-paid immersion training in Law and Economics, usually in luxurious settings like the Ocean Reef Club in Key Largo, Fla. They soon became popular free vacations for the judges, a cross between Maoist cultural re-education camps and Club Med. After a few hours of learning why environmental and labor laws were anathema, or why, as Manne argued, insider-trading laws did more harm than good, the judges broke for golf, swimming, and delightful dinners with their hosts. Within a few years, 660 judges had gone on these junkets, some, like the U.S. Court of Appeals judge and unconfirmed Supreme Court nominee Douglas Ginsburg, many times. By one count, 40 percent of the federal judiciary had participated, including the future Supreme Court justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Clarence Thomas.
A variety of major corporations eagerly joined Olin and other conservative foundations in footing the bills. A study by the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity found that between 2008 and 2012 close to 185 federal judges attended judicial seminars sponsored by conservative interests, several of which had cases before the courts.The lead underwriters were the Charles Koch Foundation, the Searle Freedom Trust, ExxonMobil, Shell Oil, the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, and State Farm, the insurance company. Topics ranged from "The Moral Foundations of Capitalism" to "Terrorism, Climate, and Central Planning: Challenges to Liberty and the Rule of Law."
Simultaneously, the Olin foundation provided crucial start-up funds for the Federalist Society, an organization for conservative law students founded in 1982. With $5.5 million from the Olin foundation, as well as large donations from foundations tied to Scaife, the Kochs, and other conservative legacies, the Federalist Society grew from a pipe dream shared by three ragtag law students into a powerful professional network of 42,000 right-leaning lawyers, with 150 law-school campus chapters and about 75 lawyers' groups nationally. All of the conservative justices on the Supreme Court are members, as are former vice presidentDick Cheney,the former attorneys general Edwin Meese and John Ashcroft, and numerous members of the federal bench. Its president, Eugene B. Meyer, son of a founding editor of National Review, acknowledged that without Olin funding "it possibly wouldn't exist at all." Looking back, the Olin foundation's staff described it as "one of the best investments" the foundation ever made.
The Olin foundation also backed what came to be known as the Collegiate Network, privately financing a string of right-wing newspapers on America's college campuses. Among them was The Dartmouth Review, which infamously published an editorial in Ebonics proclaiming, "Now we be cornin' to Dartmut' and be up over our 'fros in studies, but we still be not graduatin' Phi Beta Kappa." The paper hosted a feast of lobster and champagne to mock a student fast against global hunger, sledge-hammered shantytowns erected by students protesting apartheid in South Africa, and published a transcript of a secretly taped meeting of students belonging to Dartmouth's gay student association. The Dartmouth Review became an incubator for right-wing media figures like D'Souza and the future conservative radio host Laura Ingraham. Its counterpart at Vassar, meanwhile, gave starts in journalism to the ABC correspondent Jonathan Karl and Marc Thiessen, an online columnist at The Washington Post best known for his defense of the Bush administration's use of torture....
==
https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/capital/
Judge Loretta Preska, an advisor to the conservative Federalist Society, to which Chevron is a major donor, sentenced human rights attorney and Chevron nemesis Steven Donziger to six months in prison Friday for misdemeanor contempt of court after he had already spent 787 days under house arrest in New York.
This article originally appeared on ScheerPost.]
Preska's caustic outbursts — she said at the sentencing, "It seems that only the proverbial two-by-four between the eyes will instill in him any respect for the law"— capped a judicial farce worthy of the antics of Vasiliy Vasilievich, the presiding judge at the major show trials of the Great Purges in the Soviet Union, and the Nazi judge Roland Freisler who once shouted at a defendant,"You really are a lousy piece of trash!"
Donziger, a graduate of Harvard Law School, has been fighting against polluting American oil companies for nearly three decades on behalf of indigenous communities and peasant farmers in Ecuador. His only "crime" was winning a $9.5 billion judgment in 2011 against Chevron for thousands of plaintiffs. The oil giant had bought Texaco oil company holdings in Ecuador, inheriting a lawsuit alleging it deliberately discharged 16 billion gallons of toxic waste from its oil sites into rivers, groundwater, and farmland. Since the verdict, Chevron has come after him, weaponizing litigation to destroy him economically, professionally, and personally.
The sentencing came a day after Donziger petitioned the court to consider an opinion by the United Nations human rights council that found his house arrest a violation of international human rights law. The U.N human rights council said his house arrest counted as detention under international law and it was therefore illegal for Judge Preska to demand an additional six months in jail. Amnesty International also called for Donziger's immediate release.
Donziger and his lawyers have two weeks to appeal the judge's order that Donziger be sent immediately to jail. Preska denied Donziger bail claiming he is a flight risk. If the Federal Court of Appeals turns down Donziger's appeal he will go to jail for six months. The irony, not lost on Donziger and his lawyers, is that the higher court may overturn Preska's ruling against him, but by the time that decision is made he will potentially have already spent six months in jail.
"What Judge Preska is trying to do is force me to serve the entirety of my sentence before the appellate court can rule," Donziger told me by phone on Monday. "If the appellate court rules in my favor, I will still have served my sentence, although I am innocent in the eyes of the law."
Donziger, his lawyers have pointed out, is the first person under U.S. law charged with a "B" misdemeanor to be placed on home confinement, prior to trial, with an ankle monitor. He is the first person charged with any misdemeanor to be held under home confinement for over two years. He is the first attorney ever to be charged with criminal contempt over a discovery dispute in a civil case where the attorney went into voluntary contempt to pursue an appeal. He is the first person to be prosecuted under Rule 42 (criminal contempt) by a private prosecutor with financial ties to the entity and industry that was a litigantin the underlying civil dispute that gave rise to the orders. He is the first person tried by a private prosecutor who had ex parte communications with the charging judge while that judge remained (and remains) unrecused on the criminal case.
"No lawyer in New York for my level of offense ever has served more than 90 days and that was in home confinement," Donziger told the court. "I have now been in home confinement eight times that period of time. I have been disbarred without a hearing where I have been unable to present factual evidence; thus, I am unable to earn an income in my profession. I have no passport. I can't travel; can't do human rights work the normal way which I believe I am reasonably good at; can't see my clients in Ecuador; can't visit the affected communities to hear the latest news of cancer deaths or struggles to maintain life in face of constant exposure to oil pollution.
In addition, and this is little known, Judge [Lewis A.] Kaplan has imposed millions and millions of dollars of fines and courts costs on me. [Kaplan is the judge for Chevron's lawsuit against Donziger; Preska is his handpicked judge for the contempt charges.] He has ordered me to pay millions to Chevron to cover their legal fees in attacking me, and then he let Chevron go into my bank accounts and take all my life's savings because I did not have the funds to cover these costs. Chevron still has a pending motion to order me to pay them an additional $32 [million] in legal fees. That's where things stand today. I ask you humbly: might that be enough punishment already for a Class B misdemeanor?"
Judge Preska was unmoved.
"Mr. Donziger has spent the last seven years thumbing his nose at the U.S. judicial system," Preska said at his sentencing hearing. "Now it's time to pay the piper."
The six-month sentence was the maximum the judge was allowed to impose;she ruled that his house arrest cannot be counted as part of his detention. From start to finish, this has been a burlesque. It is emblematic of a court system that has been turned over to lackies of corporate power, who use the veneer of jurisprudence, decorum, and civility to make a mockery of the rule of law.
When the law is neutered, judges become the enforcers of injustice. These corporate judges, who epitomize what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil, now routinely make war on workers, civil liberties, unions, and environmental regulations.
Preska sent Jeremy Hammond to prison for a decade for hacking into the computers of a private security firmthat works on behalf of the government, including the Department of Homeland Security, and corporations such as Dow Chemical. In 2011, Hammond released to the website WikiLeaks and Rolling Stone and other publications some three million emails from the Texas-based company Strategic Forecasting Inc., or Stratfor. The sentence was one of the longest in U.S. history for hacking and the maximum Preska could impose under a plea agreement in the case. I sat through the
. I watched Preska spew her bile and contempt at Hammond from the bench with the same vitriol she used to attack Donziger.
Preska is also infamous for her long judicial crusade to force New York public schools to provide tax-subsidized free space for evangelical churches based on blatantly illogical readings of the Constitution.
The persecution of Donziger fits a pattern familiar to millions of poor Americans who are coerced into accepting plea deals, many for crimes they did not commit, and sent to prison for decades. It fits the pattern of the judicial lynching and prolonged psychological torture of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning. It fits the pattern of those denied habeas corpus and due process at Guantánamo Bay or in CIA black sites. It fits the pattern of those charged under terrorism laws, many held at the federal Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in Lower Manhattan, who cannot see the evidence used to indict them. It fits the pattern of the widespread use of Special Administrative Measures, known as SAMs, imposed to prevent or severely restrict communication with other prisoners, attorneys, family, the media, and people outside the jail. It fits the pattern of the extreme sensory deprivation and prolonged isolation used on those in our black sites and prisons, a form of psychological torture,the refinement of torture as science. By the time a "terrorist" is dragged into our secretive courts the bewildered suspect no longer has the mental and psychological capability to defend themselves. If they can do this legally to the demonized they can, and one day will, do it to the rest of us. The Donziger case is an ominous warning that the American legal system is broken.
Ralph Nader, who graduated from Harvard Law School, has long decried the capture of the courts and law schools by corporate power, calling the nation's attorneys and judges "lucrative cogs in the corporate wheel." He notes that law school curriculums are "built around corporate law, and corporate power, and corporate perpetration, and corporate defense."
Victor Klemperer, who was dismissed from his post as a professor of Romance languages at the University of Dresden in 1935 because of his Jewish ancestry, astutely noted how at first theNazis "changed the values, the frequency of words, [and] made them into common property, words that had previously been used by individuals or tiny troupes. They confiscated words for the party, saturated words and phrases and sentence forms with their poison. They made language serve their terrible system. They conquered words and made them into their strongest advertising tools [Werebemittle], at once the most public and most secret." And, Klemperer noted, as the redefinition of old concepts took place the public was oblivious.
This redefinition of words and concepts has, as Klemperer witnessed during the rise of fascism, allowed the courts to twist the law into an instrument of injustice, revoking our rights by judicial fiat. It has seen the courts permit unlimited dark money into political campaigns under Citizens United, defending our money-saturated elections as the right to petition the government and a form of free speech. The courts have revoked our right to privacy and legalized wholesale government surveillance in the name of national security. The courts grant corporations the rights of individuals, while rarely holding the individuals who run the corporations accountable for corporate crimes.
Very few of the legal rulings that benefit corporate power have popular support. The corporate disemboweling of the country, therefore, is increasingly given cover by Christian fascists, who energize their base around abortion, prayer in schools, guns and breaking down the separation of church and state. These issues are rarely addressed in cases before federal courts. But they distract the base from the slew of pro-corporate rulings that dominate most court dockets.
Corporations such as Tyson Foods, Purdue, Walmart, and Sam's Warehouse have poured millions into institutions that indoctrinate [incubators] these Christian fascists, including Liberty University and Patrick Henry Law School. They fund the Judicial Crisis Network and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which campaigned for Amy Coney Barrett's appointment to the Supreme Court. Barrett opposes abortion and belongs to People of Praise, a far-right Catholic cult that practices "speaking in tongues." She and the other far-right ideologues are hostile to LGBTQ rights. But this is not why she is so beloved by corporations, who are not interested in abortion, LGBTQ equality or gun rights.
Barrett and the Christian fascists embrace an ideology that believes that God will take care of the righteous. Those who are poor, those who are sick, those who go to prison, those who are unemployed, those who cannot succeed in society do so because they have failed to please God. In this worldview there is no need for unions, universal health care, a social safety net or prison reform. Barrett has ruled consistently in favor of corporations to cheat gig workers out of overtime, green-light fossil fuel extraction and pollution and strip consumers of protection from corporate fraud. The watchdog group Accountable.US found that as a circuit court judge,Barrett "faced at least 55 cases in which citizens took on corporate entities in front of her court and 76% of the time she sided with the corporations."
The Christian fascists, allied with organizations such as the Federalist Society, under the Trump administration gave lifetime appointments to nearly 200 judges, roughly 23 percent of all federal judgeships. That included 53 to the nation's appellate courts, the court immediately under the Supreme Court. The American Bar Association, the country's largest nonpartisan coalition of lawyers, has rated many of these appointments as unqualified. There are currently six Federalist Society Supreme Court justices, including Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh, who Nader calls "a corporation masquerading as a human being." Two Federalist Society Supreme Court justices, Clarence Thomas and the late Antonin Scalia, who was an original faculty advisor to the organization founded by conservative law students in 1982, were supported in the nomination process by Joe Biden.
The stacking of the courts with corporate puppets, however, began long before Trump. It was carried out by both Republican and Democratic administrations. Preska was appointed by Republican President G.W. Bush. However, the judge who preceded Preska in the Donziger case, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, a former lawyer for the tobacco industry who had undisclosed investments in funds with Chevron holdings, according to his public financial disclosure statement, was appointed by Democratic President Clinton.
The targeting of the courts was one of the key goals of Lewis Powell, a corporate lawyer later elevated to the Supreme Court by President Nixon. In Powell's 1971 memo to the Chamber of Commerce, a blueprint for the slow-motion corporate coup that has taken place,he called on business interests to pack the judiciary with corporate-friendly judges.
The courts in all tyrannies are dominated by mediocrities and buffoons. They make up for their intellectual and moral vacuity with a zealous subservience to power. They turn courtroom trials into opera buffa, at least until the victim is shackled and pushed out the door to a prison cell. They fulminate in caustic tirades at the condemned, whose sentence is never in doubt and whose guilt is never in question.
"It started when Texaco went into Ecuador in the Amazon in the 1960s and cut a sweetheart deal with the military government then ruling Ecuador," Donziger told me for a column I wrote about his case a year ago. "Over the next 25 years, Texaco was the exclusive operator of a very large area of the Amazon that had several oil fields within this area, 1500 square miles. They drilled hundreds of wells. They created thousands of open-air, unlined toxic waste pits where they dumped the heavy metals and toxins that came up from the ground when they drilled. They ran pipes from the pits into rivers and streams that local people relied on for their drinking water, their fishing, and their sustenance. They poisoned this pristine ecosystem, in which lived five indigenous peoples, as well as a lot of other nonindigenous rural communities. There was a mass industrial poisoning."
"The verdict came down, about $18 billion in favor of the affected communities, which is what it would take at a minimum to clean up the actual damage and compensate the people for some of their injuries," Donziger told me. "That eventually got reduced on appeal in Ecuador to $9.5 billion, but it was affirmed by three appellate courts, including the highest court of Ecuador. It was affirmed by the Canadian Supreme Court, where the Ecuadorians went to enforce their judgment in a unanimous opinion in 2015."
Chevron promptly sold its assets and left Ecuador. It refused to pay the fees to clean up its environmental damage. It invested an estimated $2 million to destroy Danziger. Chevron sued him, using a civil courts portion of the federal law famous for breaking the New York Mafia in the 1970s, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO Act. Chevron, which has more than $260 billion in assets, hired an estimated 2,000 lawyers from 60 law firms to carry out its campaign, according to court documents. But the oil giant, which did not want a jury to hear the case, dropped its demand for financial damages, which would have allowed Donziger to request a jury trial. This allowed Judge Kaplan to decide the RICO case against Donziger alone. He found credible a witness named Alberto Guerra, an Ecuadorian judge, relocated to the US by Chevron at a cost of some $2 million, who claimed the verdict in Ecuador was the product of a bribe. Kaplan used Guerra's testimony as primary evidence for the racketeering charge, although Guerra, a former judge, later admitted to an international tribunal that he had falsified his testimony.
John Keker of San Francisco, one of Donziger's lawyers on that case, said he was up against 160 lawyers for Chevron and during the trial he felt "like a goat tethered to a stake." He called the court proceedings under Kaplan "a Dickensian farce" and a "show trial."
In the end, Kaplan ruled that the judgment in the Ecuadorean court against Chevron was the result of fraud. He also ordered Donziger to turn over decades of all client communication to Chevron, in effect eradicating attorney-client privilege, a backbone of the Anglo-American legal system with roots dating to ancient Rome. Donziger appealed what was, according to legal experts following the case, an unprecedented and illegal order. While Donziger's appeal was pending, Kaplan charged him with misdemeanor criminal contempt for this principled stance — carrying a maximum sentence of six months — as well as his refusal to turn over his passport, his personal electronics and to refrain from seeking the collection of the original award against Chevron. When the U.S. attorney's office declined for five years to prosecute his criminal contempt charges against the environmental lawyer, Kaplan, using an exceedingly rare judicial maneuver, appointed the private law firm of Seward & Kissel, to act in the name of the government to prosecute Donziger. Neither the judge nor the law firm disclosed that Chevron has been a client of Seward & Kissel.
Kaplan also violated the established random case assignment protocol to personally assign Preska, who had served on an advisory board of the Federalist Society, a group to which Chevron has been a lavish donor, to hear the case. Kaplan had Preska demand Donziger post an $800,000 bond on the misdemeanor charge. Preska placed him under house arrest and confiscated his passport, which he has used to meet with attorneys around the world attempting to enforce the judgment against Chevron.Kaplan managed to have Donziger disbarred. He allowed Chevron to freeze Donziger's bank accounts, slapped Donziger with millions in fines without allowing him a jury, forced him to wear an ankle monitor 24 hours a day and effectively shut down his ability to earn a living. Kaplan allowed Chevron to impose a lien on Donziger's apartment in Manhattan where he lives with his wife and teenage son.
None of this would surprise those targeted by the tyrannies of the past. What would be surprising, perhaps, to many Americans is how advanced our own corporate tyranny has become. Donziger never stood a chance. Neither does Julian Assange. These judges are not, in the end, focused on Donziger or Assange, but on us. The show trials they preside over are meant to be transparently biased. They are designed to send a message. All who defy corporate power and the national security state will be lynched. There will be no reprieve because there is no justice.
https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/the-mastermind-behind-the-draconian-heartbeat-bill-banning-abortion-as-early-as-6-weeks/
Americans woke up last Wednesday morning to a new reality: Roe v. Wade, the 1973 landmark legislation granting a woman a right to an abortion, was violently under attack through the passage of a new “heartbeat bill” in Texas.
That law—which bans abortion as early as six weeks into pregnancy, makes no exception for rape or incest, and allows private citizens to sue anyone who performs or aids a woman in getting an abortion—is the first so-called heartbeat bill to have become law and actually be enforced. The Supreme Court did not swoop in and prevent the law’s enforcement as some had hoped: That evening, the top court allowed the law to stand in a 5-4 decision, with the five right-wing lawmakers firmly in camp against Roe simply claiming it was a procedural issue that abortion providers had not addressed, voting in effect for Texan women to lose the right to abortion provided under Roe.
For Janet Porter,the Texas law was a dream come true. The longtime religious-right activist took to Rumble, a posterboard of her book, “A Heartbeat Away,” propped up in the background as she announced the news. “That makes Texas the first state in the nation to actually enforce their heartbeat law of the 14 states who have passed them,” she told the camera.
“Grasp this for a moment,” she said, ecstatic, a smile spread across her face, her hands gesturing in excitement. “There is a place in the United States where nearly every child facing abortion is now legally protected. It is historic.”
“Today in Texas, if a heartbeat is detected, the baby is protected,” she said. “Soon, the nation will follow.”
Porter is often seen as the mastermind behind so-called heartbeat legislation, which bans women from having abortions after a “heartbeat” is detected—as early as six weeks in some cases and, for many women, before they’re aware that they are pregnant.Medical expertssaythe term “fetal heartbeat” is scientifically inaccurate, noting that at six weeks, the embryo—which is not yet a fetus—will have not yet developed a heart.But the term “fetal heartbeat” pulls at heartstrings, and its marketability, for a lack of better term, has Porter to thank.
While Porter has made restricting access abortion her main priority, the longtime religious-right activist’s extremism has been well documented on these pages. As Barack Obama ran for president in 2008, Porter took to her radio program to spread the racist birther conspiracy theory championed by Donald Trump. Once Obama was elected, the conspiracies didn’t stop: As Right Wing Watch reported, she falsely claimed “Obama would orchestrate food shortages to starve conservatives to death, use a swine flu outbreak as an excuse to lock them up in concentration camps, and use Obamacare to deny them healthcare and eliminate them.” On the pages of World Net Daily, a far-right conspiracy website, she frequently penned columns—her last, published Dec. 11, 2020, refused to accept Trump’s loss in the 2020 election.
When she wasn’t spreading noxious conspiracy theories, the activist was attempting to beat back the advance of gay rights, claiming Christians would be labeled criminals, rounded up, and tossed in jailif gay people had rights.She also trumpeted “conversion therapy,” a range of dangerous and discredited practices meant to change one’s sexual orientation, and was labeled the “The Architect of the ‘Conversion Therapy’ Campagin” by the New York Times. The activist, purportedly so concerned about the lives of children, even served as a spokeswoman for Roy Moore, the former Alabama chief justice who unsuccessfully ran for Senate, defending him after he was accused of child molestation and attacking the woman who accused him.
At the heart of Porter’s activism is an effort to spread a fundamentalist version of Christianity. In 2010, her views became so extreme that VCY, the Christian radio station broadcasting her show,**canceled**it, citing “the drift of the program toward ‘dominion’ theology”—that is, the idea that Christians are called to take complete control over every aspect of human life in order to bring about the return of Christ. Among those aspects of human life: abortion and women’s bodies.
And so in 2011, Porter, working as the head of anti-choice group Faith2Action, found anOhio state legislator, Rep. Lynn Wachtmann, R-Napoleon, to champion legislation she had drafted to restrict access to abortion. The Ohio bill was the first “heartbeat bill” of its kind and so extreme—limiting abortion at the detection of a “heartbeat,” making no exceptions for incest or rape—that other anti-choice groups and legislators balked at it. Questioning the constitutionality of such a measure, they wondered whether the legislation would do more harm than good for their cause. Supporters of the bill said incremental steps weren’t working and were eager to directly challenge Roe. Porter herself was explicit about her goal, stating in 2017, that her “heartbeat bill” was “the foot in the door” to totally outlawing abortion.
“It was not my original idea, but I’ve been a pro-life leader here in Columbus for 26 years, and I’m committed to pushing the courts as far as we can go to protect human life, and that’s clearly what this bill is all about,” Wachtmann stated in February 2011 shortly before he introduced the bill.
At that point, Faith2Action already had a full-throttle pressure campaign underway to get the legislation passed. Under Porter’s leadership, the group urged its supporters to send heart-shaped red balloons to the Ohio governor and state representatives ahead of Valentine’s Day, “encouraging their support of the Heartbeat Bill” and to “Have a Heart!”—a message Porter repeated in a column for the far-right WND site. The bill passed in the state House later that year.
When the legislation stalled in the state Senate in 2012, Faith2Action took out a full-page ad in the Columbus Dispatch and made thousands of robocalls asking its supportersto contact state senators. That ad featured Dr. John Willke, founder of the National Right to Life and another sponsor of the bill. Revered in anti-abortion rights circles, Willke had perpetuated the**false myth**that a woman’s body can resist conception in rape, which may be among the reasons why the bill did not provide exceptions for abortion in case of rape. Another is that Porter doesn’t think women should be allowed to have any abortion, stating in 2017, “We’re not for killing any child, especially an innocent child for the crime of his father.”
The bill had wide support among religious-right figures both in state and out of state. An archived version of Faith2Action’s site for the bill lists E.W. Jackson, Samuel Rodriguez, Mat Staver, James Robison, Rick Joyner, Wendy Wright, Ken Blackwell, Jay Sekulow, Tony Perkins, James Dobson, and Frank Pavone as supporters. It also featured a list of current and former elected officials: former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, Rep. Jim Jordan (then an Ohio state legislator), Rep. Louie Gohmert, former Sen. Rick Santorum, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, former Rep. Michele Bachmann, then Rep. Steve King, and former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore.
When the bill did reach then Gov. John Kasich, he vetoed it twice, preferring to signanother strict abortion banat 12 weeks and citing constitutionality issues with the “heartbeat” legislation.But the bill found a champion in his Republican successor, Gov. Mike DeWine, who signed Ohio’s “heartbeat bill” into law in 2019 before Planned Parenthood and abortion clinics represented by the American Civil Liberties Union sued. A federal judge issued a temporary stay on theabortion ban and extended it again this spring.
A slew of red states followed suit, passing their own “heartbeat” abortion bans. The legislation mostly faced the same fate as the Ohio law—that is, except for Texas.
The Texas law provides a loophole those others did not: Instead of the state attorney general or other state officials enforcing the law, the law explicitly prevents state governments from enforcing it and essentially deputizes every citizen to sue anyone who performs an abortion or aids a woman in getting one. That leaves abortion clinics at a loss of who to sue. The purpose by the law’s drafters: to prevent intervention from federal courts.
So when the Supreme Court had a chance to stay the legislation, the conservative majority essentially said that the nation’s top court had its hands tied, that abortion providers in the state had not addressed the “complex and novel” procedural questions and would have to do so before the Supreme Court would take it up.
The Texas law also provides a bounty to incentivize enforcement: Any person who successfully sues would get $10,000 and their legal fees covered. Defendants who are successful are not entitled to have their legal fees covered, and anyone who aided a woman in getting an abortion could be sued multiple times. The effect is that most if not all clinics in the state have stopped providing abortions after six weeks for fear of bankruptcy.
The Texas law was sponsored by Texas state Sen. Bryan Hughes, who asked conservative litigator Jonathan F. Mitchell how anti-abortion legislation could avoid the fate of other “heartbeat bills” that languished without enforcement after federal judges issued injunctions. Mitchell, a former Texas solicitor general and active member of the Federalist Society, was already steeped in the religious-right effort to overturn Roe, **representing**towns sued by the ACLU over their ordinances that made abortion a crime. In 2017, while working alongside with Alliance Defending Freedom on a case about religious freedom, he trotted out a theory that he’d go on to use in Texas, claiming that no matter how unconstitutional a law was, if it did not charge a state official with the duty of enforcement, it couldn’t produce a federal lawsuit. Mitchell would become the primary architect of the Texas abortion law’s private-enforcement provision.
“We knew we had to have another way,” said Hughes, according to the Wall Street Journal. “We were going to find a way to pass a heartbeat bill that was going to be upheld.”
It’s unclear how much Porter, who was a supporterof the Texas law, had to do with this particular loophole, but the drafters of that particular bill have Porter’s popularization of the “heartbeat bill” to thank and the religious right’s decades-long campaign to overturn Roe of which she was a part.
National religious-right organizations, like ADF, have championed a state-by-state approach to chip away at the landmark legislation. This spring, the Supreme Court announced it will hear a case about a Mississippi law banning abortions at 15 weeks, a law that was based on ADF’s model legislation and a major threat to a woman’s right to an abortion. But so far, no effort has dealt as big of a blow to Roe as has Porter’s “heartbeat” legislation. Already, other states are consideringa law based on Texas’ version of the “heartbeat bill.”
As she celebrated last Wednesday, Porter, too, looked forward.
“The National Association of Christian Lawmakers just adopted the Texas version of the heartbeat law as their model legislation,” she said, a smile dancing across her face between sentences. “That means we’re about to see a lot more heartbeat bills become law and actually get enforced.”
Tags: Bryan HughesJanet PorterJonathan MitchellAbortionHeartbeat BillReproductive RightsAlliance Defending FreedomFaith 2 ActionWorld Net Daily
https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/dark-money/
salon
More than a decade ago, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its historic ruling in _{Citizens United v. FEC}_, opening the door for corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money on political causes (although not directly to political candidates). As corrosive as that decision was to democracy, it came with a slight proviso. As Justice Anthony Kennedy _{wrote}_: while "the Government may not suppress [corporate] speech altogether," it may "regulate corporate political speech through disclaimer and disclosure requirements." Citizens United found, in other words, that corporations could spend without limit, but government had a right to force public disclosure that spending to the public.
Since then, it's become abundantly clear that money in politics takes numerous forms, far beyond the obvious subterfuge of a corporation donating to a political action committee that then funds a political candidate. In the nonprofit world, big-money donors pump hundreds of millions into politically-motivated 501(c) organizations, which are not required to disclose their donors. Those groups then funnel this money into _{patently political ventures}_, even though they are technically forbidden from engaging in significant lobbying. That two-step process describes the phenomenon known as "dark money," which allows wealthy individuals and corporations to exert enormous influence on the political system behind a veil of anonymity.
Last year alone, more than _{$1 billion in dark money}_ was spent in the 2020 election, a record high. Contrary to some people's assumptions, "both sides" actually do it — dark money flows to and from Democrats as well as Republicans. In truth, anonymous money has been part of America's political bloodstream for _{decades now}_, but not until relatively recently has the debate around it rose to a national level. Last month, in the firs major case of its kind since Citizens United, the issue of nonprofit donor disclosure returned to the highest court in the land.
In this case, _{**Americans for Prosperity Foundation** v. Bonta}_ (consolidated with another, functionally identical case, _{**Thomas More Law Center**v. Bonta}_) the Supreme Court will decide whether political nonprofits can be compelled to disclose who their largest donors are. This case in question specifically concerns donor disclosure rules in California, but its implications are unmistakably nationwide. And while the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity and the Christian-oriented Thomas More Center are distinctly right-wing in ideological terms, they have some surprising allies before the high court.
As things work now, the IRS annually collects from every nonprofit a form called Schedule B, which lists the personal information of each nonprofit's largest donors. The stated legal purpose is to regulate or prevent various financial crimes like fraud and money laundering. California is unique in requiring nonprofits to submit their Schedule B forms to the state attorney general's office — if they want to keep on raising tax-deductible donations.
To be clear, California collects the information, but does not release it to the public. But this seemingly innocuous bureaucratic regulation has sent shockwaves throughout the conservative nonprofit world — not to mention a number of liberal-leaning or civil-libertarian nonprofits as well, _{including}_ the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the ACLU and the Human Rights Campaign.
Broadly speaking, the strange coalition of plaintiffs in the Americans for Prosperity argue that the state's interest in collecting Schedule B's — which, once again, would not be made publicly accessible — does not outweigh the burden that the law would impose upon them. They further argue that this burden may be acute for nonprofits that advocate for or against controversial causes, like abortion. Furthermore, the plaintiffs have argued that if their donors are unmasked — by means of a hack or leak, for instance — these donors could be at risk of severe reprisal, causing a chilling effect on future donations.
John Bursch, vice president of appellate advocacy at Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative-libertarian group, told Salon in an interview he sees this as "a free association problem."
"Whether it's a conservative organization or a liberal or progressive organization," Bursch said, "they all recognize that publicly exposing donors to groups that engage in public advocacy risks chilling — causing people to not donate, or to donate below thresholds where they won't appear on a Schedule B."
Bursch currently represents the Thomas More Law Center,a Christian conservative legal nonprofit that briefly embraced Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the presidential election and is now battling on behalf of donor privacy. He alleges that there have been several cases when donors have felt threatened because of their connections to Americans for Prosperity Foundation or Thomas More. _{Court documents}_ detail purported instances of doxing, death threats and even assassination attempts. It's worth noting that the plaintiffs also fear "economic reprisal," such as boycotts or criticism of their businesses, activities that are clearly _{legal and constitutionally protected}_ expressions of free speech.
To make their case, the plaintiffs draw upon an unlikely parallel: the Supreme Court's seminal 1958 ruling in _{NAACP v. Alabama}_, where the justices found that Alabama officials could not force the NAACP to turn over its membership list due to the possibility of violent public retaliation against its members.
At the time of that decision, Justice John Marshall Harlan _{wrote}_ that the NAACP had made "an uncontroverted showing" that the "revelation of the identity of its rank-and-file members has exposed these members to economic reprisal, loss of employment, threat of physical coercion, and other manifestations of public hostility." Alabama's effort to expose NAACP members was largely understood by racial justice advocates as a clear attempt to dismantle the civil-rights group through the use of racial terror.
Bursch acknowledged that the historical circumstances around NAACP do not resemble those of the current case, but insisted, "To think that [Thomas More] donors might not face life or death is not really accurate."
Unsurprisingly, many critics of the corrosive force of money in politics reject any comparison between the cases. In a statement to Salon, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., drily observed "an enormous gap between the Supreme Court case cited by petitioners — a civil rights-era decision where NAACP members had reason to fear state-sanctioned bombings, assassinations and other violence — and theproblem of billionaires secretly running dark-money-funded political covert ops in our country."
Daniel Weiner, deputy director of the Brennan Center's Election Reform Program, echoed that analysis in an interview with Salon: "I always pause at any contemporary actor analogizing themselves to the NAACP in the South in 1958. And that includes folks on the right and left. AFP, whether or not it is right on the merits, represents some of the most powerful interests in the country. This is not comparable to the NAACP in the South prior to the civil rights movement."
There's another important difference between the two cases: While the plaintiffs in the Americans for Prosperity case are alleging a largely hypothetical risk of reprisal, they are demanding a result that in goes further than in the NAACP decision. As Vox's Ian Millhiser _{explained}_, "the plaintiffs insist that they are entitled to facial relief — meaning that the state's disclosure rule must be tossed out for all nonprofits, regardless of whether donors to those nonprofits face harassment, or even if they want to keep their donations secret."
Weiner said that a universal ban on mandatory donor disclosures is not warranted, arguing that the plaintiffs' case goes no further than claiming "that the law should not be applied to them. It's hard to see how all this adds up to 'the law is facially invalid,' which is a really sweeping position to take in light of a couple incidents."
Bursch responded that Americans for Prosperity "is precisely the type of case where a facial ruling would be appropriate," saying, "It's almost nonsensical to suggest that thousands of charities should have to individually sue California to keep their donor information confidential."
Even though California has no plans to release "dark money" donors' names, Bursch argues there is still likely to be a chilling effect, claiming that the state does not maintain a secure record-keeping system and leaves an "_{open door}_" for hackers. It's true that in 2012, a Schedule B for Planned Parenthood was leaked in California, potentially revealing hundreds of donors' names and addresses. But such occurrences have been rare.
As mentioned above, nonprofit donor disclosure is a particularly hot topic when it comes to dark money, which typically moves through 501(c)(4) nonprofits, or "social welfare organizations," which collect money from anonymous donors and then spend it on campaigns or candidates on said donors' behalf.
Americans for Prosperity Foundation, however, is a (501)(c)(3), meaning that in order to preserve its tax-exempt status, it's supposed to designate its funds for "charitable, religious, educational, scientific, literary, testing for public safety, fostering national or international amateur sports competition, and preventing cruelty to children or animals," according to _{IRS rules}_. However, Americans for Prosperity, the group's sister organization, is a 501(c)(4), meaning that it can more significantly engage in political advocacy and lobbying — largely in favor of reduced taxes, deregulation and other business-friendly policies — and has done so _{vigorously}_.
Bursch claimed earnestly that dark money has "nothing" to do with the current Supreme Court case, reminding this reporter that 501(c)(3) charities like AFPF are barred by federal law "from participating in any political advocacy, which is where the dark money issue arises." Explaining the relationship between Americans for Prosperity and its affiliated foundation, he said, "My understanding is that the 501(c)(3) can't fund the 501(c)(4). So, although they share a name and perhaps some common goals, the work they engage in is completely different. You can't cross those lines."
AFP did not respond to Salon's request to comment on its relationship with AFPF, which has been known to cross some lines.In 2010, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee_{accused}_ AFPF of financing blatantly political commercials that criticized the Obama administration, alleging that the ads "made the Americans for Prosperity Foundation a de facto political action group in violation of the federal tax code," according to the New York Times.
Bursch said that he believed or understood that AFP and AFPF had a "different office, different directors, different employees and different purposes." In fact, a comparison of _{AFP}_ and _{AFPF's}_ 2018 tax filings shows that a significant number of officers, directors, trustees and key employees work at both entities, including Nancy Pfotenhauer, Mark Holden, Robert Heaton, Emily Seidel, Slade O'Brien and various others.
Supplemental information on AFPF's filings also states that "certain employees of Americans for Prosperity Foundation may perform services for Americans for Prosperity, a related organization, through a service contract between the organizations." (This relationship also goes the other way.) AFPF is additionally listed as AFP's "direct controlling entity," a designation whose legal meaning is not entirely clear but certainly suggests an intimate relationship.
Not all contributors to political nonprofits count as "dark money donors," to be sure. Some are ordinary citizens, no doubt, genuinely interested in contributing to what they believe are nonpartisan endeavors. But it's precisely the lack of donor disclosure that makes the whole process opaque.
Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., a staunch critic of money in politics, affirmed the need for more effective disclosure in light of the AFP and AFPF's purposefully mysterious relationship. "Because we're dealing with dark money, we don't really know the relationship between AFPF and AFP," he said. "When a 501(c)(3) gives money to a 501(c)(4) to engage in electioneering activities, that's what dark money is all about." (Salon could not find clear evidence that money has flowed from AFPF to AFP, let alone how it might have been used.)
"The Federalist Society and the Federalist Society Foundation both share the same goals and aspirations," Johnson expressed. "People are trying to exert influence. That's the reason why they contribute to these organizations that have a political agenda."
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craig trainer, racist
Rudy Giuliani is a tragic figure. His painful appearances on Fox News and CNN in 2019 coupled with the office he once led—the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s Office—investigating him for possible campaign finance violations for his activities in Ukraine make this clear. Giuliani’s final act, however resolved, should not undo his well-deserved reputation as the greatest mayor in New York City history—an honor earned primarily by tackling the twin pathologies of crime and disorder.
The Reign of de Blasio and the Return of Crime
As mayor, Giuliani transformed New York City from a permissive and disordered society in which criminals, vagrants, bureaucrats, racial charlatans, and public-sector unions ran roughshod over taxpayers to a socially healthy and financially solvent metropolis worthy of its “Capital of the World” moniker. His successor, Michael Bloomberg, continued his crime-fighting policies for twelve years, but they are willfully being dismantled by Gracie Mansion’s current occupant and failed Democratic presidential candidate, Bill de Blasio.
Under de Blasio’s watch, aggressive vagrancy has returned, and violent crime increased in 2019 from the year prior. Murder, for instance, increased by 7.8 percent, and a surge in anti-Semitic assaults and vandalism rose by 26 percent in the ending weeks of 2019. This is not an outlier. This is the doing of a progressive mayor who governs in conformity with the criminal justice philosophy of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rather than Attorney General William Barr.
To remind urban dwellers that the present crisis of public disorder in major cities results from an intentional choice rather than a natural state, it is necessary to examine Giuliani’s revolutionary eight years as New York’s crime-fighter-in-chief and the quality-of-life policing and computer-based accountability initiatives he implemented.
The Tragedy of the Dinkins Years and the Triumph of Fear
New Yorkers elected Giuliani on the heels of trauma: the failed four-year mayoralty of Democrat David Dinkins, an eminently decent and genteel former Marine reared in the ways of the Harlem political clubhouse whom Giuliani unsuccessfully ran against in 1989. In his 1990 inaugural address, Dinkins spoke in flowerily rhetoric about “New York as a gorgeous mosaic of race and religious faith, of national origin and sexual orientation.” New Yorkers, of course, welcomed and appreciated the historical significance of electing the city’s first black mayor but were understandably more interested in not being stabbed in a locked subway car or robbed during an evening walk in Central Park. For reasons lost to history, the idea was Dinkins, rather than Giuliani, was better equipped to address the crisis in public safety.
In his first year in office, Dinkins presided over the bloodiest year in recorded New York City history, in which 2,245 murders were committed—roughly six homicides a day. Throughout his four-year term, cab drivers were robbed and killed for sport. Stray bullets killed children by the dozens. Thugs murdered people for sneakers. A man was killed for being gay, another for wearing a leather jacket. Failing to return a high-five got one teenager summarily executed. Violent race riots consumed central Brooklyn. A woman was crushed to death by marauders in a van who wanted her purse. One known mentally ill vagabond grabbed a baby from its mother and stabbed the toddler repeatedly in the face with a pen.
In essence, the underclass was waging a rebellion against social order. To those who lived it, the madness of the time cannot be overstated. Dinkins, however, was so indecisive in his response to the mayhem that the New York Post—speaking for just about every concerned New Yorker—pleaded with the mayor publicly on its front page: “Dave, Do Something!” A 1990 report by the Citizens Crime Commission stated what New Yorkers felt: “Crime is tearing at the vitals of New York City . . . [while] destroying the morale of our citizens, making them fearful for their safety, pessimistic about their future and, in some cases, persuading them to leave this, the greatest city in the world.”
The Rise of Giuliani and the Public Demand for Order
By 1993, the proverbial tipping point was reached. In the Dinkins-Giuliani rematch of that year, New Yorkers, including many liberal Democrats in good standing, recognized that the only hope for theirs and their children’s future was the Republican former lawman of the Reagan Justice Department who campaigned in 1989 on a simple platform: “Nobody owns him. Rudy – he’ll clean up New York.”
And clean up he did. Giuliani was heroic on September 11, 2001, but it was his eight years in City Hall that saved Gotham. To ensure New Yorkers understood the stakes, Giuliani announced in his 1994 inaugural address: “The era of fear has had a long enough reign. The period of doubt has run its course. . . . I will place a much greater emphasis on stricter enforcement of the law to reverse the growing trend of ever increasing tolerance for lawless behavior.” This was in stark contrast to Dinkins’s 1990 declaration that his administration would “renew the quest for social justice.”
Commissioner Bratton, the Broken-Windows-Compstat Revolution, and the Battle of New York
When Giuliani began his singularly focused assault on crime, his best wartime decision was the appointment of William J. Bratton as police commissioner. Like the mayor, Bratton understood that the crime rebellion required more than the metaphor of war; it required the prosecution of one: “I did not come here to lose. We will fight for every house in the city. We will fight for every street. We will fight for every borough. And we will win,” Bratton told crime-weary New Yorkers.
With Giuliani’s blessing and obsessive oversight, Bratton implemented the two greatest advances in crime fighting since the cataloging of fingerprints and the collection of DNA: broken-windows policing and CompStat.
Broken-windows criminological theory—much less a theory than an astute observation of human nature—holds “that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken,” according to George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson in their ground-breaking 1982 Atlantic article “Broken Windows.” This is because “one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing.”
In less metaphoric parlance, “the citizen who fears the ill-smelling drunk, the rowdy teenager or the importuning beggar is not merely expressing his distaste for unseemly behavior; he is also giving voice to a bit of folk wisdom that happens to be a correct generalization—namely, that serious street crime flourishes in area in which disorderly behavior goes unchecked. The unchecked panhandler is, in effect, the first broken window.” When public spaces are occupied by drunks, rowdy teenagers, and beggars—or, in contemporary terms, vagrants, drug addicts, and the untreated mentally ill—law-abiding citizens experience fear or disgust and retreat from these areas. This exodus invites more serious crime because of the corresponding weakening of informal social controls.
Prior to his appointment as Giuliani’s police commissioner, Bratton served as Dinkins’s chief of the New York City Transit Police (which merged with the NYPD in 1995), where he put theory into practice in the subways. He “quickly learned that the serious criminals committed petty crimes, too. When they weren’t committing robberies or assaults, they were hoping turnstiles, unlawfully moving between cars, and generally diminishing the quality of life that should be enjoyed by other, fare-paying riders.”
It was not until Giuliani’s election, however, that Bratton received his writ to “fight for every street.” A believer in the notice function of due process, Bratton gave squeegee derelicts, belligerent beggars, and fare beaters an opportunity to find religion before he and Giuliani forcibly restored order: “Get off drugs, get off the booze, get off your ass and get a job.” (Such plain talk would be a welcome antidote to today’s unhealthy indulgence for disorder.)
As historian Fred Siegel explained in his masterful work on Giuliani’s mayoralty, Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York, and the Genius of American Life, Bratton informed the NYPD that the failed days of community policing, reactive law enforcement, and non-intervention were over. He offered “the rank and file a new deal. If they wanted to be crime fighters, he’d back them up to the hilt—as long as they were clean.” He expected results in return. Boldly, for a public administrator, Bratton demanded a reduction in crime of 10 percent for 1994. With the quality-of-life offensive unleashed, New York City’s crime rate fell “below the average of the state’s next five largest cities . . . until New York City had nearly 60% less crime than its in-state peers.”
Broken-windows policing was one side of the coin, CompStat the other. Compstat (computer comparison statistics) is a program Bratton and his deputy, Jack Maple, implemented to systematically collect crime data, from the date, time, and place of a crime’s commission to the identity of the victim. This allowed NYPD brass to discern patterns, locate troubled areas, share information within the bureaucracy, and flood problem areas with more police personnel or targeted crime-fighting strategies. Consequently, it increased accountability among precinct commanders who were responsible for knowing the details of crime patterns in their area and devising plans to combat them.
As a result of these measures, crime dropped by 12 percent in 1994 (two percent more than Bratton’s stated goal) and 16 percent in 1995 and 1996. Although Giuliani eventually pushed Bratton out over personality differences, he continued his policies.
While violent crime peaked during Dinkins’s first year in office, it fell by 56 percent after Giuliani’s eight years as mayor. In human terms, people are alive today who would not be but for the Giuliani administration. In a 2007 retrospective on the mayor’s experience with race and politics, the New York Times summed up these extraordinary results: “Black New Yorkers appreciated safer neighborhoods and applauded that thousands more of their young men remained alive.”
The quality-of-life gains were no less impressive. Squeegee men disappeared, fare beaters spent a night in jail contemplating the cost-benefit analysis of their actions, graffiti was cleaned and discouraged, subways were safe, vagrancy was at manageable levels, and Times Square went from the crossroads of the smut world to one of the safest hubs of family-friendly entertainment in New York.
Giuliani, Moral Courage, and the Lessons of History
Giuliani’s success did not happen by invisible external forces, legislation in Washington, or national economic trends. It happened by will and the moral courage to do what needed to be done to restore and maintain order. San Francisco, LA, Seattle, Portland, and, under de Blasio’s government, New York will find this is the most important lesson of Giuliani’s eight years as mayor. Citizens do not have to sidestep human feces and syringes, withstand the occasional unprovoked assault, or tolerate a rash of anti-Semitic attacks as the price of living in large urban centers when a morally confident mayor and an energetic police force have the means of arresting, prosecuting, and incapacitating this deviant behavior.
The Giuliani years are the story of a visionary leader who showed a city held hostage by fear that it did not have to live that way. Two complementary ideals operated in Giuliani’s mayoralty: the virtue of courage—moral and, in some cases, physical—and the courage of principle. To rescue New York, he needed to harness his stubborn rectitude to rein in the dangerous classes. Only Giuliani could have waged such a successful legal and political assault on the public scourge of crime and disorder while battling the considerable forces of reactionary New York liberalism.
While the 75-year old Giuliani’s conduct in Ukraine may result in his indictment, his recent behavior in no way detracts from his eight years of leadership and strength that brought the greatest city in the world back from moral and social collapse. That is the legacy of Rudy Giuliani, and it will serve us well today as progressive mayors in America’s largest cities retreat to the discredited soft-on-crime policies that propelled him to City Hall in the first place.
CONTRIBUTOR
Rudy Giuliani
https://fedsoc.org/contributors/rudy-giulian
FedSoc Blog
FEDSOC BLOG • JANUARY 28, 2020
Why Rudy Giuliani Matters . . . and It Has Nothing to Do with Ukraine
Rudy Giuliani is a tragic figure. His painful appearances on Fox News and CNN in 2019 coupled with the office he once led—the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s Office—investigating him for possible campaign finance violations for his activities in Ukraine make this clear. Giuliani’s final act, however resolved, should not undo his well-deserved...
https://fedsoc.org/commentary/fedsoc-blog/why-rudy-giuliani-matters-and-it-has-nothing-to-do-with-ukraine
Podcasts
PODCASTS • NOVEMBER 19, 2007
Rudy Giuliani Address at the 2007 National Lawyers Convention
2007 National Lawyers Convention
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani delivered this address at the 2007 Annual National Lawyers Convention on Friday, November 16. 2:30 p.m. - 3:00 p.m. Grand Ballroom Address Hon. Rudy Giuliani, Former Mayor, New York City Introduction: Hon. Theodore B. Olson, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher
https://fedsoc.org/commentary/podcasts/rudy-giuliani-address-at-the-2007-national-lawyers-convention-1
Videos
VIDEOS • NOVEMBER 19, 2007
Rudy Giuliani Address at the 2007 National Lawyers Convention
2007 National Lawyers Convention
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani delivered this address at the 2007 Annual National Lawyers Convention on Friday, November 16. 2:30 p.m. - 3:00 p.m. Grand Ballroom Address Hon. Rudy Giuliani, Former Mayor, New York City Introduction: Hon. Theodore B. Olson, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher
https://fedsoc.org/commentary/videos/rudy-giuliani-address-at-the-2007-national-lawyers-convention
Blog Post
EVENT • NOVEMBER 16, 2007
Rudy Giuliani Address at the 2007 National Lawyers Convention
2007 National Lawyers Convention
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani delivered this address at the 2007 Annual National Lawyers Convention on Friday, November 16. 2:30 p.m. - 3:00 p.m. Grand Ballroom Address Hon. Rudy Giuliani, Former Mayor, New York City Introduction: Hon. Theodore B. Olson, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher
https://fedsoc.org/events/rudy-giuliani-address-at-the-2007-national-lawyers-convention
Blog Post
EVENT • JULY 07, 2010
What’s Right (and Wrong) with the Confirmation Process . . . And Elena Kagan
New York City Lawyers ChapterSpeakers:M. Edward Whelan, III, President, Ethics and Public Policy CenterBarry Friedman, Vice Dean and Jacob D. Fuchsberg Professor of Law, New York University School of Law and Author, The Will of the People: How Public Opinion has Influenced the Supreme Court and Shaped the Meaning of...
https://fedsoc.org/events/what-s-right-and-wrong-with-the-confirmation-process-and-elena-kagan
Publications
PUBLICATIONS • MARCH 04, 2006
Contempt of Court & Broken Windows: Why Ignoring Contempt of Court Severely Undermines Justice, the Rule of Law, and Republican Self-Government
Former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani dramatically reduced serious crime in the city of New York by rigorously enforcing what were until then widely considered insignificant criminal laws and ordinances. Under Mayor Giuliani, New York began to enforce long neglected laws against vandalism, graffiti, loitering, underage drinking, public use of intoxicants, public...
https://fedsoc.org/commentary/publications/contempt-of-court-broken-windows-why-ignoring-contempt-of-court-severely-undermines-justice-the-rule-of-law-and-republican-self-government
alexh 1220
note strike team also fedsoc; site has nothing on election https://fedsoc.org/ but 2nd amend protects weapons of war
Although President-elect Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 presidential election has been certified in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona and other battleground states, President Donald Trump's legal team is continuing to fight the election results in court. But attorney and election law expert Richard L. Hasen, this week in an article for Slate, salutes the Republican officials who have been standing up to Trump's campaign and acknowledging Biden as president-elect.
The GOP officials Hasen mentions in his article range from Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, who certified Biden's victory in that state, to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. When push came to shove, Hasen argues, these Republicans did the right thing.
"Along with a number of Federalist Society-aligned judges, other GOP governors and lower-ranking Republican election officials, Ducey and others have earned this praise in the wake of Trump's ongoing — and ultimately futile — effort to overturn the 2020 election," Hasen explains. "We can thank principled people on the right for helping to assure that we will have a peaceful transition of power between Trump and Biden."
Ducey and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, Hasen notes, "rejected Trump's calls to declare their states' elections fraudulent despite Trump's personal entreaties and attacks." And Hasen points out that "on Tuesday, even Trump's attorney general Bill Barr — who had scandalously backed Trump's claims of a potential for voter fraud in the past — told the AP that the Department of Justice has uncovered no kinds of fraud or irregularities that could change the outcome of the election."
Another Republican Hasen mentions is Christopher Krebs, who Trump fired from his position as a cybersecurity specialist in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
"When it comes to upholding the fundamental rule of law, many on the right deserve praise in this moment," Hasen writes. "And that might seem like a very low bar, but it is important to consider the alternative. In just the past few days, one of the president's lawyers, Joe diGenova, said that former federal cybersecurity head Chris Krebs, a Republican who has vouched for the integrity of American elections, should be shot…. (Georgia attorney) Lin Wood, also involved in (Trump's) litigation, said that the president should declare martial law and hold a new election."
In light of how unhinged some of Trump's diehard loyalists are, Hasen says, it is important to acknowledge those on the right who still respect democracy.
"We are not out of the woods yet, and it is going to take continued vigilance by all people of the left and right to assure continued support for the rule of law," Hasen emphasizes. "Some of what we are hearing from the president's most ardent supports is very ugly, antidemocratic and anti-American. In this fight, we should be appreciative of Federalist Society voices and others standing up for what is right."
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https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2020/10/13/senator-whitehouse-calls-out-dark-money-networks-behind-amy-coney-barretts-scotus-nomination
no lnx grafs
Senator Whitehouse Calls Out Dark-Money Networks Behind Amy Coney Barrett’s SCOTUS Nomination
By ExposedByCMD Editors | October 13th, 2020
Bradley Files, Democracy, Featured Investigations, Koch, News, RAGA, Trump7 Comments
Editor’s Note: The following is a transcript of remarks made by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) in the October 13, 2020, Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Thank you, Chairman, Judge Barrett. You can take a bit of a breather on your return to the committee, because what I want to do is go through with the people who are watching this now the conversation that you and I had when we spoke on the telephone. You were kind enough to hear out a presentation that I made, and I intend to ask some questions in that area, but it doesn’t make sense to ask questions if I haven’t laid the predicate, particularly for viewers who are watching this.
So, I guess the reason that I want to do this is because people who are watching this need to understand that this small hearing room and the little TV box that you are looking at, the little screen that you are looking at, are a little bit like the frame of a puppet theater, and if you only look at what’s going on in the puppet theater you’re not going to understand the whole story. You are not going to understand the real dynamic what is going on here, and you are certainly not going to understand forces outside of this room who are pulling strings and pushing sticks and causing the puppet theater to react.
So first, let me say, why do I think outside forces are here pulling strings?Well, part of it is behavior. We have colleagues here who supported you, this nominee, before there was a nominee. That’s a little unusual.
We have the political ram job that we have already complained of driving this process through at breakneck speed in the middle of a pandemic while the Senate is closed for safety reasons and while we are doing nothing about the COVID epidemic around us. We have some very awkward 180s from colleagues. Mr. Chairman, you figure in this. Our leader said back when it was Garland versus Gorsuch, that of course, of course, the American people should have a say in the Court’s direction. Of course, of course, said Mitch McConnell. That’s long gone.
Senator Grassley said the American people shouldn’t be denied a voice. That’s long gone. Senator Cruz said you don’t do this in an election year. That’s long gone. And our chairman made his famous hold-the-tape promise if an opening comes in the last year of President Trump’s term we’ll wait until the next election. That’s gone too.
So there is a lot of hard-to-explain hypocrisy and rush taking place right now, and my experience around politics is that when you find hypocrisy in the daylight, look for power in the shadows. Now people say well, what does all this matter? This is a political parlor game; it’s no big deal. Well, there are some pretty high stakes here that we have been talking about here on our side, and I will tell you three of them right here.
Roe v. Wade, Obergefell, and the Obamacare cases. Here’s the GOP platform, the Republican platform, the platform of my colleagues on the other side of this aisle say that a Republican president willappoint judges who will reverse Roe, Obergefell, and the Obamacare cases. So if you have a family member with an interest in some autonomy over their body under Roe v. Wade, the ability to have a marriage, have friends marry, have a niece or a daughter or a son marry someone of their same-sex they have – you’ve got a stake, and if you are one of the millions and millions of Americans who depend on the affordable care act you’ve got a stake.
It’s not just the platform. Over and over again, let’s start by talking about the Affordable Care Act. Here is the president talking about this litigation that we are gearing up this nominee for for November 10. In this litigation, he said we want to terminate healthcare under Obamacare.
That is the president’s statement, so when we react to that, don’t act as if we are making this stuff up. This is what President Trump said. This is what your party platform says: reverse the Obamacare cases. Senator after senator, including many in this committee, filed briefs saying that the Affordable Care Act should be thrown out by courts. Why is it surprising for us to be concerned that you want this nominee to do what you want nominees to do?
One quick stop on NFIB v. Sebelius, because a lot of this has to do with money. This is an interesting comparison. National Federation of Independent Businesses, until it filed the NFIB v. Sebelius case, had its biggest donation ever of $21,000. In the year that it went to work on the Affordable Care Act, ten wealthy donors gave $10 million. Somebody deserves a thank you.
So let’s go on to Roe v. Wade. Same thing. Same thing. The president has said that reversing Roe v. Wade will happen automatically because he is putting pro-life justices on the Court. Why would we not take him at his word? The Republican Party platform says it will reverse Roe. Why would we not comment on that and take you at your word?
Senators here, including Senator Hawley, have said I will vote only for nominees who acknowledge that Roe v. Wade is wrongly decided, and their pledge to vote for this nominee. Do the math. That’s a really simple equation to run.
The Republican brief in June Medical said Roe should be overruled, so don’t act surprised when we ask questions about whether that’s what you are up to here. And finally, out in the ad world that you have spared yourself wisely Judge Barrett, the Susan B Anthony Foundation is running advertisements right now saying that you are set, you are set to give our pro-life country a Court that it deserves.
Here is the ad with the voiceover. She said – she said. And then Roe, Obamacare cases and Obergefell, gay marriages. National Organization for Marriage, the big group that opposes same-sex marriage, says in this proceeding, all our issues are at stake. The Republican platform says it wants to reverse Obergefell. And the Republican brief filed in the case said same-sex relationships don’t fall within any constitutional protection, so when we say the stakes are high on this, it’s because you have said the stakes are high on this. You have said that is what you want to do. So how are people going about doing it? What is the scheme here?
Let me start with this one. In all cases, there’s big anonymous money behind various lanes of activity. One lane of activity is through the conduit of the Federalist Society. It is managed by a guy – was managed by – a guy named Leonard Leo, and it has taken over the selection of judicial nominees. How do we know that to be the case? Because Trump has said so over and over again. His White House counsel said so. So we have an anonymously funded group controlling judicial selection run by this guy Leonard Leo.
Then in another lane, we have again anonymous funders running through something called the Judicial Crisis Network, which is run by Carrie Severino, and it is doing PR and campaign ads for Republican judicial nominees. It got $17 million – a single $17 million donation in the Garland-Gorsuch contest. It got another single $17 million donation to support Kavanaugh. Somebody, perhaps the same person, spent $35 million to influence the United States Supreme Court. Tell me that’s good.
And then over here you have a whole array of legal groups, also funded by dark money, which have a different role. They bring cases to the Court. They don’t wind their way to the Court, your Honor, they get shoved to the Court to by these legal groups, many of which ask to lose below so they can get quickly to the Court to get their business done there. And then they turn up in a chorus, an orchestrated chorus of amici.
Now I’ve had a chance to have a look at this. And I was in a case, actually, as an amicus myself, the Consumer Financial Protection Board case. And in that case there were 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 amicus briefs filed, and every single one of them was a group funded by something called DonorsTrust.
DonorsTrust is a gigantic identity-scrubbing device for the right wing so that it says DonorsTrust is the donor without whoever the real donor is. It doesn’t have a business. It doesn’t have a business plan. It doesn’t do anything. It’s just an identity scrubber.
And this group here, the Bradley Foundation, funded eight out of the 11 briefs. That seems weird to me when you have amicus briefs coming in little flotillas that are funded by the same groups but nominally separate in the court.
So I actually attached this to my brief as an appendix. Center for Media and Democracy saw it, and they did better work. They went on to say which foundations funded the brief writers in that CFPB case. Here is the Bradley Foundation for $5.6 million to those groups. Here’s DonorsTrust, $23 million to those brief writing groups. The grand total across all the donor groups was $68 million to the groups that were filing amicus briefs, pretending that they were different groups.
Right-Wing Foundations Fund Anti-Consumer Protection Groups, 2014-present
Sixteen right-wing foundations gave nearly $69 million to groups urging the Supreme Court to abolish the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau since 2014.
Donor Amount
DonorsTrust $23,460,705
Charles Koch Foundation $12,986,462
Sarah Scaife Foundation $7,550,000
L&H Bradley Foundation $5,579,500
Searle Freedom Trust $4,550,000
Dunn Foundation $4,450,000
Donors Capital Fund $2,522,680
John William Pope Foundation $1,895,175
Bradley Impact Fund $1,363,000
Mercer Family Foundation $1,200,000
Adolph Coors Foundation $1,155,000
F.M. Kirby Foundation $672,500
Charles Koch Institute $517,134
Ed Uihlein Family Foundation $408,000
Pierre F. and Enid Goodrich Foundation $395,000
William H. Donner Foundation $167,000
TOTAL $68,872,156
And it’s not just in the Consumer Financial Protection Board case. You might say well that was just a one-off. Here’s Janus, the anti-labor case that had a long trail through the Court, through Friedrichs, and through Knox, and through other decisions.
And SourceWatch and ProPublica did some work about this. Here’s DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund. And here’s the Bradley Foundation. And they totaled giving $45 million to the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15groups that filed amicus briefs, pretending to be different groups, and both of the lawyer groups in the case, funded by DonorsTrust, funded by Bradley Foundation in Janus.
This is happening over and over and over again, and it goes beyond just the briefs. It goes beyond just the amicus presentations.The Federalist Society– remember this group that is acting as the conduit and that Donald Trump has said is doing his judicial selection? They’re getting money from the same foundations, from DonorsTrust, $16.7 million and the Bradley Foundation, $1.37 million. From the same group of foundations total, $33 million.
Donors to the Federalist Society, 2014-present
The same 16 foundations that fund the amicus brief filers all give to the Federalist Society
donor Amount
DonorsTrust $16,733,100
Mercer Family Foundation $4,850,000
Donors Capital Fund $4,231,120
Charles Koch Foundation $2,419,264
Searle Freedom Trust $1,551,000
Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation $1,375,000
Ed Uihlein Family Foundation $1,000,000
John William Pope Foundation $250,000
Adolph Coors Foundation $230,000
Pierre F. and Enid Goodrich Foundation $210,000
Dunn Foundation $150,000
F.M. Kirby Foundation $120,000
William H. Donner Foundation $45,000
Bradley Impact Fund $15,250
Charles Koch Institute $6,400
TOTAL $33,286,134
So you can start to look at these, and you can start to tie them together. The legal groups, all the same funders over and over again, bringing the cases and providing us orchestrated, orchestrated chorus of amici. Then the same group also funds the Federalist Society over here. The Washington Post wrote a big expose about this, and that made Leonard Leo a little hot, a little bit like a burned agent. So he had to jump out. And he went off to go do anonymously-funded voter suppression work. Guess who jumped in to take over the selection process in this case for Judge Barrett? Carrie Severino made the hop. So once again, ties right in together.
So, Center for Media and Democracy did a little bit more research. Here’s aBradley Foundation memo that they’ve published. The Bradley Foundation is reviewing a grant application asking for money for this orchestrated amicus process, and what do they say in the staff recommendation? It is important to orchestrate – their word, not mine – important to orchestrate high-caliber amicus efforts before the Court.
Page 3 of 2015 Bradley Summary Judicial Education Project Proposal 150K
Contributed to DocumentCloud by Staff 18 of Documented • View document or read text
They also note that Bradley has done previous philanthropic investments in the actual underlying legal actions. So Bradley is funding – what do they call – philanthropically investing in, the underlying legal action and then giving money to groups to show up in the orchestrated chorus of amici. That can’t be good.
And it goes on, because they also found this email. This email comes from an individual at the Bradley Foundation, and it asks our friend, Leonard Leo, who used to run the selection process, is there a 501(c)(3) nonprofit to which Bradley could direct any support of the two Supreme Court amicus projects other than DonorsTrust? I don’t know why they wanted to avoid the reliable identity-scrubber DonorsTrust, but for some reason they did.
Page 6 of 2014 Bradley Leonard Leo Neil Corkery Carrie Severino Judicial+Education+Project
Contributed to DocumentCloud by Staff 18 of Documented • View document or read text]
So Leonard Leo writes back on Federalist Society address – so don’t tell me that it isn’t Federal Society business – on Federalist Society, on his address, he writes back, yes, send it to the Judicial Education Project, which could take and allocate the money. And guess who works for the Judicial Education Project? Carrie Severino,who also helped select this nominee, running the Trump Federalist Society selection process.
So the connections abound. In the Washington Post article, they point out that the Judicial Crisis Network’s office is on the same hallway in the same building as the Federalist Society, and when they sent their reporter to talk to somebody at the Judicial Crisis Network, somebody from the Federalist Society came down to let them up.
This more and more looks like it’s not three schemes, but it’s one scheme with the same funders selecting judges, funding campaigns for the judges, and then showing up in court in these orchestrated amicus flotillas to tell the judges what to do.
On the Judicial Crisis Network, you’ve got the Leonard Leo connection, obviously. She hopped in to take over for him with the Federalist Society. You’ve got the campaigns that I’ve talked about, where they take $17 million contributions. That’s a big check to write, $17 million, to campaign for Supreme Court nominees. No idea who that is or what they got for it. You’ve got briefs that she wrote. The Republican senators filed briefs in that NFIB case signed by Ms. Severino.
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The woman who helped choose this nominee has written briefs for Republican senators attacking the ACA. Don’t say the ACA is not an issue here. And by the way, the Judicial Crisis Network funds the Republican attorneys general. It funds RAGA, the Republican Attorneys General Association, and it funds individual Republican attorneys general. And guess who the plaintiffs are in the Affordable Care Act case? Republican attorneys general.
Trump joined them because he didn’t want to defend, so he’s in with the Republican attorneys general. But here’s the Judicial Crisis Network campaigning for Supreme Court nominees, writing briefs for senators against the Affordable Care Act, supporting the Republicans who are bringing this case, and leading the selection process for this nominee.
Here is the page off the brief. Here is where they are. Mitch McConnell, and on through the list, Senator Collins, Senator Cornyn, Senator Hoeven, Senator — who’s still here? Marco Rubio. It’s a huge assortment of Republican senators who Carrie Severino wrote a brief for against the Affordable Care Act. So this is a, to me, pretty big deal. I’ve never seen this around any court that I’ve ever been involved with, where there’s this much dark money and this much influence being used.
Here’s how the Washington Post summed it up. This is “a conservative activist behind-the-scenes campaign to remake the nation’s courts,” and it’s a $250 million dark money operation. $250 million is a lot of money to spend if you’re not getting anything for it. So that raises the question, what are they getting for it?
Well, I showed the slide earlier on the Affordable Care Act. And on Obergefell and on Roe v. Wade, that’s where they lost. But with another judge, that could change. That’s where the contest is. That’s where The Republican Party platform tells us to look at how they want judges to rule, to reverse Roe, to reverse the Obamacare cases, and to reverse Obergefell and take away gay marriage. That is their stated objective and plan. Why not take them at their word?
But there is another piece of it, and that is not what’s ahead of us, but what’s behind us. What’s behind us is now 80 cases, Mr. Chairman, 80 cases under Chief Justice Roberts that have these characteristics. One, they were decided five to four by a bare majority. Two, the five-to-four majority was partisan in the sense that not one Democratic appointee joined the five. I refer to that group as the “Roberts Five.”
It changes a little bit as–with Justice Scalia’s death, for instance – but there’s been a steady “Roberts Five” that has delivered now 80 of these decisions.And the last characteristic of them is that there is an identifiable Republican donor interest in those cases, and in every single case, that donor interest won. It was an 80 to zero, 5 to 4 partisan rout, ransacking.
And it’s important to look at where those cases went, because they’re not about big, public issues like getting rid of the Affordable Care Act, undoing Roe v. Wade, and undoing same sex marriage.They’re about power. And if you look at those 80 decisions, they fall into four categories over and over and over again. One, unlimited and dark money and politics.Citizens United is the famous one, but it’s continued since with McCutcheon and we’ve got one coming up now. Always the five for unlimited money in politics. Never protecting against money dark money in politics, despite the fact that they said it was going to be transparent.
And who wins when you allow unlimited dark money in politics? A very small group. The ones who have unlimited money to spend and a motive to spend it in politics. They win. Everybody else loses. And if you’re looking at who might be behind this, let’s talk about people with unlimited money to spend and a motive to do it. We’ll see how that goes.
Next, knock the civil jury down. Whittle it down to a nub. The civil jury was in the Constitution, in the Bill of Rights, in our darn Declaration of Independence, but it’s annoying to big corporate powers because you can swagger your way as a big corporate power through Congress. You can go and tell the president you put money into to elect what to do. He will put your stooges at the EPA. It’s all great until you get to the civil jury, because they have an obligation, as you know, Judge Barrett, they have an obligation under the law to be fair to both parties irrespective of their size.
You can’t bribe them. You’re not allowed to. It’s a crime to tamper with the jury. It’s standard practice to tamper with Congress. And they make decisions based on the law. If you’re used to being the boss and swaggering your way around the political side, you don’t want to be answerable before a jury. And so one after another, these 80 5-to-4 decisions have knocked down, whittled away at, the civil jury, a great American institution.
Third – first was unlimited dark money, second was demean and diminish the civil jury – third is weaken regulatory agencies. A lot of this money, I’m convinced, is polluter money. The Koch Industries is a polluter, the fossil fuel industry is a polluter. Who else would be putting buckets of money into this and wanting to hide who they are behind DonorsTrust or other schemes?
And what are – if you’re a big polluter – what do you want? You want weak regulatory agencies. You want ones that you can box up and run over to Congress and get your friends to fix things for you in Congress. Over and over and over again, these decisions are targeted at regulatory agencies to weaken their independence and weaken their strength. And if you’re a big polluter, a weak regulatory agency is your idea of a good day.
And the last thing is in politics. In voting. Why on earth the Court made the decision, a factual decision – not something appellate courts are ordinarily supposed to make, as I understand it Judge Barrett – the factual decision that nobody needed to worry about minority voters in preclearance states being discriminated against, or that legislators would try to knock back their ability to vote. These five made that finding in Shelby County against bipartisan legislation from both houses of Congress, hugely passed, on no factual record.
They just decided that that was a problem that was over, on no record with no basis, because it got them to the result that we then saw. What followed? State after state after state passed voter suppression laws. One so badly targeting African Americans that two courts said it was surgically, surgically tailored to get after minority voters.
And gerrymandering, the other great control. Bulk gerrymandering where you go into a state, like the Red Map project did in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and you pack Democrats so tightly into a few districts that all the others become Republican majority districts. And in those states, you send a delegation to Congress that has a huge majority of Republican members, like 13 to 5, as I recall, in a state where the five, the party of the five actually won the popular vote.
You’ve sent a delegation to Congress that is out of step with the popular vote of that state and court after court figured out how to solve that, and the Supreme Court said nope. 5 to 4 again. Nope. We’re not going to take an interest in that question. In all these areas where it’s about political power for big special interests, and people who want to fund campaigns, and people who want to get their way through politics without actually showing up, doing it behind DonorsTrust and other groups, doing it through these schemes over and over and over again, you see the same thing.
80 decisions, Judge Barrett. 80 decisions. An 80-to-0 sweep. I don’t think you’ve tried cases, but some cases, the issue is bias and discrimination. And if you’re making a bias case as a trial lawyer – Lindsey Graham is a hell of a good trial lawyer. If he wanted to make a bias case – Dick Durbin is a hell of a good trial lawyer. If they wanted to make a bias case and they could show an 80-to-0 pattern, A, that’s admissible, and B, I’d love to make that argument to the jury. I’d be really hard pressed to be the lawyer saying no, 80-to-0 is just a bunch of flukes.
All five-four. all partisan, all this way.So something is not right around the Court. And dark money has a lot to do with it. Special interests have a lot to do with it. DonorsTrust and whoever is hiding behind DonorsTrust has a lot to do with it, and the Bradley Foundation orchestrating its amici over at the Court has a lot to do with it.
So I thank you, Judge Barrett, for listening to me now a second time and I think this gives you a chance for you and I to tee up an interesting conversation tomorrow. And I thank my colleagues for hearing me out.
urban.org 2019
i am expanding kochademic to include (family) fdn that try to change univ: fed soc // Law and Econ manne:
CASE V: THE FEDERALIST SOCIETY
Institutions created by conservative philanthropy in higher education can have profound political, social, and cultural influence. The most influential of these institutions is the Federalist Society, founded as a group for conservative law students in 1982. The Federalist Society has given educational and social support to a generation of right-wing judges, attorneys, and legal scholars. The landmark cases settled by a conservative-leaning Supreme Court in the past decade—Citizens United v. FEC, Shelby County v. Holder, Janus v. AFSCME, and Trump v. Hawaii 46—would have been considerably more difficult for conservatives to win without the Federalist Society’s influence, not least because Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, the late Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas are all Federalist Society alumni. One opinion columnist has called the Federalist Society the “farm system for the [judiciary],” ensuring the ideological reliability of judicial appointees and preventing missteps like Richard Nixon’s appointment of Harry A. Blackmun (who wrote the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade) to the Supreme Court or George H.W. Bush’s appointment of David Souter (who was identified with the court’s liberal faction for most of his career).47 Although the media
...
CASE V: UNDERGRADUATE STUDENT GROUPS
Although the Federalist Society and conservative domination of the legal system represent conservative philanthropy’s most consequential achievements, other kinds of higher education philanthropy have contributed to right-wing political success. Conservative activists and philanthropists have underwritten right-wing undergraduate student activism that advocates free market ideology on college campuses. One of the earliest organized efforts was Young Americans for Freedom, founded by a group of some 90 young activists at conservative publisher William F. Buckley Jr.’s Connecticut estate in September 1960.55 (Young Americans for Freedom is not to be confused with Young America’s Foundation, discussed below. For clarity, I refer to both organizations by their full names...
calabrisi
https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/trump-supporter-and-co-founder-of-the-federalist-society-says-the-presidents-latest-tweet-is-grounds-for-impeachment
Cody Fenwick July 30, 2020
Steven Calabresi is not among the usual slate of conservative critics of the president. He doesn’t appear on MSNBC to lambast the Republican Party or write denunciations of the White House for The Bulwark. But in a new piece for the New York Times on Thursday, he offered a blistering rebuke to President Donald Trump’s suggestion on Twitter that he may seek to delay the November election.
Calabresi started with his Trumpist bona fides, confirming that he’s not inclined to criticize the president:
I have voted Republican in every presidential election since 1980, including voting for Donald Trump in 2016. I wrote op-eds and a law review article protesting what I believe was an unconstitutional investigation by Robert Mueller. I also wrote an op-ed opposing President Trump’s impeachment.
Then he continued, cutting to the heart of the matter:
But I am frankly appalled by the president’s recent tweet seeking to postpone the November election. Until recently, I had taken as political hyperbole the Democrats’ assertion that President Trump is a fascist. But this latest tweet is fascistic and is itself grounds for the president’s immediate impeachment again by the House of Representatives and his removal from office by the Senate.
The United States has never in its history delayed a presidential election, he pointed out, and there’s no justification to do it now. Calabresi noted that it’s not even within Trump’s power to delay or cancel the election, and it’s up to states whether they want to use mail-in ballots, which the president has decried.
But unlike some political commentators who dismissed the president’s comments because he lacks the official capacity to carry them out, Calabresi took Trump’s threat seriously.
“President Trump needs to be told by every Republican in Congress that he cannot postpone the federal election,” he wrote. “Doing so would be illegal, unconstitutional and without precedent in American history. Anyone who says otherwise should never be elected to Congress again.”
Republicans in Congress — the people necessary to make good on the threat of impeachment that Calabresi raises — should follow his lead and hold the president’s feet to the fire. They ought to tell him: Back down or be replaced.
no lnx
calabrisi
https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/trump-supporter-and-co-founder-of-the-federalist-society-says-the-presidents-latest-tweet-is-grounds-for-impeachment
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/is-the-conservative-federalist-society-rewarding-susan-collins-for-her-kavanaugh-vote/
Federalist Society, the conservative legal group that pushed Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment, has been the biggest contributor to the re-election campaign of Sen. Susan Collins, the embattled Maine Republican, since she voted to confirm him, federal filings show.
Donors associated with the Federalist Society, which has supported numerous other right-wing federal judges appointed by President Trump, have contributed more than $300,000 to Collins’ campaign and related political action committees over the last 18 months. That’s more than executives and employees at General Dynamics, the second-largest contributor to Collins, have contributed during her entire Senate career.
Those campaign contributions poured in after the Federalist Society and its affiliates waged a multi-million-dollar campaign to ensure Kavanaugh’s nomination shortly after receiving a secretive $17 million anonymous donation, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The effort prevailed, barely, after Collins cast a pivotal vote in Kavanaugh’s 50-48 confirmation.
That vote led to a massive crowdfunding campaign that raised more than $4 million in advance for Collins’ eventual Democratic challenger. Collins decried the effort as a “quid pro quo” that was the “equivalent of an attempt to bribe me to vote against Judge Kavanaugh."
senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., vowed after the Kavanaugh vote that “Collins will be well-funded.” as well after her vote. According to the Portland Press Herald, “huge sums” of out-of-state money poured into the 2020 Senate race between Collins and Gideon.
The Daily Beast previously reported that major donors to the Federalist Society had contributed more than $200,000 to Collins’ re-election effort. Many of them had never donated to Collins before.
Federal filings reviewed by Salon show that the total contributions from Federalist Society executives and supporters now exceed $300,000. The group’s executives and backers have donated at least $210,650 to the Collins for Senator campaign committee, $49,400 to Collins’ leadership PAC and another $41,800 to the Collins Victory Committee.
Since the end of 2018, Federalist Society contributions dwarf those Collins has received from employees at the defense contractor General Dynamics, which had been her biggest financial backer, over the past 25 years. Employees at the company, whose Bath Iron Works is the fourth-largest private employer in Maine, have contributed at least $201,838 to Collins and related PACs going back to 1995, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics.
A spokesman for Collins accused Salon of “political bias” in response to questions about the donations.
“The Maine Senate race is currently the most expensive in the country, and our campaign continues to be significantly outspent by far-left special interest groups that are spending money on what independent fact-checkers have repeatedly found to be ‘mostly false’ and misleading ads,” said Collins spokesman Kevin Kelley. “Senator Collins’ eventual challenger will also receive $4.1 million in CrowdPAC money — the outcome of an attempt to bribe her into voting against Justice Kavanaugh’s nomination. Senator Collins cannot be bribed and she made up her mind based on the merits of the nomination. It’s entirely laughable that the same people who tried to buy Senator Collins’ vote for more than $4 million would now suggest that she sold her vote for far less.”
Collins’ new backers linked to the Federalist Society include Steven Calabresi, who has been the chairman of the group’s board of directors since 1986, and conservative activist Cleta Mitchell, a Federalist Society member who made her first donation to Collins on the day Kavanaugh was confirmed.
Leaders of the Federalist Society and the Judicial Crisis Network, another dark-money group closely aligned with the Federalist Society, have contributed more than $50,000 to Collins’ re-election effort since the vote.
Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society’s executive vice president, and his wife each contributed the maximum $5,600 to Collins’ campaign committee last year. Leo also held a fundraiser for Collins at his $4 million summer mansion, which he purchased the same month Kavanaugh was confirmed. That fundraiser appears to have triggered a wave of donations from the group’s backers.
Collins was greeted by protesters at the event. “Coming for your bribe?” one sign said.
Collins sounded “exasperated” when questioned over the donations, according to Bloomberg reporter Steven Dennis.
“So I went to a 20-person fundraiser,” she said. “It’s just ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous.”
The attendees included C. Boyden Gray, a Federalist Society board member. Gray previously donated $3,600 to Collins during her 2014 campaign but this time contributed $10,600 to the Dirigo PAC, Collins’ leadership PAC.
A week after the fundraiser, Neil Corkery, an executive at the Judicial Crisis Network, donated $10,200 to Collins’ re-election bid.
That same month, Reginald Brown, who sits on the Federalist Society’s board of visitors, contributed $2,800 to Collins’ campaign.
Diana Davis Spencer, who also sits on the board of visitors, made her first contribution to Collins with three donations totaling $5,600 within a month of Kavanaugh’s confirmation.
Ted Olson, another member of the board of visitors, donated $2,000 to Collins since Kavanaugh’s confirmation, though he also donated to her campaign in 2007 and 2014.
Daniel Casey, president of the Judicial Crisis Network, also contributed the maximum $5,600 to Collins’ campaign, his first-ever donation to the senator. The group also launched a six-figure ad campaign to thank Collins for supporting Kavanaugh.
The Federalist Society’s donors have contributed more than $250,000 to Collins-related PACs. Some of the backers are so-called Madison Club Platinum supporters, who donate $100,000 or more annually to the Federalist Society. These members contributed $78,500 to her re-election effort. None of the contributions came from Maine residents and many of the donors had never previously given money to Collins or her associated PACs.
These include Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus andhis wife, who contributed $20,800 to the Dirigo PAC last year, more than 10 times the amount the couple had donated to Collins in 2014.
Thomas Smith, the managing partner of Prescott Investments, donated $20,000 to the Collins campaign, the Dirigo PAC and the Collins Victory Committee in 2019.
Roger Hertog, the former president of Alliance Capital Management, and his wife contributed $15,300 to Collins’ campaign committee and the Collins Victory Committee in 2019.
Ravenel Curry, the founder of Eagle Capital Management, made two donations totaling $5,600 in 2019. David and Debra Humphreys, whose EL Craig Foundation is a major backer of the Federalist Society, also donated the maximum $11,200 to her campaign. Rex Sinquefield, the co-founder of the libertarian-leaning think tank the Show-Me Institute, also donated the maximum $5,600 in 2019.
Several Federalist Society Madison Club Gold donors, who contribute between $50,000 and $99,999 annually, donated another $20,100 to Collins after her vote.
Energy tycoon Philip Anschutz, whose foundation is a major Federalist Society backer, donated a total of $11,200 to Collins’ campaign and the Collins Victory Committee. Attorney Anthony De Nicola donated $5,600 to Collins in 2019. Michael Boskin, the president of the Koret Foundation, a major funder of the Federalist Society, donated another $2,800. None of the three had ever donated to Collins in the past. Mary Elizabeth Weiss, the wife of hedge fund manager Richard Weiss, donated an additional $500.
A few Federalist Society Madison Club Silver donors, who contribute between $25,000 and $49,999 annually, donated another $53,600 to Collins’ re-election effort.
Billionaire hedge fund manager Clifford Asness and his wife donated a total of $26,800 to Collins’ campaign committee, the Dirigo PAC and the Collins Victory Committee. Federalist Society donor Randy Kendrick and her husband donated $26,800 to Collins’ re-election effort.
Other major Federalist Society donors that donated to Collins since the vote include San Francisco Giants co-owner Charles Johnson and his wife Ann ($21,200), construction mogul James Stephenson and his wife Donna Yancey Stephenson ($21,200), health care tech CEO Nersi Nazari ($5,600), real estate investor Boyd Smith ($5,600), former Bush-era diplomat Frank Baxter ($2,000), Anne Colquitt, the daughter of former Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam, and her husband David ($11,200), attorney Robert Giuffra Jr. ($2,800), real estate investor Richard Weekly ($2,700), attorney Francis Menton ($250), attorney Donald Toumey ($2,800), attorney Adam Paris ($2,800), attorney David Thompson ($2,800), attorney Kannon Shanmugam ($2,800), attorney Gordon Todd ($2,400), attorney Michael Carvin ($2,000), attorney Jay Stephens ($2,000), attorney Alfred Putnam Jr. ($2,000), attorney Hill Wellford ($1,000) and attorney Stewart Baker ($500).
Beyond Kavanaugh, the Federalist Society has been the driving force behind Trump’s federal judicial appointments. Leo has been called “Trump’s judge whisperer.” Despite Collins’ claim to be pro-choice, she has voted to confirm dozens of anti-abortion judges since Trump took office and has voted to confirm more than 100 judges nominated by the president.
Collins’ campaign rejected the idea that the senator was “bribed” for her vote and said it was hypocritical to criticize her given the crowdfunding campaign against her. But Amelia Penniman, a spokeswoman for the Democratic super PAC American Bridge, argued that Collins’ recent finance reports include a “who’s who of the conservative judicial activists who brought us Brett Kavanaugh and have stacked the court with Trump’s anti-choice judicial picks.”
“This isn’t a coincidence, they’re supporting her because they know Collins is a reliable vote for their extreme nominees,” she told the Maine Beacon. “The further she leans into her relationship with conservative DC power players like Leonard Leo, the more she puts Mainers on the back burner.”
While Collins’ support for Kavanaugh and conservative judges may have resulted in a surge of Federalist Society cash, it has not been nearly enough to keep up with leading Democratic challenger Sara Gideon, the speaker of the Maine House of Representatives.
Gideon raised $8 million last quarter, compared to just over $3 million for Collins. Gideon has now raised $23 million to Collins’ $16.3 million, and that’s not counting the crowdfunding campaign.
Collins is one of the most vulnerable Republicans heading into the 2020 election. Gideon has held a slight lead in every poll released this year as Collins’ support among women voters has evaporated. Collins, who won her last race in 2014 by 37 points, has seen her approval rating plummet from 67% when Trump took office to just 36% this month. She is now rated as the most unpopular senator in the country.
“Susan Collins sold out Mainers when she voted to give an accused rapist a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court, and his backers have since rewarded her in turn,” Zach Hudson, a spokesman for American Bridge 21st Century, said in a statement to Salon. “But all the money in the world from right-wing special interests cannot change the simple fact that Susan Collins lost the trust of Maine voters which is why she’s now America’s most unpopular senator. Collins’ vote for Brett Kavanaugh may have bought her millions in special interest cash, but in November it will cost her her Senate seat. We hope she thinks it was worth it.”
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https://lawandcrime.com/judiciary/senate-dems-investigating-former-federalist-society-leaders-influence-over-trump-admins-judicial-nominees/
Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats are seeking information on the role former Federalist Society leader Leonard Leo played in in choosing the jurists President Donald Trump has nominated to lifetime appointments as federal judges. In letters sent to Attorney General William Barr and White House counsel Pat Cipollone on Wednesday, the senators said they were specifically looking into the potential conflicts of interest presented by Leo’s advising the president on judicial selections while leading a group that is anonymously funded, “likely from entities that have interests before the federal courts.”
“Mr. Leo’s prominent role in the Trump Administration’s judicial selection and nominations process while maintaining a financial interest in advocacy efforts related to this process has raised questions regarding his potential status as a federal employee and compliance with accompanying laws and regulations,” the letter to Barr stated.
The senators emphasized that by advising the Trump administration on its selection of federal judges, Leo’s conduct raised significant questions as to whether he was performing the duties of a federal government employee without proper authority, thereby violating federal ethics law.
“By outward appearances, Mr. Leo may have engaged in the performance of a federal function that must be conducted by government employees authorized to act on behalf of the United States by leading the Administration’s efforts to identify and select judicial nominees, and press for their confirmation,” they wrote. “As a federal employee, Mr. Leo would have been responsible for complying with federal records retention and financial disclosure requirements, as well as the criminal financial conflict of interest statute.”
Led by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), the Democratic senators who signed the letters were attempting to shed light on the process that has allowed the Trump White House and GOP-led Senate to confirm an unprecedented number of judges (nearly 200) in just over three years.
The senators assert that knowing the specifics of Leo’s involvement in the selection process is vital to ensuring the process remains untainted.
“Mr. Leo’s personal financial interest in advocacy efforts related to the judicial selection and nominations process raises serious concerns regarding potential conflicts of interest and the independence of the federal judiciary, given Mr. Leo’s leadership role in the Trump Administration’s work on the issue,” they wrote, before listing a number of questions relating to Leo’s role in the selection process.
As previously reported by Law&Crime, Leo stepped away from the Federalist Society earlier this year to helm a massive effort aimed at securing Trump’s re-election by highlighting the 45th president’s record on appointing conservative judges.
See below for the full letter sent to AG Barr:
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CMD
And More Money for the “Conquerors of the Courts”
CKF gave the Federalist Society, which The Washington Post coined the “Conquerors of the Courts,” $768,000 in 2018.The Federalist Society, along with its activist leader Leonard Leo, has reshaped the Supreme Court and many of the Federal Courts by aggressively promoting the appointment of right-wing judges.
Both Trump appointees to the Supreme Court, Justice Neil Gorsuch and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, were members of the Federalist Society and were added to a nomination list Leo personally compiled for Trump.
Last week, Kavanaugh took a victory lap at the Federalist Society’s Gala, saying to his supporters who helped get him seated, “I will always be grateful.”
[docs]
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kos 1219
shadowy and immensely powerful Federalist Society is a driving force behind the right-wing takeover of the federal judiciary. It is responsible for the mob of ultra-conservative federal judges attacking our civil rights and giving free rein to massive corporations, including the right-wing extremist majority on the Supreme Court.
Right now, the Federalist Society is also working overtime to rehabilitate the reputation of disgraced Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was credibly accused of sexual assault by multiple women, and they have a powerful ally: Facebook. Facebook was a “Gold Circle” sponsor – the highest level – of the Federalist Society's annual black-tie gala, where Kavanaugh was the keynote speaker and honored with a standing ovation. Facebook apparently decided it could curry favor with right-wing, pro-corporate Republicans by helping to rehabilitate Kavanaugh. And this isn't the first time Facebook has sided with Kavanaugh – one of its top executives even sat behind him at his confirmation hearing just after Dr. Christine Blasey Ford testified that he had sexually assaulted her.
Facebook is already reeling from scandals and facing waves of investigations and fines for data breaches and potential fraud, and we need to let them know: We stand with survivors, and Facebook’s support for Kavanaugh and the right-wing institutions responsible for his lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court is unacceptable.
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/fundamentalism-and-authoritarianism-how-the-party-of-law-and-order-become-the-party-of-crooks-and-crime
no lnx many
Fundamentalism and authoritarianism: How the party of ‘law and order’ became the party of crooks and crime
Written by Paul Rosenberg / Salon November 24, 2019
Whatever happened to the Republicans as the “party of law and order”? True, Richard Nixon, who first branded the party that way, was lying when he famously said, “I am not a crook.” Both Watergate and the Iran-Contra scandal rank among the most notorious examples of executive branch lawlessness in our nation’s history. But through it all, the narrative commitment to the brand never wavered. It was a source of moral and political strength, always to be contrasted with “soft on crime” Democrats, however contrary the front-page facts might be.
But not anymore. As noted here by Jennifer Mercieca, a historian of rhetoric whose book, “Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump” (table of contents here), will be published next year, it’s the Democrats who are the party of law and order in the impeachment drama, while the GOP is the party of conspiracy:
Democrats, led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, are betting that public opinion will move toward impeachment and removal once more information is made public. To try to shape public opinion they are relying on a law-and-order frame that tells Americans that the impeachment inquiry is legitimate and legally justified.
Democrats are positioning themselves as the only ones willing to uphold the rule of law and the Constitution.
Republicans, led by President Trump, are counting on their power to frame reality to prevent the public from moving toward impeachment.
The GOP is relying on a conspiracy frame that tells Americans that the impeachment inquiry is illegitimate and part of a plot to destroy America.
Of course the rhetoric of conspiracy isn’t entirely synonymous with that of crooks and criminals — but when you start to insist that career law-enforcement officials are all in on it, and you’ve abandoned the “law and order” frame to the Democrats, the crooks and criminals stench is difficult to dispel. And it’s not happening in isolation, either — above and beyond the plethora of scandals Trump generates, and the lockstep support Republicans are giving him.
That lockstep support is perhaps the most striking difference between now and Watergate-a difference most readily understood via the role of asymmetric polarization and negative partisanship, which cautions us not to expect the kind of gradual but inexorable opinion shift seen 45 years ago in response to the buildup of evidence.
In turn, dramatically increased polarization is a predicted result of historical trends described by structural demographic theory (SDT), which I wrote about previously in October 2016, reviewing “Ages of Discord,” an analysis of American history by evolutionary anthropologist Peter Turchin. SDT identifies three underlying factors contributing to increased levels of political instability: mass immiseration (stagnant or falling wages, worsening health, declining well-being), elite overproduction (increased competition for wealth and power), and fiscal distress (a product of both public debt and trust in public institutions). Mass immiseration helps fuel elite overproduction, since stagnant or falling wages leaves more money for elites, and the increased competition that results reduces broad cooperation and intensifies elite fragmentation (which also contributes to fiscal distress). In America, political polarization is a prime indicator of that fragmentation.
The fact that polarization has been asymmetric deserves special attention, as it’s not yet implicated in SDT. But it can be credibly explained. In “The AuthoritarianDynamic,” Karen Stenner presented compelling evidence that expressed intolerance resulted primarily from two factors: an innate predisposition to intolerance, demanding obedience and conformity, (“authoritarianism”) interacting with increased societal threat, particularly dissension in public opinion and loss of confidence in political leaders. Thus, there is both a logical reason for the expression of authoritarianism to increase as political instability rises, and motivation for either authoritarian or opportunistic elites to strategically manipulate conditions to intensify this process.
One can read “The Long Southern Strategy” (Salon interview with co-author Angie Maxwell here) as a coherent history of how GOP-affiliated elites have pursued just such a strategy over the past 50-plus years.
“Authoritarian attitudes peak not only when social conditions change, but also if folks are made to feel like social conditions are changing (even if they aren’t),” Maxwell said. “The threats are recycled, renewed with a sense of urgency, stoking a fire that is always smoldering. It isn’t a natural rise in authoritarian attitudes, it is an orchestrated rise in authoritarian attitudes.”
SDT suggests that it may be both, but without the orchestration it would be much more manageable, and much less prone to produce lawless behavior.
One can also view conservative legal activism as a key component in that process, as well as a profound influence on elite politics as a whole. At the time of Watergate, authoritarians were more evenly divided between the parties, but they’ve become much more concentrated in the GOP since then. As their experience of threat has risen, they’ve become more inclined to lawlessness — although it’s not tolerated on the part of others, of course!
In short, the lawlessness at the top of the GOP isn’t new — just vastly more blatant than it was during Watergate. But the infrastructure supporting, defending and excusing it is dramatically more powerful and robust, and the authoritarian mass base is much more consolidated within their voter base.
Aside from impeachment itself, three other developments this month underscores the GOP’s broader embrace of lawlessness, in contrast to its decades-long self-branding. First, there is Trump’s pardoning of three war criminals, burnishing his brand of support for official lawlessness and thuggish brutality. He may mistakenly believe this endears him to the military — which wants nothing to do with them — but it’s also meant to hype authoritarian support among his most rabid supporters.
Second, hisRoy Cohn-style attorney general, William Barr, delivered a widely criticized authoritarian screed to the Federalist Society, portraying the impeachment inquiry as dangerous to the rule of law, rather than warranted by Trump’s self-professed crimes. Third, legal scholar Steven Calabresi, chair of the Federalist Society’sboard of directors, wrote a pair of opinion articles accusing Democrats of violating Trump’s rights, one of which, according to Steven Mazie, the Economist’s Supreme Court correspondent, “reads like the first draft of an op-ed by a MAGA middle-schooler who was inspired by Jacob Wohl’s erstwhile Twitter account.”
The combination of Trump’s blatant endorsement of lawlessness and the double-whammy high-profile embarrassments of Calabresi and Barr reflects something much broader and profoundly troubling. The latter two offer striking indicators of just how seriously this is impacting establishment conservatism, in a way that can’t be fobbed off on Trump alone, while Trump’s pardons of war criminals — following earlier pardons, including that of ex-Sheriff Joe Arpaio — not only enable brute lawlessness in uniform, but points towards outright valorization in the future, especially if performed in direct support of Trump himself.
To better understand the role of the conservative legal movement, I turned to two law professors I’ve interviewed before: Eric J. Segall, author of “Originalism as Faith,” to help illuminate the role that faith has played in this process, and David Pozen, co-author (with Joseph Fishkin) of the paper, “Asymmetric Constitutional Hardball,” which starts making sense of how the political asymmetry discussed above impacts norm-violating practices, with profound systemic results. In that paper, Fishkin and Pozen write:
The “restorationist” constitutional narratives and interpretive theories promoted by Republican politicians and lawyers, [this] Essay suggests, serve to legitimate the party’s use of constitutional hardball.
While this has surely been the elite focus of the actors involved, movement conservatives have also made remaking the Supreme Court and the entire judicial branch central to their politics in ways progressives have not, and this means engaging in authoritarian mobilization via threat manipulation, as described in “The Long Southern Strategy.”
Originalismplays a key role in this, but the meaning of that term shifted sharply in the process. At first, Segall told me, the originalist position argued that judges shouldn’t be engaged in moral reasoning:
It’s not for judges to select the best moral position for a country, it’s for people who are elected to do it. Unless judges can point to something in the text of the Constitution or something clear in the history, then judges should say look, the Constitution doesn’t speak to this, vote on it.
Originalism, at first, “was inextricably tied to deference. That’s the only way that works.”
But that all changed when conservatives gained control of the court in the late ’80s and early ’90s, Segall says: “After 12 years of Reagan-Bush judges, the people who embraced originalism dropped the deference part.” That meant a return of moral reasoning, “because history cannot answer modern problems,” and while conservatives won’t admit that, “it’s true and they act that way.” The Constitution is silent about the rights of transgender people or the definition of marriage, to cite obvious examples....
quite long]
==
==
thru looking glass?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/11/16/attorney-general-barr-accuses-democrats-using-oversight-powers-try-cripple-executive-branch/
wapo no lnx
Attorney General Barr accuses Democrats of ‘war’ on Trump in speech decried as partisan
Attorney General William P. Barr described a “war” against a “duly elected government” at a conference of the Federalist Society. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)
By
Hannah Knowles
November 16, 2019
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Attorney General William P. Barr accused Democrats on Friday of using their oversight powers to sabotage the executive branch, criticizing the “resistance” to President Trump and what he called a broader erosion in the commander in chief’s rightful authority.
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The Trump appointee described a “war” against a “duly elected government” at a conference of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group that has played a key role in the administration’s efforts to seat record numbers of right-leaning federal judges.
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“The fact of the matter is that, in waging a scorched earth, no-holds-barred war of resistance against this administration,it is the left that is engaged in the systematic shredding of norms and the undermining of the rule of law,” Barr told his audience of lawyers at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel.
To critics, the speech was overly partisan and even “authoritarian.” It prompted some calls for Barr’s impeachment from lawyers and legal scholars, many of whom believe his views of presidential power are too expansive. Barr says the Constitution’s creators envisioned a strong executive.
His speech came amid a newly public, high-stakes phase of Democrat-led investigations into the White House, as impeachment hearings examine whether Trump abused his office to secure a foreign country’s probe of his political rival. Barr recently declined Trump’s request that he hold a news conference defending Trump in the inquiry by saying the president broke no laws in a call to Ukraine’s president, individuals familiar with the situation told The Washington Post.
But the attorney general was vociferous Friday in his defense of Trump’s actions in office, saying legislators are the ones who have overstepped their bounds. Judges, too, have interfered with the president’s authority in recent years, he said.
“I don’t deny that Congress has some implied authority,” he said. “But the sheer volume of what we see today, the pursuit of scores of parallel investigations through an avalanche of subpoenas, is plainly designed to incapacitate the executive branch and indeed is touted as such.”
Richard Painter, who served as chief White House ethics attorney in the George W. Bush administration, called the attorney general’s statements “authoritarian,” comparing the Federalist Society talk to another Barr speech that criticized “radical secularists.”
Barr’s talk was “an attack on our Constitution and on the rule of law,” the University of Minnesota law professor tweeted.
The speech drew praise, however, from Trump supporters who have long said the administration has been unfairly attacked. Inside the Mayflower Hotel, Barr got enthusiastic applause.
The attorney general has been warning for decades of “legislative encroachments” on the president’s power, as he put it in a 1989 memo that his Democratic successor quickly replaced with one that recognized a bigger role for Congress.
Speaking Friday, Barr traced a “steady grinding down” of executive authority to the mid-1960s, saying the trend had quickened after the Watergate scandal that led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation.
Barr emphasized the president’s purview over policy and diplomacy and argued for the executive branch’s ability to keep its conversations secret from what he called a meddling Congress. For the attorney general, the so-called resistance to the president implies a “dangerous” notion of insurgency against a military occupation.
He pointed to Trump’s election as a mandate for his actions.
“While the president has certainly thrown out the traditional Beltway playbook and punctilio, he was up front about what he wanted to do, and the people decided they wanted him to serve as president,” Barr said.
The attorney general defended specific Trump administration policies such as a travel ban aimed at citizens of mostly majority-Muslim countries, pointing to court victories. The Supreme Court upheld that policy last year in a close ruling that found Trump can bar travelers for national security reasons.
Barr contended the Obama administration wielded executive power more aggressively than its successor — for example, through its creation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that protects certain undocumented immigrants known as “Dreamers” from deportation.
Barr’s speech reiterated views that were controversial during his confirmation earlier this year, too.
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His “vision of presidential power is contrary to the constitutional system of checks and balances that lies at the heart of our Constitution,” Neil Kinkopf, a law professor at Georgia State University, testified at hearings on Barr’s nomination.
Democrats were especially wary of how Barr would handle special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of the president, pointing to a 2018 memo Barr wrote arguing that Mueller was interpreting obstruction of justice too liberally. In hearings, Barr would not promise to release the special counsel’s report.
Barr was confirmed in a 54-45 vote falling mostly along party lines.
==
https://blog.ucsusa.org/elliott-negin/exxonmobil-still-funding-climate-science-denier-groups
2x?
Why is ExxonMobil Still Funding Climate Science Denier Groups?
ELLIOTT NEGIN, SENIOR WRITER | AUGUST 31, 2018, 12:42 PM EDT
A decade after pledging to end its support for climate science deniers, ExxonMobil gave $1.5 million last year to 11 think tanks and lobby groups that reject established climate science and openly oppose the oil and gas giant’s professed climate policy preferences, according to the company’s annual charitable giving report released this week.
Nearly 90 percent of ExxonMobil’s 2017 donations to climate science denier groups went to the US Chamber of Commerce and three organizations that have been receiving funds from the company since it started bankrolling climate disinformation 20 years ago: the American Enterprise Institute, Manhattan Institute and American Legislative Exchange Council, which — in a surprise move — ExxonMobil recently quit. (More on that later.)
The other ExxonMobil denier grantees last year were the Center for American and International Law ($23,000), Federalist Society ($10,000), Hoover Institution ($15,000), Mountain States Legal Foundation ($5,000), National Black Chamber of Commerce ($30,000), National Taxpayers Union Foundation ($40,000), and Washington Legal Foundation ($40,000).
ExxonMobil’s funding priorities belie the company’s purported support for a carbon tax, the Paris climate agreement and other related policies, which it reaffirmed in a January blog post by its public affairs director, Suzanne McCarron. If, as McCarron claims, ExxonMobil is “committed to being part of the solution,” why is the company still spending millions of dollars a year on groups that are a major part of the problem?
ExxonMobil’s history of deceit
There is ample evidence that Exxon was fully aware of the danger its products pose to the planet since the 1980s and likely even earlier. Nonetheless, the company helped initiate a fossil fuel industry-backed climate disinformation campaign in 1998, a year before it merged with Mobil.
The company’s behind-the-scenes role went largely unnoticed for nearly a decade, but in early 2007, a report by the Union of Concerned Scientists revealed that it had spent at least $16 million between 1998 and 2005 to fund a network of more than 40 think tanks and advocacy groups to manufacture doubt about climate science under the guise of being neutral, independent analysts.
In response to the negative press generated by the UCS report, ExxonMobil vowed in its “2007 Corporate Citizenship Report” to “discontinue contributions [in 2008] to several public policy research groups whose positions on climate change could divert attention from the important discussion on how the world will secure the energy required for economic growth in an environmentally responsible manner.”
Note that the company only promised to stop funding several policy groups, not all, and it did in fact drop some high-profile grantees, including the Cato Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Heartland Institute and Institute for Energy Research. But it never completely ended its support for the disinformation network. From 1998 to 2007 — the year of the pledge — it spent nearly $23 million on it. From 2008 through last year, it spent another $13.17 million, for a total of $36.13 million over the last 20 years. As far as anyone has been able to determine from publicly available data, only Charles and David Koch, the multibillionaire owners of Koch Industries, have spent more to deceive the public about climate science and block government action on climate change.
Last year, $1.35 million of the $1.5 million ExxonMobil spent went to the following four organizations:
US Chamber of Commerce: Sponsoring slanted studies
In 2014, ExxonMobil committed to give $5 million to the US Chamber of Commerce’s Capital Campaign in $1 million-a-year increments on top of its annual dues, despite the lobby group’s history of misrepresenting climate science and the economics of transitioning to clean energy. Last year, the company kicked in another $15,000 for the Chamber’s Corporate Citizenship Center, bringing its total donation to $1,015,000.
If one takes ExxonMobil’s climate policy claims at face value, the Chamber’s positions are polar opposite.
ExxonMobil has been very vocal about its support for the Paris climate agreement, for example, and during its former CEO Rex Tillerson’s brief stint as US secretary of state, he reportedly implored President Trump to keep the United States in it. What did Trump cite last year when he announced he was pulling out of the accord? A widely debunked report from the US Chamber of Commerce.
Cosponsored by a former ExxonMobil grantee — the American Council for Capital Formation (ACCF) — the report maintained that the Paris accord would cost the US economy nearly $3 trillion over the next several decades and eliminate 6.5 million industrial sector jobs by 2040.
According to analyses by the Associated Press (AP), Politifact and The Washington Post, however, the Chamber and ACCF cooked the books. As the AP put it: “The study makes worst-case assumptions that may inflate the cost of meeting US targets under the Paris accord while largely ignoring the economic benefits to US businesses from building and operating renewable energy projects.”
American Enterprise Institute: Undue faith in the market
The American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an 80-year-old free-market think tank in Washington, D.C., has received more from ExxonMobil than any other climate science denier organization. In 2017, ExxonMobil gave AEI $160,000, bringing its total to $4.49 million since 1998.
Economist Benjamin Zycher, the only AEI staff member who writes regularly about climate issues, rejects mainstream climate science, insists a carbon tax would be “ineffective,” and has called the Paris agreement an “absurdity.” He not only disagrees with ExxonMobil’s professed climate policy positions, he has attacked the company for taking them.
Zycher’s colleague Mark Thiessen, a regular contributor to The Washington Post, also dismisses the Paris accord, maintaining that “free enterprise, technology, and innovation—not pieces of parchment signed in Paris and Kyoto — will revolutionize how we produce and consume energy.” Never mind that it often takes regulations to drive innovation and force corporations to adopt cleaner technology. Without federally mandated air pollution controls, for example, power plants and other industrial facilities would be emitting considerably more toxic pollution than they do today.
Manhattan Institute: Propaganda masquerading as news
Another free-market think tank, the Manhattan Institute, received $115,200 from ExxonMobil last year for its Center for Energy Policy. Since 1998, it has received $1.25 million. Like Zycher and Thiessen at AEI, Manhattan Institute fellows oppose a carbon tax and the Paris accord.
Earlier this year, the New York City-based organization hired longtime TV newsman John Stossel, former host of Fox Business Network’s “Stossel” and ABC’s “20/20,” to interview Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Oren Cass for a slickly produced, 4-minute YouTube segment titled “The Overheated Costs of Climate Change.”
Cass, who regularly testified before Congress against Obama administration climate efforts, told Stossel that the Paris climate agreement “was somewhere between a farce and a fraud.” Stossel wholeheartedly agreed. “The Earth is warming,” Stossel intoned in his wrap-up. “Man may well be increasing that. But the solution isn’t to waste billions by forcing emissions cuts here while other countries do nothing. Well, pretend to make cuts. Trump was right to repudiate this phony treaty.”
Waste billions while other countries do nothing? Besides the fact that it is now cheaper to produce electricity from utility-scale solar and wind energy in the United States than nuclear, coal and even natural gas, as of last November — a year after the Paris agreement officially went into effect — China, India and other major carbon emitters were already making significant progress in meeting their Paris accord commitments.
The other glaring problem with the segment is it’s a prime example of fake news. With a former network news show host playing anchor, viewers could easily mistake the piece as a clip from of a legitimate newscast. At least one member of the conservative echo chamber treated it that way. The Washington Free Beacon, an online news organization funded by GOP megadonor Paul Singer, ran a news story about the Stossel-Cass interview on March 19.
American Legislative Exchange Council: Fossil fuel industry ‘bill mill’
On July 12, ExxonMobil announced it had ended its longtime membership in the American Legislative Exchange Council after a disagreement over the corporate lobby group’s climate policy. From 1998 through last year — when Exxon Mobil reported it gave the group $60,000 — ALEC received $1.93 million from the oil company.
Over the last two decades, ALEC has routinely featured climate science deniers at its conferences and supplied state lawmakers with a range of fossil fuel industry-drafted sample legislation, including bills that would restrict investment in renewables, eliminate incentives for electric vehicles, and hamper the solar industry from selling electricity directly to residential and business customers.
Since 2012, more than 100 corporations, including BP, ConocoPhillips, Royal Dutch Shell and electric utilities Entergy, Pacific Gas & Electric and Xcel Energy, have severed ties with ALEC, in many cases because of its regressive policy positions.
ExxonMobil’s exit from ALEC came just months after the company fought to defeat a draft resolution sponsored by the Heartland Institute — an ExxonMobil grantee from 1998 through 2006 — calling on the Environmental Protection Agency to “reopen and review” its “flawed” conclusion that climate change poses a threat to human health. The EPA’s “endangerment finding” requires the agency to regulate carbon dioxide and other global warming emissions as hazardous pollutants under the Clean Air Act.
After ExxonMobil and the Edison Electric Institute (EEI), a utility trade group, objected to the resolution, the Heartland Institute withdrew it and accused the two of being in league with the likes of Greenpeace and the Sierra Club.
“Big corporations like ExxonMobil and trade groups like EEI have long been members of the discredited and anti-energy global warming movement,” Heartland’s president, Tim Huelskamp, said in a December 7 press release. “They’ve put their profits and ‘green’ virtue signaling above sound science and the interests of their customers.”
Huelskamp’s ludicrous assertion notwithstanding, some might construe ExxonMobil’s exit from ALEC as a welcome change in direction. The company’s money trail, however, clearly shows that it is still financing climate science denier groups that denigrate any and all climate policy options and provide cover for Congress and the current administration to do nothing. Until ExxonMobil stops funding these groups, its avowed support for a carbon tax, the Paris agreement and other climate initiatives can’t be seen as anything more than a cynical PR ploy.
Posted in: Energy, Global Warming Tags: carbon tax, Climate Denier, Climate Science, ExxonMobil, fossil fuel, Global warming
==
2015
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2015/11/17/hls-debate-fossil-fuels/
harvard
Federalist Society Hosts Fossil Fuel Debate
By Hannah Natanson, Contributing Writer
November 17, 2015
Alex Epstein, president and founder of the for-profit think-tank Center for Industrial Progress and author of “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels,” argued for the use of fossil fuels on Monday in Harvard Law School’s Wasserstein Hall.
Aladdine Joroff, a clinical instructor and staff attorney in the Emmett Environmental Law and Policy Clinic at the Law School, spoke after Epstein and gave a rebuttal. The event was hosted by the Harvard Federalist Society, a student-run organization for conservatives, moderates, and libertarians.
During his speech, Epstein critiqued the “methodology” of the prevailing energy discussion.
According to Epstein, the fossil fuel debate today places too much trust in “experts.” In addition, Epstein said much of the debate focuses on fossil fuels’ negative effects on the environment, leaving out their positive effects on human beings.
“If we were not free to use fossil fuels...billions of people suffer and die unnecessarily,” Epstein said. “This really calls into question what is the methodology of the people who oppose [fossil fuels]. My contention is, whether implicitly or explicitly, their focus is not human life.”
Epstein also differentiated his arguments in favor of fossil fuels from mainstream political discourse.
“I want to distinguish myself both from the view that you hear from what we can call the left and the right,” he said. “So I don’t think fossil fuels are an unnecessary evil or a necessary evil, I think they are a superior good.”
In her rebuttal, Joroff asserted that opponents of fossil fuel usage want to transition to a cleaner energy supply, not remove the existing energy supply.
“From a moral perspective, I’d argue that we have an obligation to pursue feasible alternatives now,” she said.
Trenton Van Oss, vice president of speakers for the Federalist Society and one of the hosts of the event, said he was pleased with the proceedings.
“[T]hat’s part of our mission at the school, to provide students with points of view that they might not get in the classroom or at other events,” he said. “Alex did that, and Professor Joroff offered a great response.”
Aqil Sajjad, a graduate student in high energy theory physics, said that he thought Epstein was not “nuanced” enough and made strong assertions in a field that “can’t be totally precise.”
“I think that, in the climate debate, demanding precision is not how we should [proceed],” Sajjad said. “If you want precision you should go into physics or chemistry.”
==
2x?
11/2001
https://www.thenation.com/article/movin-federalist-society/
619 new
How does a 1L at Harvard Law School end up singing arm-in-arm with one of the most influential judges on the federal appellate bench? If you are a student at almost any law school, not just one of the top ones, and you have remotely conservative interests, you too can join a student chapter of the Federalist Society and gain automatic admission to the highest echelons of right-wing politics and legal advocacy. Take Chris Ward, 31, a former Latin teacher who graduated from Harvard Law School this spring. As a first year student, he attended the society's annual national student symposium, held that year in Chicago. Afterward he repaired to a hotel bar where he and his friends joined in singing "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow" to Eugene Volokh, a UCLA law professor. Mingling with the group was Judge Alex Kozinski of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, a notorious card who is considered a leading candidate to become a Supreme Court Justice. Ward drew in Judge Kozinski for a few rounds. "I had just met him for the first time," Ward said. "I just thought it would be fun."
The chance to meet powerful legal luminaries like Kozinskiis one of the special treats that come with membership in the Federalist Society. Headquartered in Washington, DC, the society was a focus of attention this spring because President George W. Bush used it to recommend nominees for the federal bench, a role traditionally assigned to the more moderate American Bar Association. But its real strength is its chapters in 150 law schools, which allow Federalists to gain access to the conservative elite, putting them in a superior position for competitive jobs with judges, law firms and now the Bush Administration.
Unlike twenty years ago, when liberal federal judges provided the most desirable clerkships for law school graduates, today the best "feeders" to the Supreme Court and White House are Reagan and Bush appointees. Judge Kozinski, who screens potential clerks for Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, says that seeing the Federalist Society on a résumé "tells me you're of a particular philosophy, and I tend to give an edge to people I agree with philosophically." The notion hasn't been lost on law students, some of whom keep two résumés, one with the Federalist Society tacked on. "I have seen some students go to the Federalist Society as a career builder," says Cass Sunstein, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School.
Federalists say the favoritism is long overdue; they grumble about what they describe as oppressive disdain from liberal law professors who make them the butt of jokes and left-leaning students who hiss at them in class. To redress this perceived discrimination, the Federalists have created a system that smacks of affirmative action for conservatives. It's an ironic twist for a group that generally opposes affirmative action, on the grounds that opportunity should be based on merit alone.
But the benefits of Federalist membership go beyond the usual advantages of affirmative action, like job promotion. They include the opportunity to change law, public policy and the judiciary. From law school chapters, students can graduate into one of the society's fifteen "practice groups," which provide a venue to design arguments that will be well received by the conservative wing of the Supreme Court. Practice-group leaders, who often have clerked for the Court or have argued before it, hold meetings and debates to formulate how to push case law toward Federalist principles.
Federalism, in its most basic form, is the idea that the federal government shouldn't encroach on the powers that the Constitution allegedly has reserved to the states. But the Federalist Society is an umbrella organization embracing all right-wing causes. Some members favor libertarian principles of individual rights over "big government"; others advocate strict-constructionist interpretations of the Constitution, which they claim represent the framers' intent. Whatever legal justification is offered to ground these views, the Federalist ideology is in effect a tool to eviscerate Congressional efforts to advance public policy goals where the states have failed. As critics point out, it benefits big business, it's anti-egalitarian, it shuts plaintiffs like the poor and disabled out of the courts, and it rolls back the New Deal notion that the courts have a role to play in helping the downtrodden. While the legal theories may appear tidy, they lack compassion, working to support favorite sons like gun manufacturers and HMOs.
Federalist arguments include: Sexual-harassment and gender-equality laws impose illegitimate burdens on business; the powers of the Environmental Protection Agency should be exercised by the free market or, at most, by local or state government; juries are too unpredictable to be given the power to award punitive damages against large corporations but legitimate enough to be empowered to impose the death penalty; welfare laws by and large should be repealed; hate crimes are not a separate and more reprehensible category of criminal behavior than crimes not motivated by animus toward people of different races or sexual orientation; and the right of the people to keep and bear arms means empowering individuals to take up arms, not just preserving organized state-based militias.
However, the Federalist Society claims it takes no positions on issues.With its tax-exempt status requiring it to stay away from political activity, it hides behind the notion that it is merely a sophisticated speakers' bureau. "We are not a position-taking organization," Eugene Meyer, the society's executive director, told the Washington Post. (Meyer declined to comment for this story.) "We really are interested in discussion and in getting ideas heard." Even Judge Kozinski, a fairly ubiquitous presence at national events, won't say that he's a card-carrying member. "I'm on the mailing lists," he says. "And whether I attend depends on whether it is something I am interested in." The conservative intelligentsia repeats these lines again and again, as if afraid to say the obvious for fear it will reveal their true agenda. Meanwhile, under the dispassionate guise of a debating organization, the Federalist Society is working to prepare a powerful next generation of conservative corporate lawyers, judges, top government officials and decision-makers committed to fundamental change.
How the Federalist Society became a home for young conservatives is a tale told repeatedly by Federalists in trying to explain that they are not the majority but really a besieged minority. In 1982, the history goes, students at Chicago Law School and Yale Law School felt marginalized by the liberal doctrine and ideology that pervaded the curriculum and student body, and decided to form their own organization. The group named itself after James Madison's eighteenth-century Federalist Party, which allegedly favored decentralized government in its later years; and it rallied powerful faculty advisers to help: then-professors Ralph Winter of Yale, now a senior judge on the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and Antonin Scalia of Chicago, now a Supreme Court Justice. The group operated on a shoestring for about a year, at which time student leaders landed seed money from the Institute for Educational Affairs, overseen by neoconservatives Irving Kristol and the late William Simon. Federalist chapters soon cropped up at the top schools around the country.
...much more
==
omg
https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/attacks-on-federal-district-courts-are-the-perfect-distillation-of-whats-wrong-with-the-trump-presidency/
Here’s a proposed step towards the new autocracy that Donald Trump is promoting that we ought to stop in its tracks.
Vice President Mike Pence told the Federalist Society on Wednesday that the Trump administration intends to challenge the right of federal district courtsto issue rulings blocking nationwide policies, arguing that such injunctions are obstructing Trump’s agenda on immigration, health care and other issues.
It’s a perfect distillation of what’s wrong about the direction of the Trump presidency. It is a call for disruption – again – of judicial procedures and jurisdictions, all with the intent to protect any policy announcement by an imperial White House to be questioned. And it is not the White House’s jurisdiction to change.
In effect, the policy being presented by Pence would require multiple court challenges to reach a nationwide effect. The whole point of a federal judiciary is the opposite.
That the courts have become the favored battleground for Trump critics is as much a reflection of the fact that Trump policies have been announced too often in violation of the Constitution, of standing law and procedures, is not a fault of the judicial system. It is an indictment of the Trump policy-making machinery.
Pence argued that nationwide injunctions issued by federal judges “prevent the executive branch from acting, compromising our national security by obstructing the lawful ability of the president to stop threats to the homeland where he sees them.” He said the administration wants to bring the issue to the Supreme Court “to ensure that decisions affecting every American are made either by those elected to represent the American people or by the highest court in the land."
Administration officials have complained that announced policies like a Muslim Travel Ban were blocked in the courts simply get in their way, Constitutional issues apparently be damned.
Simply put, Pence is saying that lower courts should not be allowed to block the government from enforcing a law even if that law is found unconstitutional — they should only be allowed to exempt the specific person or people who sued from the law, argued RawStory.com.
The Supreme Court has never addressed the nationwide extent of the injunction against the ban issued by lower courts because the justices upheld the ban in its entirety. Experts say that for the Supreme Court to issue a definitive ruling on nationwide injunctions, it would first have to rule against the administration on the underlying merits of the case before it. Only at that point could the court consider whether a lower court order should apply nationwide or only to the people who are challenging an administration policy.
Obviously, a nationwide injunction has the effect of stopping “a federal policy everywhere,” as argued in the travel ban case. An alternative is for a judge to issue an order that gives only the people who sued what they want.
In his remarks, Pence quoted from an opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas, who joined the majority opinion upholding the Trump travel ban last June, but also wrote separately to say nationwide injunctions “are legally and historically dubious” and that the high court would have to step in “if federal courts continue to issue them.”
Trump has long railed against district courts, especially the 9th Circuit, on the West Coast, for blocking his initiatives, including efforts to overhaul the nation’s immigration system.
Trump raised the courts issue at a Florida rally, saying, “Activist judges who issue nationwide injunctions based on their personal beliefs undermine democracy and threaten the rule of law.”
Ironically, Trump won a 2-1 ruling from the 9th Circuit just this week that allows the administration to make asylum seekers wait in Mexico for immigration court hearings while a court challenge continues.
Yes, there is an argument that lawyers go “forum shopping” for a believed-to-be friendly court. But adoption of such a ban on national injunctions could adversely affect cases with classes of individual plaintiffs as well. More importantly, these court challenges have become a necessary defense in an increasingly authoritarian presidency. Trump simply wants to eliminate all challenges to any policy he favors.
This one ought to be stopped in its tracks.
==
https://thinkprogress.org/how-conservatives-abandoned-judicial-restraint-took-over-the-courts-and-radically-transformed-3da3115c81c0/
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Child labor laws hurt children. Social Security is an anchor dragging down economic growth, and Medicare should be abolished.
Those are the lessons I learn in a room full of conservative lawyers snacking on lamb sausage and Gorgonzola fondue — a room that’s absolutely packed with top practitioners, right-wing intellectuals and judges. I walked into the room alongside a Texas Supreme Court justice. When I reach to ladle some of the fondue onto a plate full of croutons, my hand accidentally brushes the arm of a federal court of appeals judge.
My sparring partner during much of this closing reception for the Federalist Society’s annual lawyer’s convention, is Ilya Somin, who is a law professor and writer for the Volokh Conspiracy, a popular legal blog that thousands of lawyers, law clerks and judges read every day. As Ilya lays out Social Security’s supposed vices, I wonder if his readers are aware of the breadth of his agenda. I also chide him that voters would have an easy time making up their minds if Republicans campaigned openly on promises toabolish child labor laws and kill Medicare, but he is completely unapologetic for his beliefs. This is not a man who pretends to care about the poor and the middle class in order to sell policies that will lower his own taxes. I leave the reception convinced that he sincerely believes that America’s poor would be better off if they only embraced his vision for a libertarian utopia.
Ilya’s views are not universal, but they are hardly unusual at this gathering of what is arguably the most powerful legal organization in the country. President George W. Bush raided the Federalist Society’s membership to fill the courts with judges who shared his conservative outlook. The convention’s program boasts 15 federal appeals court judges who schlepped to the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C. just to moderate a panel. The annual black tie dinner features Justice Clarence Thomas — another person who believes that federal child labor laws are unconstitutional — as the evening’s main event. And Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito are in the audience despite the fact that they don’t even have a speaking slot at the convention this year. The judges and justices gathered in Washington are not there because they crave the spotlight or because they are doing someone a favor. They are there because the many men and somewhat fewer women who make up the Federalist Society are their people.
Everyone likes to spend time with friends.
Indeed, for many attendees, their annual pilgrimage to Washington for the Federalist Society convention is an opportunity to reconnect with people they’ve known since the Society was formed three decades ago.Some of the most eminent members of the Society were present close to its founding. Justice Scalia was one of the Federalist Society’s first faculty advisers when he was a professor at the University of Chicago.
The single most important fact to understand about the Federalist Society — indeed, about the conservative legal movement in general — is that it once viewed the Supreme Court as its greatest enemy, but the Roberts Court is now the best friend it has in the American government.
Throughout this thirty year history they’ve experienced the highs of the Reagan Revolution and the lows of slowly realizing that George W. Bush was a failed president. They’ve stood together against Roe v. Wade and they’ve stood just as resolutely against Obamacare. But, most importantly, they’ve seen the judiciary reshaped in their image. The single most important fact to understand about the Federalist Society — indeed, about the conservative legal movement in general — is that it once viewed the Supreme Court as its greatest enemy, but the Roberts Court is now the best friend it has in the American government
Cases like Roe are part of the past. Citizens United and the Shelby County case, which gutted the Voting Rights Act, are the wave of the future. After decades of advocating for “judicial restraint,” the lawyers gathered at the Mayflower Hotel have now experienced the ecstasy of watching five men write conservative values directly into the Constitution. And they want to feel that sensation again. And again. And again.
The Moderate Rand Paul
This transformation from a group of lawyers patiently tying their fortunes to Republican electoral victories into activists craving a victory by any means is apparent from the convention’s speaker lineup. In 2007, the Federalist Society demonstrated its clout by hosting the sitting President George W. Bush. One year earlier the convention featured Vice President**Dick Cheney**. Both speeches demonstrated the Federalists’ positioning as an organization well within the GOP’s mainstream. Here was an organization so widely respected by Republicans that it could draw the party’s top two leaders.
This year, however, the only federal lawmakers featured at the convention were Sens. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Ted Cruz (R-TX)— and this is the second year in a row when Lee and Cruz were the only Members of Congress on the convention’s program. At a time when mainline Republicans are very much in a struggle with Tea Party insurgents for control of the GOP, the Federalist Society casts its lot with the two men most responsible for shutting down the government for half of October.
When I share this observation with one of the conference attendees who sat down next to me at the convention’s Saturday luncheon, he agrees with me that Cruz and Lee are divisive figures and even suggests that many of the other people in the room are uneasy about these two senators. Though, when I press him to explain, he quickly confirms that any disagreement with Cruz and Lee is tactical, not substantive. “We like to win,” he tells me, and the two men behind a failed effort to defund Obamacare did not deliver that all-important victory.
He also refers me to a recent New York Times piece contrasting the uncompromising Cruz with Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), a Tea Party senator who’s making friends with establishment figures and working to reelect Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). My dining companion does not hesitate to answer “yes,” when I ask him if he prefers Paul’s approach to Cruz’s.
The Federalist Society convention may be one of the few places on the planet where Rand Paul is praised for a moderate and restrained approach to politics.
The Federalist Society convention may be one of the few places on the planet where Rand Paul is praised for a moderate and restrained approach to politics. As a senate candidate, Paul came out against the federal ban on whites-only lunch counters — claiming that permitting private businesses to discriminate on the basis of race is the “hard part about believing in freedom.”More recently, Paul praised an infamous Supreme Court decision namedLochnerv. New York which gave employers a sweeping constitutional right to exploit their workers.
Lochner ensured that the courts would treat any law benefiting workers with great skepticism. It not only struck down a New York law preventing bakeries from overworking their employees, it formed the basis of later decisions depriving workers of a minimum wage and of the right to organize. Lochner is frequently taught to law students as an example of how judges should never, ever behave. Until recently, Lochner’s position in the constitutional anti-canon was unquestioned even among the hardline conservatives who form the backbone of the Federalist Society. The late Robert Bork, a failed Supreme Court nominee who is still spoken off as a fallen martyr in Federalist Society circles, called Lochner an “abomination” that “lives in the law as the symbol, indeed the quintessence of judicial usurpation of power.”
Damn, It Feels Good To Be A Gangsta
At the Mayflower Hotel, however, many of the guests are downright giddy at the notion of judicial usurpation of power. The Saturday luncheon’s program is a debate between federal appellate Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson and Georgetown law Professor Randy Barnett, with Barnett arguing in favor of the position “Resolved: Courts are Too Deferential to the Legislature.”
As an objective matter, Barnett is not a very successful Supreme Court advocate. He is best known for failing to convince the Court to shrink the federal government’s authority when he argued a case known as *Gonzales v. Raich*, and then for his work as one of the lead advocates behind the failed effort to convince the justices to repeal Obamacare. Yet his fellow Federalist Society members treat him as if he’s a conquering hero. In the convention’s hallways, he’s surrounded by leading practitioners, academics and even judges eager to share his wisdom. At one point, a young woman approaches him simply to say that she wants to “thank him for his eloquence.” If the Federalist Society played walk up music when its speakers took the stage, Barnett’s theme song would be 
”.
Though most of Barnett’s arguments rest on vague rhetoric such as “judges must follow the law,” he does offer one specific example of what he thinks judges should be doing that they currently are not. In a unanimous 1955 decision called *Williamson v. Lee Optical*, the Supreme Court upheld an Oklahoma law providing that no one could fit lenses into an eyeglass frame unless they did so “upon written prescriptive authority of an Oklahoma licensed ophthalmologist or optometrist.” Thus, just as pharmacists cannot simply hand out prescription drugs without authorization from a physician, the Oklahoma law applied a similar rule to merchants who grind lenses for eyeglasses.
More broadly, Lee Optical stands for the proposition that elected officials who are accountable to the voters — and not unelected judges with life tenure — should decide how businesses are regulated in the United States. As Justice William Douglas explained in the Court’s opinion, “[t]he day is gone when this Court uses the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to strike down state laws, regulatory of business and industrial conditions, because they may be unwise, improvident, or out of harmony with a particular school of thought.” Douglas understood that, when a lawmaker supports a law which is unwise or unworkable, the voters can correct the situation by voting that official out of office. But if a judge decides to substitute their own views for those of the electorate, the people are left without recourse.
Barnett looks at Lee Optical, however, and sees something very sinister behind the Supreme Court’s deference to democratically elected officials. The Oklahoma eyeglass law, he tells the Federalist Society, had nothing to do with protecting the health of people who wear glasses. Instead, he claims, state lawmakers enacted this law because the powerful eye doctor lobby prevailed upon the Oklahoma legislature to do so. It is this kind of “rent seeking legislation,” in Barnett’s mind, that the courts have a duty to strike down.
Lest there be any doubt, Barnett is concerned with far more than the price of eyeglasses in Oklahoma. In a 2012 speech at thelibertarian George Mason School of Law, Barnett laid out his theory of *Lee Optical* in much greater detail, and he openly admits that he would go much further than simply overruling this one case — “I would prefer that courts adopt a ‘presumption of liberty’ of the sort the Court seemed to employ in Lochner.” Barnett is offering the promise of cheaper eyeglasses, but what he’s really after is a constitutional right to exploit workers.
Medicare taxes the healthy and the young to pay the salaries of doctors. Public schooling taxes the childless to pay members of teachers unions. Laws banning murder force professional hitmen to give up their livelihood entirely!
Barnett’s narrative about Lee Optical taps into most Americans’ legitimate belief that lawmakers should not be doling out favors to interest groups. Yet it also ignores the far more compelling reason why courts do not second-guess economic regulation. Virtually every single law benefits some interest groups at the expense of others. Medicare taxes the healthy and the young to pay the salaries of doctors. Public schooling taxes the childless to pay members of teachers unions. Laws banning murder force professional hitmen to give up their livelihood entirely! If the mere fact that a law picks economic winners and losers — or even the fact that it came into being because a particular group lobbied for it — were a strike against that law’s constitutionality, then nearly all laws are suspect.
The reason why the courts abandoned the kind of inquiry Barnett proposes is that there is nothing in the Constitution that instructs judges on just how divorced a law’s effects must be from its ostensible purpose before the courts are empowered to strike the law down. And when judges divorce their own decisions from the Constitution’s text, there is nothing preventing them from imposing their views on the American people.
The Dying Breed
The task of defending this traditional argument for a limited judicial role falls to Judge Wilkinson, who offers some populist rhetoric of his own to explain why judges should not overstep their bounds — how would you feel, Wilkinson asks, “if one profession was calling all the shots for you?” Well, maybe the rest of the country doesn’t want to have all of the shots called by lifetime-appointed lawyers!
But it’s soon clear that, if the Federalist Society played walk up music for Judge Wilkinson, his theme song would be 
.” Wilkinson was once one of President Bush’s five finalists for the Supreme Court seat that ultimately went to Chief Justice Roberts, but he harbors no illusions that the Federalist Society’s winds still blow in his direction. Wilkinson demonstrates his commitment to judicial restraint by labeling Roberts decision upholding the Affordable Care Act a “courageous and correct” decision, but he pauses before he does so and invites the audience to boo him if they choose. Though a few isolated claps could be heard at the back of the room, the rest of the conference loudly accepts his invitation.
Indeed, even the moderator of this debate, arch-conservative Fifth Circuit Judge Jerry Smith, opens the discussion by suggesting that he prefers Barnett’s warmed-over Lochnerism to Wilkinson’s deference to democracy. Smith introduces Wilkinson by telling a story about when the two men met many years before — “I was a right-wing activist,” Smith jokes, and Wilkinson “was an establishment Republican.”
There are still a handful of judges like Wilkinson left — Republicans who still believe that Democratic officials should be free to govern if the American people choose to elect Democrats. Judge Jeffrey Sutton, who led one of the Federalist Society’s practice groups before his appointment to the bench, broke with his fellow Federalists and rejected an attack on the Affordable Care Act. Several months later Judge Laurence Silberman, a conservative who once received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George W. Bush, wrote an opinion holding that the legal attacks on health reform have no basis “in either the text of the Constitution or Supreme Court precedent.” But these two men were outliers in a judiciary where Republican judges rarely hesitated to deal a blow to Obamacare.
Both Sutton and Silberman were also noticeably absent from the Federalist Society’s convention.
Similarly, in 2004 the California Supreme Court included six Republicans and only one Democrat. Yet all but one of the court’s Republicans rejected a challenge to a California birth control law that’s strikingly similar to an Obama Administration rule that’s now under attack in the federal courts. The sole dissenter in that case was Justice Janice Rogers Brown, a severely conservative judge who once labeled the New Deal a “socialist revolution” and likened Social Security to cannibalism.
Nine years after Brown was a lonely voice crying out against California’s birth control law, her views on birth control are now shared by the overwhelming majority of Republican federal judges who’ve weighed in on the Obama Administration’s rules. One of those judges, thanks to a federal judicial appointment from President Bush, was Janice Rogers Brown.
Judges like Wilkinson, in other words, could soon become an endangered species. While few judges admit, as Brown does, that they would revive Lochner and fully embrace Randy Barnett’s vision, Republicans simply aren’t much interested in judicial restraint during the age of Obama.
The Failure of Richard Nixon
This embrace of Barnett over Wilkinson is a very recent development. In his 2007 address to the Federalist Society, President Bush labeled judicial activism a direct assault on the will of the people — “some judges give in to temptation and make law instead of interpreting. Such judicial lawlessness is a threat to our democracy, and it needs to stop.” At a 2006 debate with Justice Stephen Breyer co-sponsored by the Federalist Society, Justice Scalia warned that it is 
” for judges to read expansive new rights into the Constitution. In a 2006 address, then-Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff credited the Federalist Society for helping catapult the concept of judicial modesty into the legal mainstream — “in large part because of the work that the Society and others have done, the claim for judicial modesty is sufficiently well-established that everybody understands, even the critics of that claim, that they have to take it seriously and they have to address it.”
The fact that the Society was once a bastion of judicial restraint is easy to understand in light of the landscape at the time of its founding. The year 1982 was actually a rare moment of weakness for conservative lawyers. For most of the nation’s history, America’s judges stood with industrialists against their workers, with unreconstructed racists against African Americans, and with the wealthy against nearly any effort to diminish their fortunes. The Supreme Court gave its blessing to a nationwide sugar monopoly. It declared the income tax unconstitutional. And it gave every federal judge in the country sweeping power to act as union busters. One year later, it embraced the noxious doctrine of separate but equal.
In the coming decades, the justices held child labor laws unconstitutional. They gave employers sweeping rights to exploit their workers. And they spent President Franklin Roosevelt’s first term aggressively trying to frustrate the New Deal. As one of the era’s most influential legal scholars explained, “the conservative classes stand in constant fear of the advent of an absolutism more tyrannical and more unreasoning than any before experienced by man — the absolutism of a democratic majority.” And the United States Supreme Court was more than happy to protect these “conservative classes” from democracy.
Though Roosevelt eventually filled the Court with justices less hostile to self-governance, there was little unifying principle animating his nominees beyond a willingness to permit elected officials to govern. His nominees included civil libertarians, bigots, liberal activists and judicial minimalists. They also included some very fortunate surprises. Justice James Byrnes, who once claimed that lynching is necessary “in order to hold in check the Negro in the south,” quit the Court just over a year after his appointment. Justice Hugo Black, who once belonged to the Ku Klux Klan, emerged as an unexpected defender of civil rights for African Americans. Though Roosevelt’s justices took the law in a much more progressive direction then their predecessors, they accomplished this goal largely by rejecting the kind of activism that animated Lochner. An inactive Court was a progressive Court, at least compared to its predecessors.
Indeed, the very idea that the judiciary could actively push the law in a more liberal direction was virtually unheard of before Chief Justice Earl Warren donned his black robe in 1953. Warren’s tenure, which ushered in modern free speech doctrine, acknowledged the Constitution’s promise of “one person, one vote,” struck a law banning birth control and began with the Court’s celebrated decision in Brown v. Board of Education, was the first time in American history that the Court consistently embraced the Constitution as a progressive document.
By 1968, conservatives resented the Warren Court’s liberalism just as intensely as Roosevelt resented the justices’ previous efforts to impose laissez-faire Social Darwinism upon the rest of the nation. President Richard Nixon campaigned on a promise to appoint “strict constructionists” to the bench and then replaced nearly half of the Court’s members, but Nixon did not even attempt to revive the conservative activism that dominated the Court for much of its history. Indeed, liberalism continued to chalk up big wins even after Nixon’s four appointees were firmly ensconced on the bench. These nominees did provide the votes to impose strict limits on public school desegregation and to declare that poor children do not have a right to the same educational resources as rich children, but three of Nixon’s four justices also joined the modern right’s most hated decision in *Roe v. Wade*. Indeed, Roe was authored by Justice Harry Blackmun, who would eventually abandon his earlier conservatism and become one of the most liberal members of the Court.
They backed a conservative president who campaigned on a promise to appoint conservative judges, and what that got them was legal abortion in all fifty states
For all of these reasons, it’s not hard to imagine the despair conservative lawyers felt when the Federalist Society was founded in 1982. They backed a conservative president who campaigned on a promise to appoint conservative judges, and what that got them was legal abortion in all fifty states.
Restoring Lochner was a pipe dream. What conservatives needed was a truce.
The Constitution in 2000
President Ronald Reagan’s pledge to appoint judges who support “judicial restraint” was that truce. Judicial restraint meant that judges would not question minimum wage laws or engage in union busting, but it also meant that they wouldn’t strike down abortion laws. Judicial restraint meant that a Republican president who won two consecutive landslide electoral victories could carry out this mandate without interference from the unelected branch. And judicial restraint appealed to an electorate who naturally believed that their judgment was superior to that of a few elite members of the legal profession. Meanwhile, the newborn Federalist Society provided Reagan with the evangelists he needed to carry this message to that profession.
Behind the scenes, Reagan’s Justice Department crafted a vision that was quite a bit more nuanced than The Gipper’s pleas for restraint. As Dawn Johnsen has explained, much of the ground work for many of the Rehnquist Court’s decisions from the 1990s and the early 2000s which restricted the federal government’s power to legislate are was laid by the Reagan Justice Department and by President Reagan’s approach to judicial nominees. Among other things, a series of Reagan Era Justice Department documents laid out the administration’s disagreement with many Supreme Court decisions and instructed the Department’s attorneys to advance legal arguments that would promote a conservative legal vision.
For the most part, however, the Rehnquist era’s decisions had a marginal impact on congressional power — at least compared to the sweeping conservative activism now advocated by people like Barnett and Brown. Two of the most widely discussed decisions, U.S. v. Lopez and U.S. v. Morrison, left largely untouched the federal government’s sweeping authority to regulate the national economy — though it did limit its ability to enact non-economic regulation. Others limited the ability of individuals to sue states that violate their civil rights. But nothing in either the Rehnquist Court’s decisions or in the Reagan Administration’s documents predicted the kind of activism now advocated by much of the Federalist Society’s membership. To the contrary, one of the most significant Reagan documents rejects the idea that judges can enforce rights that aren’t specifically mentioned in the Constitution — a position that renders *Lochner*an impossibility:
Where the Constitution does not specify the value to be preferred, there is no principled way for courts to discern and provide preferred treatment for such a value. Whether such a value should be accorded protection, and how much protection it ought to receive, are political matters, reserved by the Constitution to the democratic majorities in the states and the political branches of the federal government.
Nor did this this fear of a judicial overreach cease when Ronald Reagan left office. George W. Bush’s first Supreme Court nominee — Chief Justice Roberts — told the senators overseeing his confirmation hearing that he would “prefer to be known as a modest judge.” He also warned that when judges make policy judgments, “they lose their legitimacy.” Even Justice Alito, a man who’s since emerged as the Supreme Court’s most intelligent and most effective conservative partisan, gave a nod to judicial restraint during his hearing. “[I]f judges begin to go further and announce and decide questions that aren’t before them or issue opinions or statements about questions that aren’t before them,” he told the Senate Judiciary Committee, “what happens when you do that is that you magnify the chances of getting something wrong.”
Endless Possibilities
[W]hat’s the point of judicial restraint when you know the judges aren’t going to do much of anything that you disagree with in the first place?
Roberts and Alito may have spoken of restraint during their confirmation hearings, but their confirmations placed the Supreme Court in conservative hands and obviated the biggest reason why Republicans once craved a modest judiciary. America in the year 2013, with Obama firmly ensconced in the White House and conservatives just as firmly in control of the Supreme Court, was the mirror opposite of the world the Federalist Society’s founders perceived in 1982. And what’s the point of judicial restraint when you know the judges aren’t going to do much of anything that you disagree with in the first place?
Indeed, it is difficult to exaggerate just how radically the judicial landscape has changed since the days when Justice Scalia was an up-and-coming lawyer heading an office in the Nixon Justice Department. The Society wasn’t just founded not that long after Roe v. Wade, it also was born nine years after the Supreme Court came within a hair of equalizing some of the disparities between the rich and the poor. The plaintiffs in *San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez* challenged Texas’ policy of tying part of local school district funding to local property taxes, a practice which ensures that wealthy areas will have better-funded schools than poorer districts simply because property in more affluent areas is worth more. The Court, by a 5–4 vote with all four of Nixon’s appointees in the majority, allowed this system to stand.
In his debate with Professor Barnett, Judge Wilkinson warned the gathered lawyers and judges that if they abandon judicial restraint today, they could open the floodgates to cases like Rodriguez — or even that judges could create entirely new entitlement programs. In the short term, however, this fear is hardly justified. So long as the Roberts Court’s current majority sits, it’s impossible to imagine the Supreme Court revisiting Rodriguez. Or expanding Roe. Or doing much of anything that would move the law in a progressive direction that doesn’t involve the rights of gay people — one of the few areas where so-called swing Justice Anthony Kennedy actually votes like a moderate. Conservatives have little to fear from judicial activism in 2013, so they have little incentive to maintain the truce President Reagan once sought.
Just as importantly, it’s difficult to exaggerate just how much the Obamacare litigation has changed constitutional lawyers’ impressions of what is now possible. When the lawsuit was filed, nearly every informed observer agreed with Judge Silberman that the lawsuit had no basis in constitutional text or Supreme Court precedent. Reagan’s former Solicitor General Charles Fried quipped that he would “eat a hat which I bought in Australia last month made of kangaroo skin” if the justices struck the law down.
Indeed, as Josh Blackman explains in his detailed history of the lawsuits challenging health reform, many of the lawyers closest to the litigation initially believed it was a weak case.David Rivkin,one of the leading trial attorneys challenging the law, admitted to Blackman that his “colleagues were privately skeptical” that Rivkin could win. Randy Barnett himself, after reading a pair of op-eds Rivkin co-authored laying out his legal case, concluded that “[i]f those were the best arguments that the law is unconstitutional, then I figured it must be constitutional.”
And yet this argument that was widely mocked by lawyers across the political spectrum came within one vote of capturing the Supreme Court. If that could happen, why not test the limits of how far these five conservative justices are willing to go?
The Spirit of Liberty
Barnett relies on what Wilkinson describes as the “very vaguest phrases of the Constitution” to support his libertarian vision. He primarily cites the Ninth Amendment, which provides that “[t]he enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people,” and the Fourteenth Amendment’s command that “[n]o State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States,” as the provisions in the Constitution that require a judicial takeover of America’s economic policy. It’s easy to see why Judge Wilkinson would like a little more guidance from the Constitution’s text before he appoints himself overseer of the nation’s economy.
But the belief that judges should be cautious before claiming they’ve found the One True Way to read the Constitution is quite often dismissed at the Federalist Society’s convention. As is Wilkinson’s rejoinder to Barnett — that when the Constitution is uncertain it’s best to defer to people who can actually get voted out of office.
A Friday morning panel that also features Professor Barnett is moderated byfederal appellate Judge Edith Jones,who the Federalist Society staffer tasked with introducing the panel describes as a “longtime friend of the Federalist Society.” Jones is undoubtedly a good friend of the Federalists, but she’s also a fairly notorious figure among the remainder of the legal community. Jones once voted that a man could be executed despite the fact that his lawyer slept through much of his trial. The Houston Chronicle reported that she once advised workers claiming discrimination to “[t]ake a better second job instead of bringing suit.” And she once proposed increasing Texas’ rate of executions by eight to twelvefold.
She’s also under investigation for allegedly claiming that African-Americans and Hispanics are predisposed towards violent crime.
Towards the end of her Friday morning panel, Jones describes the Constitution as “one of the clearest, greatest documents in world history,” a description that earns her a round of applause from the audience. Yet, for all that her fellow Federalists approved of this statement, it is a ridiculous claim that casts a fair amount of doubt upon whether Judge Edith Jones has actually read the Constitution.
Few people question the Constitution’s greatness, and rightly so, but the document is absolutely riddled with ambiguity. What on earth are the “privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States?” What makes a search or seizure “unreasonable?” Which punishments are “cruel and unusual?” If the government wants to deny someone “liberty,” how much “process” is “due?” What is a “public use” of private property? How should the United States guarantee a “republican form of government?” What is the “general welfare of the United States?” Which laws are “necessary and proper” for carrying into effect Congress’ enumerated powers?
Many of these questions perplexed lawyers and public officials even before the Constitution was ratified, and judges, attorneys and scholars continue to struggle with them to this very day. And yet Edith Jones, a woman who believes that the constitutional right to an attorney does not include the right to have that attorney be awake, is certain that she knows exactly what the Constitution means.
Nearly seven decades ago, Judge Learned Hand offered a different assessment of how he should behave if he wishes to honor the framers’ commitment to freedom. “The spirit of liberty,” said Hand, “is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right.”
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wsj
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Federal ethics regulations governing the Justice Department are more generally focused on financial or legal conflicts of interest, rather than past commentary. Justice Department ethics lawyers offer advice, but not strict orders, about whether an official should recuse, though other officials have typically followed their guidance.
Mr. Whitaker has sometimes had a difficult relationship with other department officials, people familiar with the department’s leadership said. He was tapped to replace Jody Hunt, Mr. Sessions’ former chief of staff, who was a longtime Justice Department employee with a more relaxed management style than Mr. Whitaker’s more aggressive approach, people who know both men said.
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He had no relationship with Mr. Sessions or the rest of the department brass before arriving. He was installed at the suggestion of Leonard Leo, head of the influential Federalist Society, upon whom Mr. Trump relies when it comes to picking judges, who admired his style and connections to the conservative legal world, people familiar with the matter said. He has allies in the White House. When Mr. Rosenstein’s departure seemed imminent last month, White House and Justice Department officials crafted a plan to have Mr. Whitaker replace him, people familiar with it said.
Outward signs of the leadership shift were already evident Thursday. Mr. Whitaker attended a formal investiture for new Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in Mr. Sessions’ stead, reciting the lines from the lectern before the sitting justices. When a court clerk read aloud Justice Kavanaugh’s commission, the text concluded with the name of the signatory, Mr. Sessions.
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https://maplight.org/story/trump-judicial-adviser-linked-to-1-million-anonymous-inaugural-donation/
:{:{This story was produced by MapLight in partnership with Fast Company.
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A conservative lawyer who advises President Donald Trump on judicial nominations appears to be linked to an anonymous limited liability company that donated $1 million to the Trump inaugural committee, according to campaign finance records.}:
In December 2016, the Trump committee received a seven-figure check from BH Group, LLC. Journalists have tried for the past year to locate anyone who works for the company. The limited liability company only lists a paralegal at Holtzman Vogel, a conservative law firm, as its organizer in Virginia incorporation records.
A recent New Jersey congressional campaign filing may have helped unravel the mystery. The report lists Leonard Leo, an executive vice president at the Federalist Society, the conservative lawyers network, as an attorney for BH Group. Leo has served as an adviser to Trump on judicial nominations, and he helped leadSupreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch through his Senate confirmation process last year.
Leo and the White House did not respond to questions from MapLight about his role with BH Group. Holtzman Vogel did not respond to MapLight’s request for comment.
The campaign report, filed by Jay Webber’s congressional campaign, was first highlighted by journalist Wendy Siegelman.Leo has beenidentified as the president of the BH Fund, a nonprofit that was given influence over hiring and admissions at George Mason University's law school as part of an anonymous $20 million donation.
The only previous public reference to BH Group was in a tax return filed last year by the Wellspring Committee, a secretive conservative nonprofit. The dark money organization reported paying $750,000 to BH Group in 2016 for public relations.
Wellspring served as the primary financier of the Judicial Crisis Network (JCN), another dark money organization. The network spent $7 million on advertisements to persuade Republicans to block President Barack Obama’s 2016 Supreme Court pick, Merrick Garland. JCN then spent $10 million to support Gorsuch’s confirmation last year. The network is currently pushing the Senate to confirm dozens of other Trump judicial nominees.
According to the Daily Beast, Leo was instrumental in starting both JCN and Wellspring. The organizations provided almost 80 percent of the money raised by theRule of Law Project, a conservative nonprofit that Leo helped lead.
The Federalist Society, where Leo has worked since 1991, has members throughout the senior levels of the Trump administration. Its annual convention last year in Washington, D.C., featured speeches from Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta, and White House Counsel Don McGahn.
The Federalist Society’s top donors have included billionaire libertarian brothers Charles and David Koch; Koch Industries, their energy and chemical conglomerate; the Mercer Family Foundation, funded by hedge fund magnate Robert Mercer; and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the powerful business lobby.
Leo appears to be especially close with Pruitt, who previously served as Oklahoma’s attorney general. Records from Pruitt’s Oklahoma office show he frequently spoke at the Federalist Society events, and the organization paid for Pruitt to fly from Tulsa to Washington, D.C., for only a few hours to meet with Leo in 2016.
An unnamed EPA official recently told the New York Times that when Leo called his office “and asked for something, we did it, it doesn’t matter what it was." Agency records show Leo helped arrange Pruitt’s agenda during his trip to Rome last year. The Washington Post found that Leo originally paid for one of the administrator’s dinners before Pruitt reimbursed him.
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yikes courts
kroll mojo 10th wave of fedsoc
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trumps-judicial-takeover-711200/
no lnx
One evening last November, Don McGahn, the top lawyer in the Trump White House, walked onstage in an opulent ballroom at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C. He looked out at the audience of several hundred judges, lawyers, clerks and law students seated under a pair of glittering chandeliers that hung from a ceiling accented in gold. McGahn, who rarely gives interviews or speeches, had come to speak at the annual conference of the Federalist Society, the powerful network of conservative lawyers, and the occasion felt like a homecoming and a victory lap.
Over the past two decades — including five years serving on the Federal Election Commission — McGahn has become an ideological warrior battling what he sees as the tyranny of the federal government. He parlayed his campaign-finance expertise into a job as Donald Trump’s lawyer. After the election, Trump rewarded McGahn with the job of White House counsel, a perch from which McGahn has spearheaded the administration’s unprecedented campaign to reshape the American judicial system, filling courts with judges who share Trump’s goals of dismantling environmental protection, rolling back civil and reproductive rights, and gutting labor laws — in other words, destroying the so-called administrative state. “These efforts to reform the regulatory state begin with Congress and the executive branch,” McGahn said in his speech, “but they ultimately depend on courts.”
On the campaign trail, Trump told evangelicals and other wavering Republicans they had no choice but to vote for him: “You know why? Supreme Court judges, Supreme Court judges.” He talked about judges nonstop and even released a list of 21 potential Supreme Court picks that he had gathered with the help of the Federalist Society and the archconservative Heritage Foundation. He would enter office with the most judicial vacancies since Bill Clinton — largely thanks to Republican filibustering of Obama’s nominees — and his administration has filled those vacancies as fast as possible.
As of this writing, Trump has put 26 new judges onto the appellate courts, more than any other chief executive at this point in the presidency. He has also nominated over 100 district-court judges and gotten 26 of those picks confirmed. These judges are overwhelmingly young, ideological and now set to serve lifetime appointments. And then, of course, there’s Justice Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s first pick for the Supreme Court, and Judge Brett Kavanaugh, the president’s second Supreme Court nominee, who stands a strong chance of confirmation. “Whatever anyone wants to say about President Trump, he was very explicit about which judges he wanted, and he’s gone about appointing them,” says Michael Gerhardt, a law professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. “He made a promise and they’re keeping it.”
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What unites these judges is the radical legal doctrine of originalism— that the text of the Constitution should be understood only as it was intended when written more than 230 years ago. Originalism was long seen as a fringe philosophy; taken to its logical extreme, an originalist reading of the Constitution could mean a country without same-sex marriage, federal child-labor laws or the Americans With Disabilities Act. Today, however, originalism is the dominant legal philosophy on the right and the litmus test for any judge appointed by President Trump.
That’s in large part due to the influence of Leonard Leo, who sat in the front row for McGahn’s speech. An owlish 52-year-old lawyer and operative, Leo is the executive vice president of the Federalist Society, where he has played a pivotal role grooming a generation of conservative lawyers and supplying dozens of names to the White House for judicial vacancies. (He has advised on the past three successful Republican picks for the Supreme Court.) “Our opponents of judicial nominees frequently claim the president has outsourced his selection of judges,” McGahn said. “That is completely false. I’ve been a member of the Federalist Society since law school, still am, so frankly it seems like it’s been in-sourced.”
Leonard Leo, executive VP of the Federalist Society, has helped the White House appoint an unprecedented number of federal judges. Photo: Mark Peterson/Redux
Behind all the chaos and upheaval of the Trump administration, McGahn, Leo and Republican leaders including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have steadily filled the courts with future Clarence Thomases and Antonin Scalias. In Donald Trump, they have found the perfect vehicle for executing a judicial takeover. “We’re now looking at the possibility of as many as three Supreme Court vacancies and more than 200 lower-court seats to fill just in these next few years,” Leo said last year. “We are at this unique point in history.”
In the process of filling the empty seats, McGahn and Co. have shown a willingness to look past extreme and inflammatory comments made by judicial nominees. Damien Schiff, a Trump pick for the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, blogged in 2007 that Justice Anthony Kennedy was a “judicial prostitute” because of his frequent swing votes. John Bush, an appointee to the Sixth Circuit, likened Roe v. Wade to the 1857 Dred Scott decision, which denied citizenship to black people. Using an anonymous byline, Bush also promoted birther conspiracies about President Obama.
Not surprisingly, many of Trump’s picks have championed hard-line conservative positions on LGBTQ equality, civil rights, environmental regulation, consumer protection and more. These are the kinds of judges who hesitate to say that Brown v. Board of Education was correctly decided, or rule that campaign-finance laws are unconstitutional. They would almost certainly overturn Roe if given the chance. “These nominees appear to have been chosen because they check ideological boxes, rather than because they represent the best and the brightest,” says Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. “This is a clear strategy to stack our courts for generations.”
It has taken brute force and legislative cunning to engineer an overhaul of the courts. During the Obama years, Senate Republicans — led by McConnell — filibustered so many picks for the bench that then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid used the “nuclear option” to abolish the 60-vote threshold for lower-court nominees. Reid said McConnell’s tactics had left him a choice: “Continue like we are or have democracy?” Obama rushed through a slew of confirmations, but Republicans won back the Senate in 2014. McConnell, a master tactician and consummate cynic, was running the show. He not only denied Obama the chance to fill a Supreme Court seat after Scalia’s death, but the Senate confirmed just 22 judicial nominees in Obama’s final two years, reportedly the lowest number since the end of Harry Truman’s second term, leaving 112 vacancies for Trump.
A week after Trump’s victory, McConnell gave McGahn a call to say the new president had a chance to make history. “The impact that this administration could have on the courts,” McConnell later told Time, “is the most long-lasting impact we could have.”
McConnell and Senate Republicans have tossed out one norm after another to whisk Trump’s nominees through the confirmation process. They eliminated the filibuster for Supreme Court picks, paving the way for Gorsuch’s confirmation. They’ve held confirmation hearings for two nominees at the same time, limiting how long each senator can question them. They have disregarded the blue-slip tradition of seeking the approval of both home-state senators before confirming a nominee. And with the exception of George W. Bush, Trump is the only president to dismiss the role of the American Bar Association, which interviews and rates the quality of judicial picks. The ABA rated four of Trump’s nominees “not qualified,” two of them by a unanimous decision. (That represented 25 percent of all “not qualified” ratings for the past five presidencies.)
Trump has also suffered some setbacks. One pick for the U.S. District Court of D.C., Matthew Petersen, withdrew his nomination after failing at his confirmation hearing to answer questions a first-year law student should know. Another nominee for appellate court, Ryan Bounds, went up in smoke when Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., vowed to oppose him due to past writings that were widely seen as racist. And then there was Brett Talley. A 36-year-old lawyer, horror novelist and ghost hunter with scant courtroom experience, Talley joined the Trump administration in early 2017 working in the Justice Department office that selects and vets judicial nominees. Trump nominated him later that year for a district-court opening in Alabama, but journalists soon discovered that Talley had written comments on a sports-fan message board trashing Muslims, making light of statutory rape and defending the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Talley withdrew his nomination — only to land a plush job as an assistant U.S. attorney in northern Virginia.
But at the appellate-court level — the “de facto Supreme Court to the vast majority” of Americans, as Feinstein once put it — Trump appointed more judges in his first year than any previous president since the appeals courts were created in 1891.Appellate courts hear 59,000 cases a year, compared with just 70 or 80 for the Supreme Court. Trump is on pace to flip three of the 13 appellate courts from liberal to conservative in his first term alone. “These are the judges that have the greatest influence,” says John Malcolm of the Heritage Foundation. “The buck stops at the courts of appeals.”
It is too soon to say how influential Trump’s dozens of judicial picks will be, but the early returns are what you’d expect. Judge Amul Thapar, a Trump appointee on the Sixth Circuit, helped uphold Ohio’s controversial lethal-injection program and a Michigan county’s tradition of beginning government meetings with Christian prayer. Recently appointed Judge James Ho on the Fifth Circuit issued fiery opinions in two Texas cases, about campaign-finance limits and a law concerning the burial of fetal remains. Ho’s opinion on the latter case — at one point he refers to the “moral tragedy of abortion” — left no doubt about his opposition to Roe. “It is hard to imagine,” he wrote, “a better example of how far we have strayed from the text and original understanding of the Constitution than this case.”
If Republicans retain control of the Senate this fall — to say nothing of Trump in 2020 — McGahn and Leo and McConnell could have as much as 20 percent of the American judicial system to fill. As Heritage’s Malcolm puts it, “This is the president’s legacy.”
https://kpfa.org/episode/talkies-august-28-2018/
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Leo, one of Trump's top advisers on the latest US Supreme Court vacancy, feels good about their odds of getting a justice confirmed before the next court term starts in October.
The White House is freshening up its research on Trump's short list of 25 names, and interviews with candidates will start next week, Leo said in a phone interview with BuzzFeed News on Thursday. There is "pressure" to announce a nominee within the next two to three weeks, he said, before Trump leaves for the NATO summit in mid-July. Trump has been asking questions about a few names, and wants to personally interview finalists like he did for the late justice Antonin Scalia's seat last year, Leo added.
Leo doesn't work in the White House, but he is once again poised to play a major role in the nomination and confirmation process. Within hours of the news Wednesday that Justice Anthony Kennedy would step down this summer, a spokesperson for Leo confirmed that he had taken a leave of absence as executive vice president of the Federalist Society — the influential conservative lawyers group — to advise the president. He similarly served as an outside adviser to Trump last year on the Scalia vacancy.
"I'm very heartened by the president's determination and enthusiasm. I'm impressed by the discipline he has shown in laying down standards and sticking to them because other presidents haven't done that historically," Leo said.
The Federalist Society has long served as a pipeline to the bench for conservative lawyers under Republican presidents. The majority of Trump's nominees for federal appeals court seats are or have been members of the group, and Trump has said that the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank, helped craft his Supreme Court short list. Justice Neil Gorsuch, a longtime Federalist Society member, was the group's featured speaker at its annual convention in Washington, DC, in November. He embraced Leo as he came onto the stage to deliver his remarks.
Democrats have accused Trump of outsourcing judicial nominations to the Federalist Society and other conservative groups who aren't accountable to the public and whose backers aren't always known. The Federalist Society publishes a list of donors in its annual report; in 2017, a quarter of the benefactors in the $100,000-plus tier were anonymous. The administration has countered that there is nothing nefarious about the president tapping outside sources for guidance.
Leo told BuzzFeed News that he was confident the White House could get a nominee ready to roll out by the time Trump leaves for Europe, noting that the White House had already gone through this process with Gorsuch; Trump announced Gorsuch as his nominee for Scalia's seat on Jan. 31, less than two weeks after he took office.
Trump started releasing the names on his short list in May 2016, and the current list of 25 has been in place since November. Asked if he expected to do anything different from how the Gorsuch nomination and confirmation played out, Leo said they didn't expect to.
"The Gorsuch model works," Leo said. "The president hit it out of the park by deciding to put out a list and deciding to pick somebody, as he put it, who is extraordinarily well-qualified and not weak and will interpret the Constitution the way the framers intended it to be."
The White House is still in the process of assembling the team of lawyers who will manage the nomination and confirmation process, Leo said. White House counsel Don McGahn will take the lead inside the White House, and Assistant Attorney General Beth Williams, who leads the Justice Department's Office of Legal Policy, will manage much of the activity at DOJ, especially once a nominee is in place.
Leo wouldn't get into too many specifics about who the frontrunners are at this point — no one is off the list, he said — but he said that judges who were finalists for Scalia's seat remained "serious contenders," and that the public speculation so far among lawyers and journalists about who was likely to be at the top of the list was "relatively accurate."
Besides Gorsuch, Trump last year reportedly interviewed 3rd Circuit Judge Thomas Hardiman, 6th Circuit Judge Amul Thapar (Thapar at the time was a federal district judge; he later became Trump's first lower-court nominee), and 11th Circuit Judge William Pryor Jr.
Other judges considered frontrunners include DC Circuit Judge Brett Kavanaugh, a Kennedy clerk and a veteran of the George W. Bush administration; 6th Circuit Judge Raymond Kethledge, also a Kennedy clerk; and 7th Circuit Judge Amy Coney Barrett, a former law professor who was nominated and confirmed last year to the appeals court.
With Republicans in control of the Senate, there is nothing Democrats can do to block a Trump nominee if Republicans stick together. But some Senate Democrats and liberal advocacy groups have already launched full-throated attacks on Trump's short list in its entirety, warning that a more conservative justice would imperil the abortion protections outlined in Roe v. Wade and the Obergefell decision legalizing same-sex marriage, and would shift the court to the right on issues ranging from voting rights to environmental regulation.
Leo said he had expected the left to raise what he characterized as the Roe "bogeyman." Trump has pledged to appoint pro-life judges and has said he wants to see Roe overturned. But Leo dismissed concerns about the future of Roe, saying liberals had expressed that fear each time a vacancy opened up under a Republican president, and it hadn't happened. He did note that since Roe, the court had trended toward upholding various state restrictions on abortion.
"We've been over this time and again and the fact of the matter is that Roe v. Wade is still on the books," he said.
But as BuzzFeed News reported Wednesday, many advocates on both sides of the abortion debate saw Kennedy as the major impediment to a reversal of Roe, and are preparing to pour resources into the upcoming confirmation fight.
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https://www.npr.org/2018/06/28/624416666/what-is-the-federalist-society-and-how-does-it-affect-supreme-court-picks
HOLLIS-BRUSKY: The Federal Society (ph) grows up alongside the Reagan Revolution. You have a small group of law students at elite law schools who are conservative and libertarian-leaning. They see that conservative ideas and ideology are politically ascendant. And yet in their elite law schools, they don't see those ideas represented in their curriculum. And so they decide that they need to found an organization, a club that would bring conservative and libertarian voices, scholars and perspectives into their law schools.
KELLY: And interestingly, you write one of their earliest faculty mentors that they brought in was Antonin Scalia.
HOLLIS-BRUSKY: A lot of Scalia's ideas in writing about originalism and original meaning became deeply ingrained into the kind of founding consciousness of the Federal Society. And the organization really grew up as a organization that promoted Antonin Scalia's conservative judicial philosophy.
KELLY: So how does this play out if we set this against the list that President Trump says? He's got 25 names. He's going to find his next Supreme Court nominee from that list. What role did the Federalist Society play in shaping that list?
HOLLIS-BRUSKY: I would say one very direct role is that Leonard Leo, who was the executive vice president of the Federal Society, took leave from the society to construct that list for President Trump. And so that list is in many ways a product of the Federal Society and its network.
KELLY: Leo in interviews has said the president called and asked him for a list, asked him to come up with this.
HOLLIS-BRUSKY: Yeah. And I think one strong indicator of Federal Society influence here - if you think about Trump's other Cabinet nominees, his secretary nominees, he tends to gravitate towards nepotism, people who have been loyal, faithful. They're his friends. When you look at his list of judges and the people that he's put on the bench, it's been entirely controlled by the Federal Society. And that is an indicator of the pull that the Federal Society has within that space, that Trump wouldn't dare nominate someone who was just a family friend.
KELLY: Do we have any way of knowing how they may be seeking to exert influence on the pick, on who might rise to the top of this list of 25 names?
HOLLIS-BRUSKY: I think Leo, as a gatekeeper, has a lot of power and influence right now. And so as they're walking through this list of nominees, they're of course taking into consideration politics, which senators are more or less likely to vote for particular nominees. So there's broader political considerations here. But Trump has said and the Federal Society has said as much - their focus is on getting verifiably conservative judges on the court and young judges and justices.
KELLY: So that they can exert influence for longer?
ay replace Kennedy on the Supreme Court bench after his retirement goes into effect on July 31, according to the White House in November:
Amy Coney Barrett of Indiana, U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit
Keith Blackwell of Georgia, Supreme Court of Georgia
Charles Canady of Florida, Supreme Court of Florida
Steven Colloton of Iowa, U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit
Allison Eid of Colorado, U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit
Britt Grant of Georgia, Supreme Court of Georgia
Raymond Gruender of Missouri, U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit
Thomas Hardiman of Pennsylvania, U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit
Brett Kavanaugh of Maryland, U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit
Raymond Kethledge of Michigan, U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit
Joan Larsen of Michigan, U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit
Mike Lee of Utah, senator
Thomas Lee of Utah, Supreme Court of Utah
Edward Mansfield of Iowa, Supreme Court of Iowa
Federico Moreno of Florida, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida
Kevin Newsom of Alabama, U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit
William Pryor of Alabama, U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit
Margaret Ryan of Virginia, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces
David Stras of Minnesota, U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit
Diane Sykes of Wisconsin, U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit
Amul Thapar of Kentucky, U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit
Timothy Tymkovich of Colorado, U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit
Robert Young of Michigan, Supreme Court of Michigan (retired)
Don Willett of Texas, U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit
Patrick Wyrick of Oklahoma, Supreme Court of Oklahoma
ref
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/25/business/economy/labor-court-conservatives.html?smid=tw-share
Behind a Key Anti-Labor Case, a Web of Conservative Donors
By NOAM SCHEIBER and KENNETH P. VOGELFEB. 25, 2018
In the summer of 2016, government workers in Illinois received a mailing that offered them tips on how to leave their union. By paying a so-called fair-share fee instead of standard union dues, the mailing said, they would no longer be bound by union rules and could not be punished for refusing to strike.
“To put it simply,” the document concluded, “becoming a fair-share payer means you will havemore freedom.”
The mailing, sent by a group called the Illinois Policy Institute, may have seemed like disinterested advice. In fact, it was one prong of a broader campaign against public-sector unions, backed by some of the biggest donors on the right. It is an effort that will reach its apex on Monday, when the Supreme Court hears a case that could cripple public-sector unions by allowing the workers they represent to avoid paying fees.
One of the institute’s largest donors is a foundation bankrolled by Richard Uihlein, an Illinois industrialistwho has spent millions backing Republican candidates in recent years, including Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Gov. Bruce Rauner of Illinois.
Tax filings show that Mr. Uihlein has also been the chief financial backer in recent years of the Liberty Justice Center, which represents Mark Janus, the Illinois child support specialist who is the plaintiff in the Supreme Court case.
And Mr. Uihlein has donated well over $1 million over the years to groups like the Federalist Society that work to orient the judiciary in a more conservative direction. They have helped produce a Supreme Court that most experts expect to rule in Mr. Janus’s favor.
The case illustrates the cohesiveness with which conservative philanthropists have taken on unions in recent decades. “It’s a mistake to look at the Janus case and earlier litigation as isolated episodes,” said Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, a Columbia University political scientist who studies conservative groups. “It’s part of a multipronged, multitiered strategy.”
In doing so, these donors have not just brought labor to the brink of crisis but threatened the Democratic Party as well.
Amid changes in the campaign finance landscape and the decline of private-sector unions, the party and its candidates have increasingly relied on major public unions for funding, including hundreds of millions of dollars in direct and indirect spending during the 2016 presidential cycle. Those unions include the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, whose Council 31 is the defendant in the Janus case.
Mark Janus, the plaintiff in a Supreme Court case challenging mandatory union fees, at the Illinois State Capitol. Credit Whitney Curtis for The New York Times
A recent paper by Mr. Hertel-Fernandez and two colleagues may foretell what Democrats can expect if Mr. Uihlein and his fellow philanthropists succeed. It found that the Democratic share of the presidential vote dropped by an average of 3.5 percentage points after the passage of so-called right-to-work laws allowing employees to avoid paying union fees. That is larger than Democrats’ margin of defeat in several states that could have reversed their last three presidential losses.
And that is clearly on the mind of Republicans. In a recent interview, the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, acknowledged the potential of the Janus case to hurt Democratic fund-raising for the coming midterm elections. “In states where they got rid of the automatic deduction and employees figured they could keep their own money, they did,” he said. “So it could have an impact.”
Conservative groups aren’t alone in locking arms to advance an ideological agenda. For decades, liberal donors and foundations, sometimes working together through coalitions like the Democracy Alliance, have promoted liberal goals in a variety of ways. Some backed groups, like the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders, that used litigation to move American society leftward.
But the extent of the coordination on the right often dwarfs liberal efforts. Especially on the state level, conservative groups are “doing different things, mobilizing different constituencies,” Mr. Hertel-Fernandez said. “But they’re all working with one another. You don’t see the same thing on the left.”
As the percentage of unionized private-sector workers has collapsed in recent decades, public-sector unions, which have held steady in the mid-30s since the early 1980s, have increasingly become a target.
Conservatives chafe at the unions’ political influence, which they believe not only props up the Democratic Party but also drives up government spending and skews public policy on issues like education.
In 2011, Wisconsin rolled back the right of most public unions to bargain over anything other than wages and eliminated the requirement that nonmembers pay fees. The portion of unionized public-sector workers in the state plummeted from half to just over one-quarter within five years.
In seeking to produce similar results nationally, conservative donors have created a symbiosis between groups aiming to overturn Supreme Court precedent favorable to unions and groups that take advantage of those rulings to drain unions of members.
The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation of Wisconsin, which had over $800 million in assets in 2016, has funded both kinds of organizations.
In a 2014 case brought by a group that had received more than $1 million in contributions from the Bradley Foundation, the Supreme Court ruled that home-care aides and other “partial-public employees” paid through Medicaid could not be forced to pay fair-share fees if they left their unions. Unions say these fees, typically about 80 percent of standard dues, are necessary to compensate them for representing nonmembers in bargaining and grievance proceedings.
A fund-raising solicitation from the Illinois Policy Institute, one of several groups that have fueled efforts to weaken public-sector unions.
Then in 2016, the court heard a case, Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, that could have struck down fair-share fee requirements for all public employees represented by unions in more than 20 states, including California, Illinois and New York. The case was brought by a group that has received millions of dollars from the Bradley Foundation.
During 2015 and 2016, the foundation also substantially increased its contributions, totaling well over $1 million, to groups like the Independence Institute of Colorado and the Freedom Foundation of Washington State. Those groups have used such tools as direct mail, phone calls and door knocking to persuade public-sector workers to give up union membership.
Richard Graber, the chief executive of the Bradley Foundation, said the foundation avoided short-term tactical considerations in its giving. But he acknowledged that the increase was driven partly by the recent Supreme Court developments, which promised to make such opt-out campaigns more compelling for union members. (Some conservative groups are currently raising money for even more ambitious opt-out campaigns to take advantage of a favorable ruling this year.)
Our columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin and his Times colleagues help you make sense of major business and policy headlines — and the power-brokers who shape them.
In February 2016, the month after the Supreme Court heard the Friedrichs case, Justice Antonin Scalia died, depriving conservatives of a decisive fifth vote to strike down mandatory union fees. That gave the Liberty Justice Center, backed by Mr. Uihlein, a chance to try again.
Few philanthropists have funded a more sweeping assault on labor than Mr. Uihlein, who with his wife, Elizabeth, founded a Wisconsin-based shipping supply company called Uline.
Mr. Uihlein is an ardent conservative who considers many Republican office holders too moderate on fiscal and social issues, according to those who know him.
“It’s not just politics for him,” said his friend Leonard A. Leo, the Federalist Societyexecutive vice president, who declined to offer specifics on Mr. Uihlein’s views. “I think he is philosophically attuned to conservative ideas,” added Mr. Leo, whom the Trump White House enlisted to shepherd the Supreme Court nomination of Neil M. Gorsuch, Justice Scalia’s successor.
The Uihleins have spent tens of millions of dollars over the past decade supporting Republican candidates and committees. That includes contributions to super PACs backing the 2016 presidential campaigns of Mr. Walker and Mr. Cruz, and at least $250,000 to help Mr. Walker survive a 2012 recall election. (Mr. Uihlein did not respond to a request for comment.)
The Uihleins appear to be preoccupied with state employee pensions and the unions that negotiate them.
“Bruce is the only one in the race who isn’t beholden to public-sector unions,” Mr. Uihlein said of Mr. Rauner, the year before his 2014 election as Illinois governor, in an interview with Crain’s Business Chicago. The Uihleins gave more than $2.5 million to his campaign.
Justice Neil Gorsuch speaking in November before the Federalist Society, which seeks a judiciary aligned with conservative values. He filled the Supreme Court seat vacated by Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016. Credit Sait Serkan Gurbuz/Associated Press
Mr. Rauner has been a major ally in the fight against public-sector unions. Shortly after taking office in 2015, he challenged the constitutionality of mandatory union fees in federal court.
By the time a judge ruled that Mr. Rauner lacked standing for his lawsuit, the Illinois Policy Institute, which drew more than one-third of its $5.8 million in revenue that year from Mr. Uihlein’s foundation, had found a viable plaintiff to replace him: Mark Janus. The Liberty Justice Center and the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which Mr. Uihlein also contributes to, represented Mr. Janus in court.
Since then, the policy institute has sought to persuade state employees to leave their union through its mailing campaign. It said it had obtained employees’ names through Freedom of Information Act requests.
Mr. Rauner’s administration has amplified the institute’s message, and vice versa. In an August 2016 email to state workers, the administration highlighted a benefit of giving up union membership and urged workers to visit a website that would help them do so. The policy institute soon promoted the same website and provided similar guidance in its mailings to state workers.
Mr. Uihlein’s foundation has supplemented these efforts by supporting a nonprofit called Think Freely Media, which uses storytelling techniques to champion free-market ideas, including right-to-work laws. The Uihlein foundation contributed more than $1.5 million to Think Freely from 2014 to 2016, the last year for which tax records are available.
At the center of this network is a longtime conservative activist named John Tillman, who serves as the chief executive of the Illinois Policy Institute as well as the chairman of the Liberty Justice Center and Think Freely Media.
In an interview, Mr. Tillman, who managed a call center earlier in his career and talked up his “marketing-centric approach” to promoting free enterprise, said the institute is fighting the enormous power of union leaders but is not anti-union per se.
“In the late 1800s, early 20th century, business owners had all the power, and workers had very little power,” he said. “Unions and collective bargaining emerged as a way to level the playing field. I think it was an amazing story of success.”
But in other contexts, Mr. Tillman has been less conciliatory.
In a fund-raising solicitation by the policy institute in December, Mr. Tillman claimed credit for helping more than 2,600 workers leave their union, resulting in a loss of $1.2 million in union revenue.
“It’s time for Illinois to throw off the shackles of big labor and big government,” he wrote.
“When you and I look around Illinois and see the devastation the union-dominated status quo has inflicted,” he continued, “we simply have no choice.”
Follow Noam Scheiber and Kenneth P. Vogel on Twitter: @noamscheiber, @kenvogel
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http://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/360598-meet-the-powerful-group-behind-trumps-judicial-nominations
Trump administration has been filling judicial vacancies in rapid succession, with the majority of nominees having one thing in common: ties to the Federalist Society.
Groups on the left have accused the White House of outsourcing the nomination process to the Washington, D.C.-based group as it seeks to stack the courts with conservative judges.
Of the 13 judicial nominees confirmed since President Trump took office, 10 are either current or former Federalist Society members or regular speakers at its events. Eight of the 10 appellate Trump nominees pending before the Senate have ties to the group.
Leonard Leo, executive vice president of the Federalist Society, is a White House adviser on judicial nominations. He reportedly played a key role in Trump’s nomination of Neil Gorsuch to replace the late Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court.
Leo declined numerous requests to be interviewed for this story, as did other Federalist Society staff members.
Steven Calabresi, who co-founded the society in 1980 and serves as chairman of its 12-member board of directors, said Leo offers recommendations to the White House on his own time and in his private capacity as an individual citizen — not as the society’s executive vice president.
At the same time, he acknowledged the nonprofit organization, which has about 60,000 members nationwide, has become a clearinghouse of sorts for candidates.
“I would say I think the Federalist Society has come to play over the last 30 years for Republican presidents something of the role the American Bar Association has traditionally played for Democratic presidents,” Calabresi said in an interview with The Hill.
“The last two Republican presidents have disregarded ABA ratings, and I think they are relying on the Federalist Society to come up with qualified nominees.”
Calabresi formed the group to gather likeminded conservatives at a time when he said law schools catered to liberals. Members are known for holding originalist views of the Constitution.
Four of the nine justices on the Supreme Court have strong ties to the group. Gorsuch and Justice Clarence Thomas regularly speak at events, and Justice Samuel Alito said during his confirmation hearings that he was a proud member.
Though Chief Justice John Roberts said he did not recall being a member of the group during his confirmation process, The Washington Post reported in 2001 that he was listed in the group’s 1997–1998 directory as a member of its steering committee.
The Federalist Society, which does not lobby for legislation, take policy positions or sponsor or endorse nominees and candidates for public service, is funded through grants, membership and donations.
Top donors include the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, David Koch and Koch Industries Inc., which each contributed $100,000 last year. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce contributed $500,000, according to the society’s 2016 annual report. Revenue and support totaled $26.75 million in 2016.
The society says its main mission is to create a forum for legal experts of opposing views to interact with members of the legal profession, the judiciary, law students and academics, including through events such as the National Lawyer’s Convention that begins Thursday in Washington.
The three-day convention will include keynote speeches from Gorsuch, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and White House Counsel Donald McGahn.
The Federalist Society’s rise has come as the American Bar Association has seen its standing fall.
McGahn notified the ABA in a letter in March that the White House was ending the long-standing practice of inviting the independent ABA Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary to review the professional qualifications of prospective nominees to the lower federal courts before nominations are made.
Matt Cimento, an ABA spokesman, said the association doesn’t comment on the Federalist Society.
“You can look at their record and their positions and make your own determination,” he said when told of Calabresi’s remark that the society is now the ABA for Republican administrations.
The ABA is still giving ratings, but not until after the nominations are announced.
So far, it has given four Trump nominees the rare “not qualified” rating.
Those given the rating include Brett Talley, who has just three years of experience practicing law and has never tried a case before.
The Senate Judiciary Committee approved Talley’s nomination to a federal district judgeship in Alabama, and he is expected to be confirmed by a majority vote in the Senate, which is controlled by Republicans.
On Monday, The New York Times reported that Talley had failed to disclose his marriage to Ann Donaldson, who is McGahn’s chief of staff.
Lena Zwarensteyn, director of strategic engagement at the liberal American Constitution Society, said the ratings show the administration is cutting corners in nominating conservative judges with little experience.
“Membership [in the group] might not be determinative, but the Federalist Society has their eye on who they want on the bench and the administration is giving deference to them,” she said.
The Federalist Society has long been used by GOP presidents as a resource to nominate judges.
Federalist Society members have occupied key positions in the White House and the Department of Justice since the group’s founding. Former GOP Presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush all relied on Federalist Society members inside or outside their administrations in making judicial nominations.
Reagan Attorney General Edwin Meese, an early supporter of the group, now sits on the society’s board of directors. C. Boyden Gray, who served as George H.W. Bush’s White House counsel, is also on the board, as is Michael Mukasey, who served as U.S. attorney general under George W. Bush.
“I expect someone from the Trump administration will be added to the board of directors as well,” Calabresi said.
Liberal groups say Trump’s team is relying too much on the Federalist Society.
“The public and Americans want a judiciary of men, women, people of color, individuals of all political beliefs and professional experiences,” said Nan Aron, president of the liberal Alliance for Justice.
She said membership in any one group shouldn’t be a touchstone for nominees — and that when it is, you can get a roster of judges that doesn’t look like America.
The Associated Press reported this week that Trump is nominating white men to the federal courts at a rate not seen in decades. The report found that 91 percent of his nominees are white and 81 percent are men.
“It’s harmful for a judiciary to be comprised solely of individuals from one membership group, particularly one that supports the confirmation of individuals whose main criteria is a hostility to women’s rights and LGBTQ protections,” Aron said.
Michael Avery, a professor at the Suffolk University Law School who wrote “The Federalist Society: How Conservatives Took the Law Back from Liberals,” said he disagrees with the society’s politics, but admires how successful the organization has been in reshaping the federal judiciary.
“They have culture hegemony in legal quarters that matter when it comes to appointing judges and they achieve that by having worked to build influence, build membership,” he said.
==
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/17/the-conservative-pipeline-to-the-supreme-court
Annals of Law
April 17, 2017 Issue
The Conservative Pipeline to the Supreme Court
With the Federalist Society, Leonard Leo has reared a generation of originalist élites. The selection of Neil Gorsuch is just his latest achievement.
By Jeffrey Toobin
==
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist_Society
The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, most frequently called the Federalist Society, is an organization of conservatives and libertarians seeking reform of the current American legal system in accordance with a textualist or originalist interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. It is one of the nation's most influential legal organizations.[6] It has played a significant role in moving the national debate to the right on the Second Amendment, campaign finance regulation, state sovereignty, and the Commerce Clause. It plays a central role in networking and mentoring young conservative lawyers.[7]
The society began at Yale Law School, Harvard Law School, and the University of Chicago Law School in 1982 as a student organization that challenged what its founding members perceived as the orthodox American liberal ideology found in most law schools. The society asserts that it "is founded on the principles that the state exists to preserve freedom, that the separation of governmental powers is central to our constitution, and that it is emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is, not what it should be."[1]
The society is a membership organization that features a student division, a lawyers division, and a faculty division. The society currently has chapters at more than 200 United States law schools and claims a membership exceeding 10,000 law students. The lawyers division comprises more than 60,000 practicing attorneys (organized as "lawyers chapters" and "practice groups" within the division) in eighty cities.[2] Its headquarters are in Washington, D.C. Through speaking events, lectures, and other activities, the society provides a forum for legal experts of opposing views to interact with members of the legal profession, the judiciary, law students, and academics.[2][8]
- :{1:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{Background:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
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Background
The society was started by a group of some of the most prominent conservatives in the country, including Attorney General Edwin Meese, Solicitor General and ReaganSupreme Court nominee Robert Bork, Indiana congressman David M. McIntosh, Lee Liberman Otis, Energy Secretary and Michigan senator Spencer Abraham, and Steven Calabresi. Its membership has since included Supreme Court justices Antonin Scalia, John G. Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch.[9]
The society looks to Federalist Paper Number 78 for an articulation of the virtue of judicial restraint, as written by Alexander Hamilton: "It can be of no weight to say that the courts, on the pretense of a repugnancy, may substitute their own pleasure to the constitutional intentions of the legislature... The courts must declare the sense of the law; and if they should be disposed to exercise WILL instead of JUDGMENT, the consequence would equally be the substitution of their pleasure to that of the legislative body."
Its logo is a silhouette of former president and constitution author, James Madison, who co-wrote The Federalist Papers. Commissioner Paul S. Atkins of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission considered society members "the heirs of James Madison's legacy" in a speech he gave in January 2008 to its lawyers chapter in Dallas, Texas. Madison is generally credited as the father of the constitution and became the fourth presidentof the United States.[10]
The society's name is said to have been based on the eighteenth-century Federalist Party,[11] however, James Madison associated with Thomas Jefferson and the Democratic-Republican Party in opposition to Federalist Party policies borne from a loose interpretation of the Commerce Clause. The society's views are more associated with the general meaning of Federalism (particularly the New Federalism) and the content of the Federalist Papers than with the later Federalist Party.
Donors to the Federalist Society include Google, Chevron, Charles G. and David H. Koch; the family foundation of Richard Mellon Scaife; and the Mercer family.[12]
Activities
The society holds a national lawyers convention each year in Washington, D.C. It is one of the highest profile conservative legal events of the year.[13][14] Speakers have included former ACLU head Nadine Strossen, business executive Carly Fiorina, former BB&T chairman John Allison, former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, and U.S. Senator Mike Lee.[15]
Members of the society helped to encourage President George W. Bush’s decision to terminate a nearly half-century-old practice of rating qualifications for office for judicial nominees by the American Bar Association. Since the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the American Bar Association provided the service to presidents of both parties and the nation by vetting the qualifications of those under consideration for lifetime appointment to the federal judiciary. The society alleged that the bar association showed a liberal bias in its recommendations.[16][17][18] Examples given included that while former Supreme Court clerks nominated to the Court of Appeals by Democrats had an average rating of slightly below "well qualified", similar Republican nominees were rated on average as only "qualified/well qualified." In addition the bar association gave Ronald Reagan's judicial nominees Richard Posner and Frank H. Easterbrook its lowest possible ratings of "qualified/not qualified",[19] and Judges Posner and Easterbrook have gone on to become the two most highly cited judges in the federal appellate judiciary.[20]
In The Federalist Society by Michael Avery and Danielle McLaughlin, the authors write that every federal judge appointed by both President George H.W. Bush and President George W. Bush was either a member, or was approved by members of the society.[8] Avery and McLaughlin write that the society is primarily a “group of intellectuals.”[21]
The society helped to assemble the list of 21 people from which Donald Trump has said he will choose a nominee to replace Antonin Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court. Nine of the 21 individuals spoke at the society's annual convention in late November 2016, while nearly all of the others were in attendance.[22][23]
Publications
The Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy is the Federalist Society's official journal and a subscription is provided to members.[24]
Notable members
Notable members of the society have included:
- United States Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia (who served as the original faculty advisor to the organization)[25]
- Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito[8]
- Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas[8]
- Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch[26]
- United States Court of Appeals Judge (D.C. Cir.) Thomas Griffith[27]
- United States Court of Appeals Judge (5th Cir.) Edith Clement[28]
- Alex Kozinski, former Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit[29]
- Former United States Assistant Attorney General Peter Keisler, a co-founder of the Federalist Society[7]
- Former United States Court of Appeals Judge (D.C. Cir.) Robert Bork[30]
- Former United States Attorney General Edwin Meese[29]
- Former United States Solicitor General Theodore Olson[29]
- Former United States Solicitor General Paul Clement[31]
- President Pro Tempore of the U.S. Senate Orrin Hatch[25]
- Former President of Baylor University and former independent counsel Kenneth Starr[25]
- Former U.S. Senator and Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham[29]
- Former Texas State Representative and Dallas lawyer Bill Keffer[32]
- Professor Richard Epstein of the New York University School of Law[33]
- Professor Randy Barnett of Georgetown University Law Center[7]
- Roger Pilon, Director of Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute[34]
- Former United States Ambassador to the European Union C. Boyden Gray[29]
- Former Columbia Law School Dean David Schizer[35]
- Former United States Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton[29]
- Labor, employment, and regulation law attorney Eugene Scalia (son of Justice Scalia)[36]
- Former general counsel of the Office of Management and Budget and of the Department of Homeland Security Philip Perry[37]
- Michael Chertoff, former United States Secretary of Homeland Security[37]
- Former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft[29]
- Senator Ted Cruz, Republican Senator of Texas[38]
- Senator Todd Young, Republican Senator of Indiana
Chief Justice of the United States John G. Roberts was reported to have been a member of the society, but Roberts's membership status was never definitively established. Deputy White House press secretary Dana Perino said Roberts "has no recollection of ever being a member."[39] Following the report, the Washington Post located the Federalist Society Lawyers Division Leadership Directory, 1997–1998, which listed Roberts as a member of the Washington chapter steering committee,[40] however, membership in the society is not a necessary condition for being listed in its leadership directory.[40]
See also
==
clinton...There is a right-wing conspiracy in American law led by the influential Federalist Society and described by Michael Avery and Danielle McLaughlin in their new book The Federalist Society: How Conservatives Took the Law Back from Liberals. But it is the fact that the right-wing conspiracy is notvast that has made the Federalist Society effective.
It was in 1982 that the Federalist Society was founded by a group of students at Yale Law School, Harvard Law School, and the University of Chicago Law School as an attempt to challenge what they considered to be the neglect of conservative and libertarian ideas in the American legal system. The students who founded the organization were an impressive group, and they were aided by leading luminaries like Robert Bork (who would be nominated to the Supreme Court by President Ronald Reagan and rejected by the Senate) and then-professor Antonin Scalia, now a Supreme Court justice.
From a small student organization, in 30 years the Federalist Society has expanded to include many of the leading conservative lawyers in the country. The society has come to be known for featuring participants who believe that the Constitution should be interpreted using “originalism,” a doctrine stating that the basic meaning of the Constitution was set at the time the document was created at the end of the 18th century....
http://www.thedailybeast.com/a-small-right-wing-conspiracy-the-federalist-society
A Small Right-Wing Conspiracy: The Federalist Society
The elite Federalist Society has become an exceptionally effective conservative group. David Fontana looks at how that happened.
06.11.13
==
2016 uchic
what a maroon
The next Federalist Society event is "The 17th Amendment: Is Voting Ever a Bad Thing?" with speaker Professor Bradley P. Jacob on Wednesday, October 26. When asked about upcoming events of interest, Foldi wrote, “I'm particularly excited for ‘The First Amendment is Not Enough: Why Free Speech Needs a Moral Defense’ because we have seen how important an issue free speech is on our own campus, ‘Class Actions,’ because Ted Frank was an alum of the Law School who has an extremely interesting background, and ‘International Law and ISIS.’”
==
GONZÁLEZ: As we continue our coverage of Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch,we are joined by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Eric Lipton of The New York Times. He recently co-wrote a piece headlined "In Gorsuch, Conservative Activist Sees Test Case for Reshaping the Judiciary." The piece looks at how a top official at the Federalist Society, named Leonard Leo, is playing a key role in helping Trump behind the scenes.
AMY GOODMAN: Leonard Leo is currently on leave from the Federalist Society to help shepherd Gorsuch’s nomination. In addition to nominating Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, President Trump has 123 other federal judgeships to fill, because Senate Republicans blocked many of Obama’s nominees.
Eric Lipton, welcome to Democracy Now! Why don’t you start off by talking about the conservative shaping of the judiciary, and particularly the role of the Federalist Society?
ERIC LIPTON: Sure. You know, first off, I mean, you introduced them at one point by describing them as a right-wing group. I wouldn’t call the Federalist Society a right-wing group. I think that they are a group of conservative legal scholars who see themselves as an alternative voice, and they really got started through law schools in the United States, where there was some concern by law professors that there was not a forum for conservative people to sort of, you know, meet and discuss theories relative to the court that could sort of be an alternative to the more liberal, dominant thought in the court system.
But the Federalist Society has grown into an organization that has an incredible influence in the United States. It is—it has many lawyers who are lawyers working for different corporations, and it has judges that are members. And it has gatherings around the United States that pull together conservative legal minds. And it’s funded by a combination of conservative foundations, that are—you know, that want to try to change various standards in American society, as well as corporations that like the ideas of the Federalist Society in terms of limited governing and sort of trying to knock down certain federal regulations.
So, what—the thing that is sort of interesting at this moment is that—is that the judicial philosophy of the Federalist Society and of groups that are related to it in the conservative world, they are better positioned at this moment than they probably have ever been in modern times, and because of a series of events that have occurred. You’ve got the president, who has essentially allowed them to help pick Supreme Court nominees, and told them that he’s going to also allow them to provide input to other judges. You’ve got a Congress that is controlled by Republicans. You have state governments throughout the United States where the majority of the governors and legislatures are under Republican control. And you have more vacancies right now, going into this new term for a president, than you’ve had in any time going back to Carter. And also, you have more judges who are near retirement age than in any time in decades. So, President Trump and the Republicans are better positioned at this moment to reshape both the federal and state judiciaries than they probably have ever been. And the Federalist Society and Leonard Leo are sitting there ready to help that process.
AMY GOODMAN: And can you talk about the foundations that are supporting the Federalist Society, like the Koch brothers, like Richard Mellon Scaife?
ERIC LIPTON: Yes. I mean, they—you know, you’ve got everything from Google and Microsoft, which are donors to the Federalist Society, and as well as major energy companies like Chevron or Devon, which are very—you know, especially Devon is trying to challenge much of the Obama administration’s regulatory agenda when it comes to the environment. But then you have also a lot of very conservative family foundations that—you know, like the Mercer foundation or the Koch brothers’ foundation, that see their giving, if you look at their donor patterns, as a way to try to influence American society. And clearly, I mean, the Federalist Society is a forum for these lawyers to discuss legal approaches that they can then use and to fine-tune them. And they—the Federalist Society argues that it is a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) that doesn’t—you know, is not an advocacy organization. But it’s pretty clear that they have a very conservative legal philosophy, when you look at the forums that they hold and the debates that they hold and the people that are members of it, and you look at the judges that they also align themselves with. And, I mean, Leonard is almost—has a mythical status almost in the legal circles in the United States. I mean, you come to an event in Washington that the Federalist Society puts on and that Leonard Leo is helping organize, and you’re likely to encounter, you know, at least when Judge Scalia was alive, I mean, Judge Scalia, Judge Thomas. I mean, he is very well respected among that circle and has a great deal of influence.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And how did he get to have this influence? He’s almost like the go-to guy. He also shepherded through, apparently, the confirmations of both Justice Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, as well. How did he get to that position?
ERIC LIPTON: I mean, the Federalist Society is essentially—I mean, a fraternity implies that it’s male, but a fraternity—you know, could be, say, sorority—of like-minded lawyers. It’s a club. And so, it’s essentially a private club of like-minded lawyers, and be they judges or corporate lawyers or academic lawyers. And they have regular meetings and conferences. And Leonard Leo is sort of like the—you know, the head counselor of this group. And they very well—he’s a very respected guy. He’s a very intelligent guy. He’s also, surprisingly for Washington, very low-key. You don’t hear his voice in the debates at all. You don’t see him. You don’t see him quoted. He’s very much behind the scenes, but has a great deal of respect among this universe of folks.
He really came to prominence, at first, in George W. Bush’s administration, when he was named to serve as a sort of intermediary for Catholics and the Republican Party. And he, himself, is Catholic and very serious about his beliefs. And then, during—he transitioned from that role to—early in the Bush administration, they had trouble getting through some Supreme Court nominees, and Harriet Miers was nominated and then backed out. And there was frustration among conservatives that Bush was not taking advantage of the power that he had to fill the federal courts. So, Leonard came in, and—Leonard Leo, and he helped—he helped set up a process to not only identify candidates that were conservative and that they could get confirmed, but also a process to then build public support across the United States to execute on those nominations once they were made. So that’s when Judicial Crisis—or then called Judicial Confirmation—Network was created. Leonard Leo has always been associated with this group. He helps find them money. And they began a public relations campaign nationally to get the conservative judges confirmed, once, you know, folks like Leonard had helped get them nominated.
AMY GOODMAN: You begin your piece, Eric, the front-page piece of the Sunday New York Times, by saying, "Deep into the Senate’s 68-page questionnaire of Judge [Neil M.] Gorsuch, the Supreme Court nominee was asked to describe how he had come to President Trump’s attention." And he said—"The first thing he wrote was, 'I was contacted by Leonard Leo.'" So, can you also talk, as you are now, talking about the allied organizations and those that Leonard Leo works with, like John Malcolm of the Heritage Foundation, Ann Corkery, the Washington lawyer who, along with her husband, oversees the Judicial Crisis Network and, you say, related dark-money groups that also support the cause?
ERIC LIPTON: Yeah, I mean, I, as a reporter and as a person that believes in transparency and also likes—someone that likes to kind of, you know, to decipher riddles, I find it really interesting to just observe this kind of aligned parties and the various roles that they have set up. So you have, you know, the Federalist Society and Leonard that’s playing a role in helping identify candidates to nominate and to bring them to the administration and to get the process started. And then you essentially have a handoff, because he is a 501(c)(3). You know, he comes from that world, where you’re not advocates. Then you have his handoff to this group, the Judicial Crisis Network, which is an advocacy organization that’s spending, you know, something upwards of $4 million on television commercials and radio and other media, particularly in the states where there are Senate Democrats who are up for re-election next year in states where Trump won. OK, so these are Democrats that live in red states who are vulnerable. And Gorsuch is going to need their votes in order to get confirmed, because, otherwise—unless, you know, the 60-vote rule is overturned, in order to get—you know, to prevent the block. You know, he doesn’t need it for a majority; he needs it to get the vote to the floor.
And so, that’s whereJudicial Crisis Networkcomes in. This is an organization that was set up in approximately 2005, and it’s a dark-money group. They will not tell you who their donors are. But when you look at their—at their 990, which is their tax form—and I happen to conveniently have a copy here, and the thing that’s so interesting about it to me is that, you know, they show that they had a budget of—in 2014, of $5.7 million, which isn’t that much, but that’s just one of many aligned organizations. And then you go to the page that shows who their donors are, and it’s called the Schedule B of the 990. And if you ask for it, you can get it, although if you look in the normal tax records, you won’t find it. And you see that all of their money came from two donors, although the names of the donors aren’t there. So, you know, $5.75 million came from two people. And then you look at their 990, as well, and say, "Well, OK, how many people do you have that work for you? How many volunteers do you have?" Zero employees, zero volunteers. So you’re sort of wondering, "Well, what is this group?" I mean, it has zero employees, zero volunteers. All of its money come from two donations. So how much is this really a grassroots organization, or how much is it an organization that takes checks from players that want to influence the federal judiciary and then funnel the money through this organization to try to create an appearance that it’s really a grassroots organization? And that’s something that—
AMY GOODMAN: And do you know who those two people are?
ERIC LIPTON: Well, if you reverse-engineer the federal—the IRS records, which I did, you could find—you could backwards—you could find this organization called the Wellspring Committee. OK, so here’s the interesting thing. The Wellspring Committee, which is also—it’s based in Virginia, is run—and here, the signed document, Wellspring, this is their 990, is Ann Corkery. OK, so Ann Corkery is listed, signed here as the president of the Wellspring Committee. OK, on the Judicial Crisis Network, this document, who signs it as a treasurer? Neil Corkery. That’s her husband. OK, so her husband helps run the Judicial Crisis Network. Ann Corkery runs Wellspring Committee. And then you look at the back of their Schedule—who do they give—who does the Wellspring Committee give money to? Oh, so they gave $5.775 million to the Judicial Crisis Network in 2014. Wait a second, that’s exactly the same amount of the money that the Judicial Crisis Network spent in 2014. So, this—Ann Corkery gave all of the money to—and so then you wonder, "OK, where does Wellspring get its money from?"
Well, then you begin this process, because of the—you know, the federal government doesn’t require disclosure of donors. You end up into a brick wall, because you can’t find out Wellspring—where Wellspring Committee gets its money from, and you end up in the dark-money circle. But, basically, what you see is that this is an interconnected network that is moving money around in a way to try to hide who the original donors were. And then it’s—and the connections between the Federalist Society and the Judicial Crisis Network and Ann Corkery and Neil Corkery and Leonard Leo, and the connection between Judicial Crisis Network and the Wellspring Committee, they’re all interconnected. And now, I mean, they have their—they certainly have the right to influence this process. I mean, it’s a democracy. You raise money, you spend money. I just think it’s interesting to bring light to this and to sort of—to examine this network. And, you know, that’s their right to do it, and they’re doing it. But I think, you know—
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Eric Lipton, I’d like to ask you—obviously, they’re now using this entire machinery to help get Judge Gorsuch approved for the Supreme Court. But I wanted to ask you about the article you wrote, "Leashes Come Off Wall Street, Gun Sellers, Polluters and More." The potential impact of Judge Gorsuch’s views on federal regulatory policy in terms of how he might shift the court in this direction?
ERIC LIPTON: Yeah, I mean, you know, I’d say, to me, forgetting all the tweets and the kind of the headlines that Trump has generated so far in his administration, there’s two really big things that are happening. OK, and I’m sorry, I have one more caveat: besides the immigration fight. And those are regulatory policy, which there are major things happening on the regulatory policy front, and then the judicial. You know, we’re only—Gorsuch is only the start. But, you know, as you said, there are 124 vacancies. So there is some major stuff that’s about to happen.
OK, so on the regulatory policy, Gorsuch, you know, is—it’s going to be interesting to watch. I mean, this is a guy who, in terms of the famous Chevron deference decision, you know, took a position opposed toChevron deference, which allows that federal agencies have the right to interpret the law in a way to then write a regulation that offers, essentially, their interpretation. And Chevron deference, the court ruled that they have the right to do that. And he has found—he has ruled against that. And that is like a fundamental ruling that really shapes the powers of federal agencies to interpret the actions by Congress and to, therefore, build off of that legal action. And if Chevron deference is overturned, then we’re going to have a very different regulatory system in the United States.
And that—and, OK, you look at—if you want sort of to further that answer, you look at Judicial Crisis Network. Who—in addition to spending millions of dollars on ads to get Gorsuch confirmed, what else is Judicial Crisis Network spending a lot of money on? It’s spending millions of dollars to get Republicans elected as state attorneys general. And the reason that is, is they want Republican attorneys general to bring cases in state and federal court that challenge federal regulations, which they think are overreaching, and then to get those cases into the court, in which they then help pick the judges and have more conservative judges, and then will have decisions which limit the federal powers.
And I think that, you know, that Gorsuch is—if you look at his record, it’s reasonable to expect that he will—he will believe in a more—a narrow interpretation of the law and that any time that a federal agency goes too far, that it’s appropriate for the courts to review it and decide if it has stepped beyond its bounds. Now, I guess, you know, it’s going to be interesting to watch. But that said, we’re going back to a 5-4 court, which is where it was before. So, you know, is it going to be that radically different from the court we had before Justice Scalia died? Probably not.
AMY GOODMAN: In your piece on conservatives using the Gorsuch nomination to press overhaul in judiciary, you mention an attorney general—well, a past one—the Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, who’s now head of the EPA. And you talk about how he sort of quipped that when—when Leonard Leo calls, you answer. And he invited him to dinner in Washington, and so Scott Pruitt stayed. And you talk about who was at that dinner.
ERIC LIPTON: Yeah, it just, again, shows you just what incredible status that Leonard Leo has. And so, Scott Pruitt was in town for a Federalist Society meeting. Scott Pruitt is very active in the Federalist Society. These are people with like-minded philosophies about the benefits of limited government. And so, Leonard asked—approached Scott and said, "You know, Scott, stay over Friday night for dinner. I think you’ll enjoy it." And so, Scott Pruitt shows up for the dinner. It’s in a basement, which is sort of interesting. They don’t specify why the dinner was held in a basement location in Washington, D.C. And who’s there at the dinner table butJustice Scalia and Justice Thomas. So these are the kind of folks that when, you know, Leonard Leo has a Friday night dinner and he invites the attorney general from Oklahoma to join him, that these are the folks that he has around the table.
And one of the interesting things is, this little anecdote, which Scott Pruitt mentioned in a speech that he gave in Michigan last year—this anecdote came up during Scott Pruitt’s confirmation hearing, because this moment occurred at the time when Scott Pruitt was attorney general, and he had a number of cases in federal court, including several that had reached the Supreme Court. And so, you’ve got to wonder—I mean, here it is, the attorney general of Oklahoma with a number of matters that are pending before the Supreme Court—is it appropriate for him to be having private conversations in a dinner in an undisclosed location with two members of the Supreme Court? Pruitt was asked about that in the questions that were—written questions that were presented to him during his confirmation. And he said that he doesn’t remember the specifics of what was discussed, but he’s certain that he did not discuss pending court matters. But again, it just sort of shows you Leonard Leo’s really pretty unprecedented and underappreciated reach in conservative legal worlds in the United States, that he could bring together the attorney general of Oklahoma and two sitting members of the United States Supreme Court for a dinner.
AMY GOODMAN: Eric Lipton, we’re going to ask you to stay with us, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter at The New York Times. And we’ll link to your piece, "In Gorsuch, Conservative Activist Sees Test Case for Reshaping the Judiciary." You’ve also written about what’s going on right now around FBI Director James Comey and other issues. And we’d like you to stay with us when we talk about this extraordinary moment yesterday when the director of the FBI, James Comey, revealed the agency is investigating links between the Trump campaign and Russia. Stay with us.
==
grossman, more speech is better, no censor
rj johnson john doe via leo
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March 7, 2005, Leonard Leo tapped out an email on his BlackBerry to Mary Beth Buchanan, then the director of the Executive Office of United States Attorneys, suggesting a candidate to replace Carol Lam, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of California. "You guys need a good candidate?" Leo, the executive vice president of the Federalist Society, wrote to Buchanan, herself a member of the influential conservative lawyers' group. "I'd strongly recommend the current GC [general counsel] of the Air Force, Mary Walker."
At the time, White House and Justice Department officials were in preliminary talks about replacing an unspecified number of "underperforming" federal prosecutors, a plan that would culminate almost two years later in the forced resignations of nine U.S. Attorneys, including Lam, and ignite a scandal that has claimed the jobs of at least four high-ranking Justice Department officials. Leo's email, written so early in the process, speaks to the close relationship that has developed between the Federalist Society—an organization whose aims include "reordering priorities" within the judicial system to fit its conservative agenda—and key Justice Department decision makers, many of whom are members of the group.
While perhaps not a prerequisite for employment at the highest echelons of Justice, membership in the society has become a standard by which political appointees at the agency identify candidates who share their agenda. Some officials at the agency view it as such an indicator of conservative virtue that membership in the society was included as a category—along with Hill and campaign experience—on a spreadsheet that was used to rank the qualifications of the 93 sitting U.S. Attorneys, a document included in the reams of Justice Department memoranda released by the House Judiciary Committee this spring.
Beyond highlighting the organization's role as the administration's de facto headhunter for conservative lawyers and judges, Leo's correspondence raises the question of what, if any, role the Federalist Society played in the prosecutor firings. Leo did not respond to messages left at his office and on his cell phone, but he told the New York Times last night that, when he emailed Buchanan, he was unaware that a plan was in the works to replace multiple U.S. Attorneys. But, he acknowledged, his recommendation was not unsolicited. "The only way I could have possibly made that recommendation is if somebody said to me, 'Gee, do you know anyone who would be good?'" he said.
Leo's email, released yesterday as part of an ongoing congressional investigation into the prosecutor firings, marks the second time in as many days that his name has been raised in connection with the probe. Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, Bradley Schlozman—the controversial Justice Department official who replaced Todd Graves as the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Missouri—acknowledged seeking Leo's advice on candidates to fill career positions at the agency.Unlike his former colleague, Monica Goodling, who testified that she "crossed the line" in vetting the political bonafides of job applicants, Schlozman denied subjecting potential hires to a political litmus test.
His record would suggest otherwise. Schlozman is a member of the Federalist Society, and in May the Boston Globe reported that half of the career lawyers hired during his tenure were members of the society or the conservative Republican National Lawyers Association; among the eight hires during the previous two years, none had been. According to Joseph Rich, a 37-year veteran of the Justice Department who served as the head of the agency's voting rights section until 2005, Schlozman was among a cadre of appointees who have presided over an unprecedented wave of politicization at the agency. Within the Civil Rights division, where Schlozman served until March 2006, "there appeared to be a conscious effort to remake the Division's career staff," Rich told Congress in March. He described "major" changes in hiring procedures "which virtually eliminated any career staff input into the hiring of career attorneys." As a result, he went on, the attorneys hired for the division had "little if any experience in, or commitment to, the enforcement of civil rights laws."
The politicization of Justice went well beyond hiring practices, according to Rich, extending to efforts to "influence elections." Schlozman, he says, was part of a group of political appointees that greenlighted Tom DeLay's controversial redistricting plan, which resulted in Texas Republicans winning a record number of U.S. House seats in the 2004 election. Later, while serving as the interim U.S. Attorney in Missouri, Schlozman indicted four voter registration recruiters for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) on charges of voter fraud days before the mid-term elections. (During his Senate appearance this week, Schlozman maintained that he was unaware of ACORN's political leanings.)
The Federalist Society's advice has been sought not only on Justice Department hires: Leonard Leo is one of the Bush administration's go-to experts on the federal judiciary. When the time arrived for the president to fill two open Supreme Court slots, Leo took a temporary leave from the Society in order to advise the administration. The administration did end up selecting two Federalist Society members for the high court, bringing to four the number of Supreme Court justices (Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, and Samuel Alito) who claim membership in the organization.
Leo was less successful in selling Justice on his pick to replace Carol Lam. This owed, perhaps, to Mary Walker's controversial past. In addition to being accused of whitewashing an investigation of rampant sexual assault at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Walker also headed the group of Pentagon lawyers that produced a report arguing that the president was not bound by the Geneva Conventions. When Lam stepped down in February, she was replaced by one of her deputies, Karen Hewitt—also a member of the Society.
Daniel Schulman is Mother Jones' deputy Washington, DC, bureau chief. Reach him at dschulman (at) motherjones.com. Dan is the New York Times best-selling author of Sons of Wichita
How Conservatives Captured the Law
By Michael Avery and Danielle McLaughlin
APRIL 15, 2013
How Conservatives Captured the Law
With a Democratic president beginning his second term in the White House, swinging a more liberal bat than he had in his first term, the conservative legal movement in academe is upping its game.
In January the Legal Studies Institute, a program of the Fund for American Studies, in Washington, solicited law professors across the country to nominate top students for summer internships. The institute's program and board feature leading members of the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, including Peter Redpath, vice president and director of the society's Student Division. LSI's elegantly designed brochure features photographs of federal and state judges and leading conservative academics in earnest conversations with law students. The institute guarantees an internship, reminds students that "who you know does matter," and offers a course, "Originalism and the Federalist Papers." Past speakers include Justice Antonin Scalia.
In early February, the libertarian Cato Institute sent law professors an e-mail inviting them to subscribe to periodic notices about potential course materials, like Liberty of Contract, Gun Control on Trial, and the institute's annual Supreme Court Review. Later that month, the Federalist Society sent a brochure to law professors, touting the benefits of membership in its Faculty Division and the variety of programs for law faculty, including the Olin-Searle-Smith Fellows in Law, which offers "top young legal thinkers" a year with an office at an elite law school to pursue their research, a $60,000 stipend, and health benefits. The inside cover of the brochure shows Justice Scalia speaking at the Federalist Society's 25th-anniversary gala, regaling the audience with an exultant metaphor: "We thought we were just planting a wildflower among the weeds of academic liberalism, and it turned out to be an oak."
The history of the Federalist Society is a story of how disaffection, bold ideas, commitment to principle, and enlightened institution-building have created a significant conservative shift in the legal, policy, and political landscape of America over the past 30 years. The society reports that more than 45,000 lawyers and law students are involved in its various activities, with approximately 13,000 dues-paying members. With a national budget of about $10-million, in 2010 its 75 lawyer chapters sponsored nearly 300 events for more than 25,000 lawyers, and the society sponsored 1,145 events at law schools for more than 70,000 students, professors, and others. Through conferences, debates, publications, litigation, education, and by holding key positions in government and the judiciary, the society has changed law and policy in areas like property rights, access to courts, affirmative action, privacy rights including abortion and same-sex marriage, and the influence of international law on the domestic legal system.
The Federalist Society's membership includes many brilliant and sincere theorists who raise important and interesting issues. On the other hand, the society's critics say, its overall impact is reactionary. By glorifying private property, demonizing government intervention (particularly at the federal level), insisting that originalism is the only legitimate method of constitutional interpretation, embracing American exceptionalism as a reason to remain apart from global governance, and pushing related policies, these critics say, the society advocates a form of social Darwinism that has been discredited by mainstream American legal thought since the 1930s.
Membership includes economic conservatives, social conservatives, Christian conservatives, and libertarians, many of whom disagree with one another on significant issues, but who cooperate in advancing a broad conservative agenda. They generally support individual rights and a free market, and prefer states' rights to action by the federal government.
How Conservatives Captured the Law
The Federalist Society
President Reagan gave the keynote address at the 1988 national convention of the Federalist Society, in Washington. Beside him are the society's founders, David McIntosh, Steven Calabresi, and Lee Liberman.
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Members have held senior policy making positions in the Reagan, George H.W., and George W. Bush administrations; have a commanding presence on the federal bench; and, as private lawyers, advocates in public-interest law firms, and government lawyers, challenge laws that are anathema to their worldview. The dockets of the federal and state courts (including the Supreme Court) are brimming with test cases brought or defended by Federalist Society members to challenge government regulation of the economy; roll back affirmative action; invalidate laws providing access to the courts by aggrieved workers, consumers, and environmentalists; expand state support for religious institutions and programs; oppose marriage equality; increase statutory impediments to women's ability to obtain an abortion; and otherwise advance conservative ideas.
Academics associated with the Federalist Society have educated a new generation of conservative law students, played a role in the rise of openly conservative law schools like Pepperdine's and George Mason's, and succeeded in gaining respect and traction for conservative legal ideas. Those stem in large part from an originalist interpretation of the Constitution, exemplified by the jurisprudence of Justice Scalia. That view posits that to interpret the Constitution, one must search for the original meaning of its provisions. The argument is that the original meaning of words may be objectively determined by recourse to historical sources that reveal how the words were used at the time, and that the original meaning is the only legitimate method of interpreting the document.
In 1980, Steven Calabresi, Lee Liberman, and David McIntosh were young conservative law students at Yale and the University of Chicago. They were alienated from the prevailing liberal political orientation of their classmates and their schools. The New Deal, the civil-rights movement, and the Great Society antipoverty programs had led to widespread faith that government could and should solve the country's social, political, and economic problems. Calabresi, Liberman, and McIntosh thought otherwise, believing that big government posed a fatal threat to individual rights and the sanctity of private property. In their view, liberals, in pursuit of their social agenda, had distorted important constitutional principles.
Conservative philanthropists have understood something that liberal philanthropists appear to have missed—the importance of building institutions.
The questions that Calabresi, McIntosh, and Liberman raised as they began to organize identified many of the crucial issues of contemporary America: What is the appropriate balance between an individual's right of self-determination and the powers and responsibilities of government? Should Americans pursue collective or individual solutions to social problems like poverty, care of the elderly, and education? How much regulation of private property and economic behavior is appropriate in a capitalist, free-market country? Is racial and gender diversity in education and employment an appropriate goal for government to pursue, and if so, what means are acceptable for achieving it? In the face of increasing economic and social globalization, what is more important—protecting national sovereignty or establishing international norms? Should judges interpret the Constitution to keep pace with the moral, economic, and social tenor of the times, or should they read the text in the light of its 18th-century meaning?
Calabresi, Liberman, and McIntosh organized the Federalist Society on their campuses in 1981 and 1982, and it swiftly spread to many others. The students were assisted by professors who were themselves struggling with the prevailing liberal ideology of their colleagues. Professors Ralph K. Winter Jr. and Robert Bork helped Calabresi start the Federalist Society at Yale, and Professors Antonin Scalia, Richard Epstein, Richard Posner, and Frank Easterbrook were advisers to Liberman and McIntosh at Chicago. A couple of years earlier, Spencer Abraham and Stephen Eberhard, then students at Harvard Law School, had started the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy as a vehicle for conservative ideas. Eventually it would become the official law journal of the Federalist Society.
The Federalist Society's first major event was a symposium on federalism in April 1982. It was sponsored by the Yale and Chicago law-school groups, the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, and a similar group at Stanford Law School, the Stanford Foundation for Law and Economic Policy. The Institute for Educational Affairs, the Olin Foundation, and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute financed the conference. Within one year of the first symposium, there were 17 Federalist Society chapters, all on law-school campuses.
The society grew continuously in subsequent years. By 2000 it had 25,000 members, lawyer chapters in 60 cities, and law-school chapters on 140 campuses. Today there are more than 300 chapters. They include lawyer chapters in every major city in the country as well in London, Paris, Brussels, and Toronto; student chapters in every accredited law school in the United States and in the business schools at Harvard and Northwestern; and law-school-alumni chapters, recently started by the society to enable alumni to better reconnect. To fuel its networks, the society connects with other conservative organizations—think tanks, public-interest law firms, and philanthropic organizations.
Conservative philanthropists, like the Koch brothers, support the Federalist Society with large annual gifts. Most of those are unrestricted funds, allowing the organization to use the money as it sees fit. Donors have not insisted on measurable short-term outcomes, but are supporting the long-term goal of sustaining a legal conservative movement. In that respect, conservative philanthropists have understood something that liberal philanthropists appear to have missed—the importance of building institutions.
The Federalist Society has been so successful that organizations outside the field of law and policy have adopted its model. The Benjamin Rush Society, founded in 2008, was formed in reaction to what was seen as the prevailing liberal bias in medical-school curricula. It seeks to educate medical students on free-market solutions to health care, and to question government intervention in the relationship between physicians and patients. The Alexander Hamilton Society,dedicated to foreign, economic, and national-security policy, was founded in 2010. The group believes that foreign and domestic policy must be shaped to defend the principles of individual liberty, limited government, economic freedom, the rule of law, human dignity, and democracy. The Adam Smith Society was formed recently to achieve in business schools what the Federalist Society achieved in law schools, exposing students to the philosophical and moral underpinnings of capitalism. All three groups are building institutions based on student chapters. And all three groups subscribe to principles of individual liberty, limited government, and free markets.
How Conservatives Captured the Law
Although the predominant values when Calabresi, McIntosh, Liberman, and Abraham arrived in law school were liberal, a wave of conservative political resurgence was reaching its crest as the students began to organize. Sidney Blumenthal, the journalist and onetime aide to President Bill Clinton, describes the election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980 as a triumph of the new conservative "counterestablishment." The Reagan presidency created a powerful platform—in all three branches of government—for members of that movement. So when the young Federalist Society lawyers burst onto the scene, there was a political apparatus waiting to put them to work.
For example, after law school, Calabresi clerked for Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia, then worked in the White House and the Justice Department. McIntosh became a special assistant to President Reagan and to Attorney General Edwin Meese III. Liberman clerked for Scalia on the Court of Appeals, then served as an assistant attorney general. When Scalia was appointed to the Supreme Court, she clerked for him there. Later she worked in the White House when George H.W. Bush was president.
Since the Reagan administration, membership in the Federalist Society has become a passport to professional advancement. Federalist Society members reached the height of their political influence in the George W. Bush administration. Then-Vice President Cheney, addressing the Federalist Society at its national convention in 2001, noted, "There are many members of the Federalist Society in our administration. We know that because they were quizzed about it under oath. We're especially proud to have two of your founders at the Department of Energy—the general counsel, Lee Liberman Otis, and Secretary Spencer Abraham."In 2001 three cabinet members were either Federalist Society members or active participants: Energy Secretary Abraham, Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton, and Attorney General John D. Ashcroft. Theodore Olson, a Federalist Society stalwart, was solicitor general. Five of the 11 lawyers in the White House Counsel's Office were members.
The Federalist Society has directly influenced the litigation of some of the most important legal issues of the day, often by representing the parties in the leading cases. A society member has presented the oral argument to the Supreme Court on every abortion case since Planned Parenthood v. Casey, in 1992. InCitizens United v. Federal Election Commission, where the court held that First Amendment protections extended to corporate-financed independent political broadcasts, the case was shepherded through the lower courts by the society member James Bopp Jr. and argued before the Supreme Court by Olson, one of the two or three most powerful litigators in the United States.
Federalist Society members were heavily involved in the challenge to President Obama's health-care reforms in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius. Paul Clement represented the states that challenged the law, and Michael A. Carvin represented the private challengers. Clement and Carvin participated in the oral argument at the Supreme Court. Karen R. Harned and Randy Barnett also represented the private challengers. Several influential Federalist Society members and allies wrote amicus briefs. Society members fanned out across the country to speak at lawyer and student chapters both before and after the decision. The society also set up a dedicated Web page on which it hosted video from debates at Federalist Society chapters around the country discussing the act and its constitutional implications, as well as scholarly articles and podcasts by society members.
In a decision that Chief Justice Roberts might have compared in his own mind with Marbury v. Madison, the court gave the president the decision on the continued existence of the program, but gave the Federalist Society what it was looking for on the law. The court accepted the society's argument that the health-insurance individual mandate was unconstitutional under the commerce clause, in part because it created commerce rather than regulated it, and because it regulated inactivity (failing to purchase health insurance) rather than activity. In addition, the court held that the provision penalizing states that refused to participate in the expansion of Medicaid was unconstitutionally coercive under the spending clause, the first time it had ever struck down legislation on that basis. It remains to be seen how much damage these doctrinal rulings will do in the future, but following the decision, Randy Barnett blogged, "Who would have thought that we could win while losing?"
The Federalist Society not only has powerful litigators but also dominates the judiciary. The society came into being at a catalytic moment. Southern resentment at Brown v. Board of Education, disenchantment by "law and order" citizens with the criminal-procedure rulings of the Warren Court, and profound disagreement with Roe v. Wade made conservatives and Republicans angry at the Supreme Court. Ronald Reagan's presidency and the general renaissance of conservative ideas created an opportunity to demand change on the bench.
Throughout the administrations of all three Republican presidents since its founding, Federalist Society members have occupied key positions in the White House, the Department of Justice, and as outside advisers with respect to the nomination of federal judges. Once a large number of conservative judges were on the bench,new Federalist Society law graduates obtained clerkships with them, an important career steppingstone.The society developed a powerful pipeline from the law schools to judicial clerkships, White House and Justice Department positions, judgeships, and other positions of power and influence.
Four Supreme Court Justices—Antonin, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts Jr., and Samuel Alito—are current or former members of the Federalist Society. Every single federal judge appointed by President George H.W. Bush or President George W. Bush was either a member or approved by members of the society, as were many of the judges appointed by President Reagan.
In Reagan's administration, Attorney General Meese heavily influenced judicial selection. In Reagan's second term, Stephen J. Markman, now a member of a Federalist Society majority on the Michigan Supreme Court, was the assistant attorney general in charge of the office that screened judicial candidates. In the administration of George H.W. Bush, the person principally responsible for screening nominees for judicial appointments was the White House counsel, C. Boyden Gray, now a member of the Federalist Society's board of directors. Gray's most important staff member with respect to judicial nominees was the Federalist Society founder Lee Liberman.
During the administration of President George W. Bush, the Federalist Society brought its full weight to bear on the judicial-selection process. In addition to two Supreme Court Justices, Roberts and Alito, nearly half of the appeals-court judges Bush appointed were society members. The most important staff lawyers for judicial selection during the crucial first two years of this administration were society members. Brett M. Kavanaugh was the associate White House counsel working under Alberto Gonzales, until the president nominated Kavanaugh himself to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. Assistant Attorney General Viet Dinh was head of the Office of Legal Policy in the Justice Department. When Gonzales resigned, in mid-2007, Michael B. Mukasey, now a member of the Federalist Society's Board of Directors, became attorney general. During George W. Bush's second term, two of the key players with respect to judicial selection were Kate Comerford Todd and Rachel Brand, important Federalist Society members.
In addition, judicial selection advice was provided by society members outside the administration, including those known as the "four horsemen": Gray, Jay Sekulow, Leonard Leo, and Meese. In 2005, Leo took a leave of absence from his position as executive vice president of the society to devote more time to advising the president on judicial selection. In addition to providing direct advice to the president, society members were active in a highly organized public campaign to support conservative judicial nominees.
In February 2005, Leo, Meese, and Gray assembled a group of grassroots organizers, public-relations specialists, and legal strategists to prepare for vacancies that might occur on the Supreme Court. They worked through the Judicial Confirmation Network, a group that had been set up to assist Bush judicial nominees. For five years, the chief counsel of the network wasWendy E. Long, a former law clerk to Justice Thomas and Judge Ralph K. Winter. She attempted to pre-empt criticism of Roberts's membership in the Federalist Society in a "Bench Memo" in Online, asking derisively which senators might be "goaded" at his nomination hearing into asking, "Judge Roberts, are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Federalist Society?" Another group that lobbied publicly for the president's judicial nominees was the Committee for Justice, which Gray headed. In 2006, Spencer Abraham, one of the founders of the Federalist Society, became the committee's chairman.
Federalist Society members are also active with respect to judicial nominations when the president is a Democrat. In 2010, once President Obama began nominating judges, the Judicial Confirmation Network changed its name to the Judicial Crisis Network. Carrie Severino, a former clerk for Justice Thomas,took over as chief counsel. Severino is a Federalist Society member and a member of its Northern Virginia Women's Caucus.
The Federalist Society has now been moving the law in a conservative direction for more than 30 years. The Office of Legal Policy in the Department of Justice during the Reagan administration, populated by conservative lawyers including young Federalist Society members, published several pamphlets designed to influence the future course of the law. In Report to the Attorney General: The Constitution in the Year 2000, published in 1988, the office described areas of potential conflict on the Supreme Court between then and 2000. Those included the exclusionary rule for evidence collected in violation of a defendant's constitutional rights in criminal cases; abortion; gay rights; morality as a basis for legislation; affirmative action; private education and the religion clauses of the First Amendment; the free-exercise clause and accommodation of religious practices; freedom of association and protection from government policies as applied to private groups; eminent domain; the authority of the president in foreign policy; protection of the states by the 10th Amendment; the power of the federal courts to restructure local institutions; the rights of aliens; and separation of powers. The report's emphasis on selecting the right judges to resolve these issues was paramount.
Empirical studies by law professors and political scientists have demonstrated a high correlation between the politics of federal judges and the outcome in cases in their courts. Federalist society members themselves have long believed that the easiest way to change the law is to change the judges. Working together with other conservatives, they have done just that, moving the federal judiciary significantly to the right over the past 30 years. And as they predicted, the law has followed.
Michael Avery is a professor of law at Suffolk University. Danielle McLaughlin is a litigation associate in the Boston office of Nixon Peabody. They are authors of The Federalist Society: How Conservatives Took the Law Back From Liberals, new from Vanderbilt University Press.
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In 1987 and 1988, conway] “he served as a law clerk to Circuit Judge Ralph K. Winter, Jr.of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.”
http://www.chronicle.com/article/How-Conservatives-Captured-the/138461/
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**Trump: Scalia Will Be 'The Ultimate Example' Of My Supreme Court Picks**
9/9/16 @ 5:15
**Trump: All My Judges Will Be 'Picked By The Federalist Society'**
6/13/16 @ 5:15
http://www.desmogblog.com/2016/09/12/who-are-rep-lamar-smith-s-expert-witnesses-house-science-committee-exxonknew-subpoenas
In July, the chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, & Technology, Rep. Lamar Smith, issued subpoenas to two state attorneys general who are currently investigating what ExxonMobil knew about climate science, when they knew it, and if the company misled investors.
The attorneys general of New York and Massachusetts both refused to turn over any information or communications about their investigations. Each AG's office argued the Committee had no authority to issue such a request, calling the subpoenas a violation of states' rights under the 10th amendment.
In a response last month, Smith, a Republican from Texas, announced a hearing to “affirm” that his Committee did have the legal authority to issue such subpoenas. The legal issue the September 14 hearing will address is whether a Congressional committee has subpoena power over state attorneys general and non-profit advocacy organizations. The subpoena was called “an unprecedented effort to target ongoing state law enforcement 'investigations or potential prosecutions'” by Leslie Dubeck, an attorney in the Office of the New York State Attorney General.
Smith has called three legal experts to bolster his claim — two with direct ties to the same Exxon-funded groups who have pushed climate science denial and inaction to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
Why Would Republican Rep. Lamar Smith Put Aside Principles of Federalism to Protect Exxon?
According to Oil Change International's Dirty Energy Money database, Rep. Smith has taken $24,770 in campaign contributions from Exxon over his career, with $17,500 of that coming in the last five years.
All told, according to the Center for Responsive Politics' OpenSecret.org database, Rep. Smith has received $684,947 from the oil and gas industry since 1998 — making oil and gas his most generous industry contributor throughout his career.
On top of the subpoenas sent to the New York and Massachusetts attorneys general, Rep. Smith issued subpoenas to eight non-profit advocacy organizations, foundations and a private law firm that have drawn attention to what Exxon knew about climate science and when the company knew it.
The Union of Concerned Scientists, which received such a subpoena, offered to meet with the Committee but refused to turn over internal records. Their meeting request was refused.
“From the outset, Chairman Smith has overstepped his authority with this investigation,” said USC President Ken Kimmell. “He has consistently mischaracterized our work in repeated, convoluted attempts to justify his efforts. It is telling that after issuing broad, unilateral subpoenas, he is now holding a hearing to figure out if his actions are legitimate…We will continue to stand firm against this abuse of power and defend our First Amendment rights.”
“However Chairman Smith stacks this hearing with friendly witnesses, it's clear that he's on shaky legal ground,” Kimmell continued.
img graph
http://littlesis.org/maps/1673-rep-lamar-smith-s-house-science-committee-hearing-on-exxonknew-subpoenas
Who are Chairman Lamar Smith's Hand-Picked Witnesses?
So who are these “friendly witnesses”? All three are law professors. Two currently hold positions at major conservative think tanks that are known recipients of funding from the fossil fuel industry. The other, Jonathan Turley, is a respected law scholar and civil liberties expert with no potential conflicts of interest.
Ronald Rotunda
Ronald Rotunda is a law professor and the Doy and Dee Henley Chair and Distinguished Professor of Jurisprudence at Chapman University, and is a widely published expert on legal ethics.
In 2000, Rotunda was a visiting legal scholar at the Cato Institute, a think tank co-founded by oil and gas billionaire Charles Koch that is heavily funded by the Koch brothers.
Currently, Rotunda is a Policy Expert at the Heartland Institute, which describes itself as “the marketing arm of the free market movement,” but is most well known for its decades of climate change denial. A vocal critic of renewable energy and a cheerleader for fossil fuels, the Heartland Institute is notoriously secretive about its donors.
But many of the organization's largest known donors are fossil fuel industry companies and organizations with direct ties to the oil and gas industry.
Heartland has received at least $676,500 directly from Exxon since 1998, including $140,000 in grants that were earmarked for climate change work. It has received hundreds of thousands from various branches of the Koch brothers' donor networks, through family foundations and directly from Koch Industries. Heartland has also received more than $17.5 million in anonymous money through Donors Capital Fund and more than $600,000 from Donors Trust including numerous grants with climate related titles.
Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund are dark money organizations that allow donors to give privately, and are known toreceive millions from the Koch brothers' various entities.
Rotunda has recently criticized the state AGs for using their unquestionably legal subpoena power to request records from Exxon. Rotunda wrote for the Verdict blog and Heartland Institute's blog, “The marketplace of ideas, not the subpoena power of government, should decide what is true or false.” However, at the September 14 hearing, he is expected to argue for a Congressional subpoena power that critics argue is without precedent.
Elizabeth Price Foley
Elizabeth Price Foley is law professor at the Florida International University College of Law. Foley also serves on the Editorial Board of the Cato Institute's Supreme Court Review. The Cato Institute was co-founded by oil and gas billionaire Charles Koch, and also receives funding from various Koch affiliated organizations, including the David H. Koch Charitable Foundation.
Foley is also a Research Advisory Board member of the James Madison Institute for Public Policy. The James Madison Institute is funded in part by the Donors Capital Fund, a supporting affiliate of Donors Trust for donors of more than $1 million. The Donors funds are advertised as a way for very wealthy conservatives to remain hidden when “funding sensitive or controversial issues,” creating a lack of transparency and accountability.
Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund have been exposed as a “dark money” channel for the Koch brothers to donate to fossil fuel-friendly front groups, through their Knowledge and Progress Fund.
Finally, Foley is listed as an “Expert” at the Federalist Society, an influential conservative group that has published numerous essays and articles claiming the lawsuits against ExxonMobil and related requests for records from denialist groups are a threat to free speech, a “chilling campaign to establish ‘consensus’ through intimidation”, a “witch hunt” and a “fishing expedition.”
In 2015, the Federalist Society received funding directly from ExxonMobil, and received nearly $1 million from Donors Capital Fund in 2010.
In short, Foley currently holds positions at three influential public policy groups funded by oil and gas interests, two of which receive funds directly from ExxonMobil.
Foley also is of counsel to the law firm BakerHostetler and she collaborates with a BakerHostetler partner, David Rivkin, on articles criticizing the Obama Administration. Rivkin, also affiliated with Cato and the Federalist Society, is actively engaged in litigation and advocacy opposing efforts by the Administration to address climate change and toxic pollution. Rivkin is also known to DeSmog readers for his role in launching the Free Speech in Science Project to defend fossil fuel interests and the Competitive Enterprise Institute in the ongoing attorneys general investigations.
Full Committee Hearing Scheduled for Wednesday..
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media realclear and fedsoc
cei ~RICO
Andrew M. Grossman discusses climate change and freedom of speech in a Federalist Society produced video
sez ~ tobacco
answers unclear on AGW
==
https://ratical.org/ratville/CAH/feddieSoc.html
Introduction
When President George W. Bush took office, many pundits predicted that his narrow margin of victory, his loss of the popular vote, and his moderate-sounding campaign would lead him to govern from the political center. Yet Bush began almost immediately to confound this prediction with a series of actions -- especially in the areas of family planning, the environment, and nominations -- that seemed to have been taken directly from the right wing's playbook. Within just a few months after the new president took office, pundits and political observers were eating their earlier words, now noting that Bush was building the "most conservative administration in modern times." [1] Right-wing groups have voiced great pleasure at President Bush's efforts to assemble a team that one ultra-conservative leader described as "more Reaganite than the Reagan administration." [2]
Early predictions of moderation proved wrong largely because observers failed to take into account a very important factor: President Bush's reliance for policy and staffing decisions on members of key right-wing organizations, notably the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies. When President Bush broke his campaign promise to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, that decision was based on a controversial report requested by one of the Society's founding members. [3] When right-wing leaders attacked the potential nomination of conservative Montana Governor Marc Racicot to be attorney general, it was a leading Federalist Society activist who wrote the memorandum that proved critical in torpedoing Racicot's hopes. [4] In the end, the post went instead to former Senator John Ashcroft, an extreme conservative and Society member. Today, many Society members are working in the White House counsel's office, at the top levels of the Department of Justice and in other high administration posts. [5]
Not yet 20 years old, the Federalist Society exerts a powerful influence. Despite its protestations that it is little more than a debating society, media from across the political spectrum agree that the organization carries tremendous clout. The Washington Times' Insight magazine identified the group as the "single most influential organization in the conservative legal world.:{" :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:[6:{]}::{ An article in}::{ }:Washington Monthly:{ identified the Society as "quite simply the best-organized, best-funded, and most effective legal network operating in this country. . . . There is nothing like the Federalist Society on the left." :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:[7:{]}:
The Society's status is reflected in the list of people who are members of, or otherwise affiliated with it. This list includes: Attorney General John Ashcroft; Department of Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham; Department of the Interior Secretary Gail Norton; Senator Orrin Hatch, the ranking Republican on the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee; Solicitor General Theodore Olson; former Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr; and former Christian Coalition President Donald Hodel, who also served as secretary of the Energy and Interior departments under President Reagan (see Appendices for a more extensive list). [8]
There is nothing illegal or unethical about an administration being so heavily staffed and influenced by individuals who are affiliated with a single organization. However, the American people deserve to be fully informed about any organization that has assumed such a central role in shaping policies and determining appointees for the Bush administration. Contrary to the charges of Federalist Society members, there is nothing inappropriate or McCarthyite about such an effort to inform the public. Indeed, if the organization in question were People For the American Way, it's a safe bet that Federalist Society members themselves would be vigorously arguing that Americans should closely examine the values and goals that guide the organization.
To better inform the public debate, this report explores the Federalist Society and its members and allies -- examining their legal and policy objectives, their prevailing philosophy, as well as the kind of impact they could have through their influence within and outside the Bush administration on the law, the courts, the Constitution and ordinary citizens.
Right-Wingers of a Feather
Founded in 1982 by students at the Yale and University of Chicago law schools, the Federalist Society was initially nurtured by law professors such as Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia.:{ :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:[9:{]}::{ The Society served as a meeting ground for those who felt out of step with the perceived liberal bent of their schools' curriculum. To this day, the Society continues to attract lawyers, scholars and elected officials whose opinions closely parallel the right-wing views of Bork, Scalia, and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.}:
The Federalist Society is governed by a board of directors co-chaired by Steven Calabresi and David McIntosh, both of whom have strong ultra-conservative credentials. As aYale law student, Calabresi founded one of the first Society chapters.Upon graduation, he went on to clerk for both Robert Bork at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. He also served as a special assistant to Reagan Attorney General Edwin Meese III and as a speechwriter for Vice President Dan Quayle.
McIntosh followed a similar path, co-founding one of the Society's first chapters at the University of Chicago law school. McIntosh also served a stint as a special assistant to Meese and as special assistant and deputy legal counsel to Quayle. After his 1994 election to the U.S. House of Representatives from Indiana, McIntosh became a frequent ally of then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich. [10] McIntosh's congressional voting record was extremely conservative, exemplified by his July 28, 1995 vote to prohibit the Environmental Protection Agency from enforcing some sections of the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. [11] McIntosh, who chaired a subcommittee on regulatory issues, confided to one reporter that he was surprised at the public's support for existing environmental laws. :{:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:[12:{]}:
In addition to its board of directors, the Federalist Society has a board of visitors (formerly the board of trustees). [13] The Society's board of visitors includes Judge Bork and William Bradford Reynolds, President Reagan's assistant attorney general for civil rights who was so controversial that his 1985 nomination for promotion to associate attorney general was defeated by a Republican-led Senate Judiciary Committee. During his confirmation hearings, critics claimed that as head of the Justice Department's civil rights division, Reynolds had refused to enforce civil rights laws and ignored court rulings with which he disagreed. [14] Republican Senator Arlen Specter accused Reynolds of giving misleading testimony, "disregarding the established law," and "elevating [his] own legal judgments over the judgments of the courts." [15]
Bork has long been revered by his fellow Society members. Several months after the Senate defeated his 1987 Supreme Court bid by the largest margin in history, attendees at the Society's annual conference gave him four standing ovations -- and many of them wore "Reappoint Bork" buttons. [16]
A closer examination of the board of visitors shows the extent to which far-right views dominate the leadership of the Federalist Society. Virtually all of the board members are well-known, right-wing legal and political leaders or otherwise public supporters of radically conservative views. In addition to Bork and Reynolds, the roster includes Edwin Meese III, former White House counsel C. Boyden Gray, Senator Orrin Hatch, and former Christian Coalition leader Don Hodel. :{:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:[17:{]}:
Less well known is board member Gerald Walpin, who has criticized the Supreme Court's 1966 Miranda decision for permitting "lawlessness" and has endorsed Congress' ability to set aside the ruling that obligates police to inform defendants of their rights to remain silent and to have access to legal counsel. [18] In materials on the Society's Web site, Walpin has also assailed court precedents guaranteeing the rights of free speech and free expression. [19]
Also serving on the Society's board of visitors is University of Virginia law professor Lillian BeVier. In an article on privacy rights and the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, BeVier wrote that "the right of privacy that Roe protects" is "a perversion" of the Court's earlier rulings on privacy. [20] As applied to the right of reproductive choice, BeVier insisted that "the word `privacy' is not only unearned but positively misleading," calling the Roe decision the product of an "exercise of judicial power." [21] BeVier also sits on the advisory board of the right-wing Independent Women's Forum (IWF), which sponsored a panel discussion last year to lambaste the U.S. Civil Rights Commission -- a panel entitled: "Time to Decommission this Commission." [22] BeVier was nominated by the elder President Bush to be a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, but she never received a vote. [23]
Leading members of the Society are ed to serve on 15 "practice groups" that cover a wide range of issues such as separation of powers and federalism, free speech and election law, labor and employment law, religious liberties, environmental law, and civil rights. [24] The Society created its lawyers' division in 1986 for attorneys, business leaders, judges and others who shared three goals: educating the legal community about how the Society's ideas "can affect decisions in the legal and policy worlds"; building a network of lawyers to "exercise leadership in shaping national, state and local policy"; and "[c]ounterbalancing the leftward pressures that hold sway in the organized bar." [25]
Led by such individuals, the Federalist Society has grown substantially over the years. According to a January 2001 report by the Institute for Democracy Studies, the Society's membership includes over 40,000 lawyers, policy analysts, business leaders and others. In addition, the organization's membership includes 5,000 law students at roughly 140 law schools. [26]
Key Sources of Funding
The Federalist Society's standard membership fees -- $25 for lawyers and "standard members," $5 for law students and $10 for faculty -- account for a relatively small share of the organization's annual income. [27]Major contributors, both individuals and foundations, are recognized through the James Madison Club, whose namesake appears as the silhouetted profile in the Society's logo. The growing clout of the Society has been aided by millions of dollars from the likes of the John M. Olin, Lynde and Harry Bradley, Sarah Scaife, and Charles G. Koch foundations -- some of the largest funders of right-wing groups in the country. In 1998, all four of these foundations contributed at least $100,000 to the Federalist Society, gifts that placed them in an elite group of eight top Society contributors. [28]
The Olin Foundation grew out of a family chemical and munitions manufacturing business. It routinely has funded ultra-conservative organizations such as the Heritage Foundation and the Manhattan Institute for Public Policy Research. Other organizations on the far right that have received support from Olin are the Center for Individual Rights, Citizens for a Sound Economy Foundation, Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum, Focus on the Family, the Free Congress Foundation, the Independent Women's Forum, and the Institute for Justice. [29] The Olin Foundation was once headed by Michael Joyce, who later departed to head the Bradley Foundation. (The Olin Foundation has recently decided to disband in keeping with the wishes of its namesake, who feared that the foundation might someday be "captured by someone who didn't agree with his philosophy." [30])
The Bradley Foundation, which uses much of its financial resources to promote school vouchers and attack affirmative action and welfare programs, has a history of funding right-wing causes. It provided a grant to support David Brock's 1992 book The Real Anita Hill. [31] The book was designed to "ruin" Hill's reputation and remove lingering doubts about Thomas' fitness for the Supreme Court, but Brock has recently recanted the book's claims, admitting that right-wing activists encouraged him to work "virtually every derogatory -- and often contradictory -- allegation I had collected on Hill into the vituperative mix.":{ :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:[32:{]}:
The Bradley Foundation's Joycedefended the foundation's $100,000 grant to Charles Murray, who co-wrote the highly controversial 1994 book The Bell Curve. Murray's book was criticized widely by scholars as racist and statistically unsound. An earlier book that Murray wrote, Losing Ground, was also produced with financial backing from Joyce. In Losing Ground, Murray argued that poverty did not result from economic dislocation or discrimination, but from personal failings. In response to critics who assailed Murray's blame-the-victim view, Joyce praised Murray as "one of the foremost social thinkers in the country." [33] (This summer, Joyce left the Bradley Foundation and has formed a lobbying group to help push for congressional passage of President Bush's plan for government funding of religion, also known as faith-based initiatives. [34])
The Scaife Foundation has also funded the Federalist Society, along with a long list of other right-wing efforts. These include the American Spectator and its "Arkansas Project" -- a $2.4 million campaign to gather information for the expressed purpose of discrediting former President Bill Clinton and potentially forcing him out of office.
The Koch Foundation is one of three family foundations established by Charles G. Koch, the heir to Koch Industries, an oil refining and petrochemical company based in Wichita, Kansas. Koch Industries began as Rock Island Oil and Refining, built a generation ago by Fred Koch, who was also one of the founders of the John Birch Society. [35] In addition to serving as chief executive officer of the company, Charles Koch is a co-founder of the Cato Institute, [36] a libertarian Washington, D.C.-based think-tank whose publications have downplayed the dangers of lead-based paint and asbestos, and proposed allowing states to choose "whether to accept any increase" in the minimum wage. [37]
The Koch Foundation supports right-wing causes at every level -- from academic research and the recruitment of young scholars to think tanks and "implementation" groups that attempt to turn these ideas into political realities. Among the other right-wing groups supported by the Koch Foundation are Citizens for a Sound Economy, the Institute for Justice, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Reason Foundation, the Heritage Foundation, the Landmark Legal Foundation and the Young America's Foundation. [38]
Since 1985, the Olin, Bradley and Scaife Foundationshave provided over $5 million in grants to the Federalist Society. [39] Since 1993, the Federalist Society's funding has soared 182 percent. [40]
Undeniably Ideological
While the Federalist Society does not file legal briefs in court cases or draft an official platform, its views on major legal and constitutional issues are clearly far to the right on the political spectrum. In a recent column in The Washington Post, Federalist Society member Eugene Volokh declared the organization devoid of ideology: "We have no articles of faith." [41] Yet, at a later point in the same column, Volokh's own words betray this contention: "We think that a fair debate between us and our liberal adversaries will win more converts for our positions than for the other side's [emphasis added]." [42]
Resources on the Federalist Society's own Web site also discredit Volokh's notion that the organization has no real ideology. For example, the Web site promotes what it calls the "Conservative and Libertarian Pre-Law Reading List: An Introduction to American Law for Undergraduates and Others." According to this Society publication, the most important principles underlying the nation's legal system "are private property ownership, freedom of contract, and limited government:{ [emphasis in original]," rhetoric reminiscent of the Lochner era when highly conservative judges tried to hold back the New Deal. :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:[43:{]}::{ No wonder, then, that a March 2001 conference that the Society sponsored in Chicago carried the blunt headline "Rolling Back the New Deal." :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:[44:{]}:
The Society's pre-law reading list is based on a lengthy article first published by the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation. [45] Overall, the reading list is dominated by right-wing perspectives on the Constitution and jurisprudence. For example, under the category of public policy and "public choice," the Federalist Society endorses an "economic analysis in addressing public policy issues" and specifically praises Capitalism and Freedom, a book by arch-conservative economist Milton Friedman, as the "classic treatment" in assessing public policy through this economic lens. [46]
The Society's constitutional law reading list is similarly revealing and is introduced with this glib pronouncement: "There are two kinds of constitutional lawyers: those who take the text of the Constitution seriously, and those who don't. Much of what is wrong with the American polity today is traceable, directly or indirectly, to the latter, who greatly outnumber the former." [47] Four names account for more than half of the individually authored recommended books and articles on this reading list: Bork, Scalia, Richard A. Epstein and Lino Graglia. What are their views on constitutional freedoms and civil rights?
Robert Bork's ultra-conservative credentials are well known. In 1963, he wrote a New Republic article opposing passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act in which he took the position that outlawing racial discrimination in public accommodations would infringe business owners' rights. :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:[48] :{Ten years later, under critical Senate questioning as a nominee for Solicitor General, he recanted that position. :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:[49:{]}::{ }::{In his 1996 book:{ }:Slouching Towards Gomorrah, Bork put forth another breathtakingly radical constitutional theory by arguing that it should require only a simple majority for Congress to overturn Supreme Court rulings interpreting constitutional rights -- a theory with devastating potential to thwart the Court's power to defend individual liberties. :{:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:[50:{]}::{ }::{Just last December, after that theory was criticized by a}::{ }:New York Times:{ }::{columnist, Bork claimed that he had abandoned this idea, too -- not because he had thought better of the proposal itself, but because a similar measure instituted in Canada had not been effective. :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:[51:{]}:
Bork, whose extreme views on the Constitution doomed his 1987 nomination for the Supreme Court, argued in Slouching Towards Gomorrah that censorship is needed "to root out the worst in our popular culture.:{" :(style="font-weight:normal;background-color:#ffffff;"):}:[52:{]In}::{ }:The Tempting of America: The Political Seduction of the Law:{ -- the 1990 book recommended on the Society's pre-law reading list -- Bork seemed several times to defend, then later abandon, his "strict constructionist" approach to the Constitution.He insisted, for example, that the Fourth Amendment only protects "papers," not "words."Yet, Bork also argued that it was entirely appropriate to derive a right against electronic eavesdropping. As Pulitzer prize-winning historian Leonard Levy summed up, Bork's message is that "the Constitution means what it says when it says what he means.":(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:[53:{]}:
Like Bork's, Scalia's philosophy is well honed and extremely conservative. Just this year, in Zadvydas v. Davis, Scalia was one of only two Supreme Court justices who argued that a Lithuanian man, a nondeportable illegal alien, could be held indefinitely in detention by the government.:{ :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:[54:{]}::{ }::{In another case in the Court's just completed term, Scalia was one of only two dissenters in a ruling that struck down a death sentence reached by a South Carolina jury that had not been given complete information about sentencing alternatives. While Scalia noted that a fully informed jury "may well be a good idea," he wrote that there was no constitutional requirement for it.}::{ :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:[55:{]}:
Scalia's 1997 book, Matter of Interpretation, is recommended by the Society on its pre-law reading list. In a review in The Nation, Garrett Epps wrote that "Scalia's ideal civil law judge is something like a certain kind of Islamic jurist, to whom `interpretation' of the Koran is blasphemy" and that Scalia "finds no democratic value in guarantees against oppression of electoral minorities" and "believes elected bodies should be able to do whatever they want without a lot of whining from the losers." [56]
Epstein, a University of Chicago law professor, wrote the 1992 book Forbidden Grounds: The Case Against Employment Discrimination Laws:{, in which he assailed federal laws protecting civil rights in the workplace. :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:[57:{]}::{ In "The Mistakes of 1937" -- the article included on the Society's pre-law reading list -- Epstein assailed two 1937 Supreme Court rulings. A key ruling that recognized the federal government's authority under the commerce clause, Epstein wrote, "throws the history and text of the Constitution into disarray." :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:[58:{]}::{ Another ruling that enabled the federal government to regulate labor markets was unjustified, he wrote, even if the purpose was to protect the public health and safety. }::{"If someone wants to take risks with health and safety in order to obtain a higher wage, then so much the better," Epstein wrote. }::{"The classical theory of contract gives no reason to prohibit that transaction." :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:[59:{]}:
In one of his most controversial books, Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain, Epstein espoused views sharply at odds with long-settled constitutional law. While courts have historically interpreted the Fifth Amendment to require governments to compensate property owners for land taken through eminent domain, Epstein argued that zoning regulations, pollution control laws and even welfare payments amounted to "takings" of property by the government. Epstein admitted that his constitutional interpretation of property rights would effectively invalidate most laws passed in the 20th century. [60] In a 1995 book, Epstein devised a framework for defining privacy rights that significantly restricts such rights, disallowing even the rights of patients to maintain privacy of their medical records. [61]
No author has more contributions to the constitutional law section of the Society's pre-law reading list than Graglia, a University of Texas law professor who has vehemently opposed affirmative action and court-ordered school desegregation efforts in Texas. [62] The very titles of some of the Graglia articles that are recommended by the Society are revealing: "From Federal Union to National Monolith: Mileposts in the Demise of American Federalism" and "`Constitutional Theory': The Attempted Justification for the Supreme Court's Liberal Political Program." [63]
In the latter article, Graglia dismissed the significance of the Seventh Amendment to the Constitution -- adopted more than 200 years ago as part of the original Bill of Rights to guarantee the right to a jury in a civil trial -- calling it "an unnecessary inconvenience." In this same article, Graglia contended that the equal protection clause of the Constitution does not prevent states from discriminating on the basis of such factors as sex or nationality. [64] In the former article, Graglia espoused even more shocking views, criticizing adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment -- which permitted Americans, instead of state legislatures, to directly elect U.S. senators -- because it weakened "state autonomy." [65]
Also in his article on federalism, Graglia voiced chagrin that the Lincoln administration did not permit southern states to leave the union. By refusing to accept secession and, instead, choosing to engage in a Civil War, Graglia wrote, the North deprived the South of "the right of freedom of disassociation. Although the southern states had voluntarily joined the Union, the North had grown so attached to southerners as to prefer killing them to permitting them to depart. . . . The loss of the right to secede cost the states their ultimate defense against national encroachment upon any element of independence [emphasis in original]." [66] Incredibly, these Graglia articles are endorsed by the Society for those who want to learn "about the historical process that deformed many areas of constitutional law..." [67]
Graglia's extreme and outspoken views have made him a lightning rod. In 1997, he declared that Mexican-American and African American students were not academically competitive with white students due largely to "cultural effects." Of these minority groups, Graglia said, "They have a culture that seems not to encourage achievement. Failure is not looked upon with disgrace." Graglia has also been criticized for using the ugly, racially derogatory word "pickaninny" to refer to African American students in his classes. [68] Graglia's remarks drew widespread criticism. A resolution denouncing the statements was drafted in the Georgia House of Representatives, and a University of Texas regent called Graglia's comments a "cruel and insensitive lie." [69]
The Society's "Journalist's Guide to Legal Experts" -- a Web site inventory of attorneys and scholars to whom the organization steers the news media -- offers additional evidence of the group's overriding right-wing philosophy. While the Society's Web site points out that the views of these experts are their own, it also makes quite clear that the Society promotes them as espousing conservative and libertarian philosophies. Although conservatives and libertarians across the country hold differing views on many of the subjects listed, the views of those recommended by the Society on a number of specific controversial issues are strikingly uniform.
For example, all three people listed by the Federalist Society as gay rights law experts hold views that are hostile to gay rights. Michael Carvin, a Washington, D.C., attorney, actually represented Equal Rights, Not Special Rights, the political group that worked to overturn Cincinnati's human rights ordinance protecting gays from discrimination. [70] Carvin praised a court ruling that upheld Issue 3, an anti-gay amendment to Cincinnati's city charter. "[The amendment] frees up local communities to pass initiatives like [Cincinnati's]," he said. [71]
Another of the experts, Notre Dame law professor Charles E. Rice, has strongly anti-gay viewsand has even attacked his university's administration for failing to emphasize the message that "[h]omosexual acts are intrinsically wrong." [72] The third expert offered to journalists is David M. Wagner, a law professor at Regent University, which was founded by right-wing televangelist Pat Robertson. In June 1999, Wagner signed onto a letter by 157 law professors that criticized an upcoming legal conference for discussing "the legal recognition of same-sex partnerships." The letter signed by Wagner argued that laws "to include same-sex unions" would create "unprecedented moral, social and legal confusion..." [73]
Similarly, on the issue of assault weapons, the Federalist Society recommends two experts for the media to contact: Nelson Lund of George Mason University law school and Eugene Volokh of UCLA Law School:{. :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:[74:{]Both clearly have similar anti-gun control views, as evidenced by the fact that the National Rifle Association -- the best known extreme pro-gun group in America -- also recommends Lund and Volokh as experts for media interviews. In fact, an NRA press statement last year urged the media to interview Lund and Volokh, noting that both of them could be reached through NRA's own public affairs office. :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:[75:{]}::{ Moreover, Volokh co-wrote a 1999 article entitled "Loaded Guns Can Be Good for Kids," in which he and co-author Dave Kopel strongly criticized a federal proposal to require guns to be sold with safety locks. :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:[76:{]}:
From Network to Policy
In the face of clear evidence of the Federalist Society's pervasive ideological bent, Volokh and other spokespersons expect us to believe that the organization has no desire to convert its ideology into legislative, judicial or political action. Volokh has claimed that the Society's charter "is to create discussion, not to lobby," and Assistant U.S. Attorney General and Society member Viet Dinh has described the organization merely as "a forum for discussion of law and public policy from both sides." [77] Although the Federalist Society does sponsor debates and does not lobby or file briefs in the mold of a traditional advocacy organization, it is evident that the Society does aggressively promote its ideological point of view.
Instead of advocating change piecemeal -- one lawsuit or one bill at a time -- the Society seeks to produce much broader change by altering the entire legal landscape. This includes developing and promoting far-right positions, guiding law students and young lawyers accordingly, and influencing who will become judges, top government officials, and decision-makers. It urges law students to join its law school chapters by noting that the Society "creates an informal network of people with shared views which can provide assistance in job placement." [78] To sum up the importance of the Society's outreach to law school students, the right-wing magazine Insight quoted former Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter's observation: "In the last analysis, the law is what the lawyers are." [79] And once they become lawyers, the Society's lawyers' division seeks to build a network of attorneys to "exercise leadership in shaping national, state, and local policy." [80]
The Federalist Society's overall methods were best captured by its own executive director, Eugene Meyer, in a 1996 guest editorial in a Heritage Foundation publication. Meyer wrote that his organization "has built a network designed to overcome legal abuses and to return America to a legal system which operates according to the design of the founders." [81] Through this network of right-wing lawyers, government officials, scholars and judges, the Society seeks to fundamentally remake the American legal system.
Curtis Moore, a former Republican counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, recently offered a case study of how the Society's "network" operates and how far it extends. He noted the relentless attacks leveled by ultra-conservatives in Congress on the Clean Air Act. Moore noted that in May 1998 Senator Orrin Hatch filed a 29-page brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, attacking the EPA's particulate standard. The brief, Moore explained, "was written by one member of the Federalist Society board, C. Boyden Gray, to be filed on behalf of another member of the Federalist Society board, Orrin Hatch, to defend the corporate interests of a member of the Business Advisory Council of the Federalist Society, Joseph Cannon of Geneva Steel, in a case to be heard by two judges, [Douglas] Ginsburg and [Stephen] Williams, who are active participants in Federalist Society events. . ." In addition, Gray had lobbied on behalf of Geneva Steel from January 1996 to July 1997. [82]
With the increased public scrutiny that the Society has recently received, Meyer and other leaders have downplayed its objectives. In April, for example, Meyer insisted that the group is simply interested in "discussion and in getting ideas heard." [83] Yet even activists on the far right don't seem to accept this explanation. Said ultra-conservative activist Grover Norquist: "If Hillary Clinton had wanted to put some meat on her charge of a `vast right-wing conspiracy,' she should have had a list of Federalist Society members and she could have spun a more convincing story." [84]
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