ted olson bak

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whitewater, Hale Ark Pjt Ginni?!

,Olson served as attorney for Citizens United in the Supreme Court case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.

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brock

That critical flow of inside information allowed Starr, in effect, to set a perjury trap for Clinton, laying the foundation for a crazed national political crisis and an unjust impeachment over a consensual affair.

bush v gore:

Ted Cruz, a 29-year-old domestic-policy adviser on the Bush campaign at the time and a former law clerk for Chief Justice William Rehnquist, put together Bush’s legal team. One of his first calls was to John Roberts, whom Cruz knew from the close-knit network of former Rehnquist clerks,nicknamed the Cabal.

“We started to assemble a team of the best lawyers and in particular the best Supreme Court lawyers in the country, and John’s name naturally came near the top of the list,” Cruz told The New York Times in 2005. Roberts, who had clerked for Rehnquist in 1980 and was now in private practice, caught the next flight to Tallahassee.

Ted Cruz, then 29, put together George W. Bush’s legal team in the 2000 election fight.

Roberts had a long history of opposition to voting rights. As a young lawyer in Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department, Roberts led the charge against the 1982 reauthorization of the VRA, writing more than two dozen memos criticizing the landmark civil-rights law. Voting-rights violations “should not be made too easy to prove,” he wrote, and would lead to “a quota system in electoral politics.” Now he was helping the Bush team prevent eligible votes from being counted.

===

Bloomberg

By Paul M. Barrett

September 26, 2013

You know a major corporation really cares about an appellate-court argument when they bring out one of the bar’s big guns. No gun is bigger than Theodore Olson.

In federal court in New York today, Chevron deployed Olson, a former U.S. solicitor general and noted Supreme Court advocate, to convince a three-judge panel to clear the way for a civil racketeering suit the oil company wants to start next month against plaintiffs’ attorney and environmental activist Steven Donziger. Olson, who at the moment is also representing BP in that energy giant’s liability battle in New Orleans over the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, seemed to get the job done for Chevron....

===

A SPKER FOR FOUNDER FEDSOC

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, andTheodore 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.

===

His Cheatin' Heart

During this period the editor of The American Spectator was R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., author of Boy Clinton: The Political Biography, published by Regnery. Scaife’s foundations gave $2.4 million to The American Spectator Education Foundation while it was running anti-Clinton articles. The foundation launched the “Arkansas Project,” financing information-gathering operations involving reporters, private investigators, former law enforcement officers, and political operatives. Public tax records of the foundation were obtained by Joe Conason at the New York Observer, who discovered that $1.7 million of the Scaife funds between 1993 and 1996 had been reported as legal fees but apparently used for the “Arkansas Project.”

Some $35,000 of these funds ended up with Parker Dozhier, who owns a fishing camp in Arkansas. One witness for Starr, David Hale, “was staying at Dozhier’s fishing cabin complex in Hot Springs, Ark., between 1994 and 1996.” Two former friends of Dozhier claim he made small cash payments to Hale, but Dozhier denies that claim. Dozhier, however, provided free accommodations to Hale. Dozhier served as a conduit for information onWhitewater from Hale and others to investigators, reporters, and representatives from The American Spectator.Theodore Olson, a director at the Spectator Foundation, was Hale’s lawyer in 1995 and 1996. Olson is Ken Starr’s former law partner. A grand jury is considering if illegalities were committed.

Other potential witnesses against Clinton were clearly in the cash pipeline. According to Boston Globe reporter John Aloysius Farrell:

…Peter W. Smith, a wealthy Chicago businessman and supporter of House Speaker Newt Gingrich, paid thousands of dollars to the Arkansas state troopers whose tales of Clinton’s sex life, published in the Spectator, sparked the Paula Jones case.

Since the Spectator article in December 1993, it was known that unnamed conservative benefactors gave the troopers financial assistance. The Chicago Sun-Times pierced the veil of anonymity…identifying Smith—a big contributor to GOPAC, the political action committee once led by Gingrich— as the man who gave $6,700 each to two troopers and introduced them to David Brock, the writer of the article. Smith has given $150,000 to GOPAC in the last 12 years.

He told the Sun-Times he spent $80,000 in the 18 months after Clinton’s election to get stories about the president’s personal life into the media.

===

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/i-knew-brett-kavanaugh-during-his-years-republican-operative-don-ncna907391

no lnx

I knew Brett Kavanaugh during his years as a Republican operative. Don't let him sit on the Supreme Court.

We were part of a close circle of cynical hard-right operatives being groomed for much bigger things.

Sept. 7, 2018,

By David Brock

I used to know Brett Kavanaugh pretty well. And, when I think of Brett now, in the midst of his hearings for a lifetime appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court, all I can think of is the old "Aesop's Fables" adage: "A man is known by the company he keeps."

And that's why I want to tell any senator who cares about our democracy: Vote no.

Twenty years ago, when I was a conservative movement stalwart, I got to know Brett Kavanaugh both professionally and personally.

Brett Kavanaugh proves the Supreme Court swing vote is dead

SEPT. 4, 2018]

Brett actually makes a cameo appearance in my memoir of my time in the GOP, "Blinded By The Right." I describe him at a party full of zealous young conservatives gathered to watch President Bill Clinton's 1998 State of the Union address — just weeks after the story of his affair with a White House intern had broken. When the TV camera panned to Hillary Clinton, I saw Brett — at the time a key lieutenant of Ken Starr, the independent counsel investigating various Clinton scandals — mouth the word "bitch."

But there's a lot more to know about Kavanaugh than just his Pavlovian response to Hillary's image. Brett and I were part of a close circle of cold, cynical and ambitious hard-right operatives being groomed by GOP elders for much bigger roles in politics, government and media. And it’s those controversial associations that should give members of the Senate and the American public serious pause.

[Related OPINION

GOP's maneuvering during the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings will seriously damage the Supreme Court's legitimacy]

Call it Kavanaugh's cabal: There was his colleague on the Starr investigation, Alex Azar, now the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Mark Paoletta is now chief counsel to Vice President Mike Pence; House anti-Clinton gumshoeBarbara Comstockis now a Republican member of Congress. Future Fox News personalities Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson were there with Ann Coulter, now a best-selling author, and internet provocateur Matt Drudge.

At one time or another, each of them partied at my Georgetown townhouse amid much booze and a thick air of cigar smoke.

In a rough division of labor, Kavanaugh played the role of lawyer — one of the sharp young minds recruited by the Federalist Society to infiltrate the federal judiciary with true believers. Through that network, Kavanaugh was mentored by D.C. Appeals Court Judge Laurence Silberman, known among his colleagues for planting leaks in the press for partisan advantage.

[Related OPINION

Tom Steyer and Ron Fein: Stop Kavanaugh's confirmation until Mueller's investigation is done]

When, as I came to know, Kavanaugh took on the role of designated leaker to the press of sensitive information from Starr's operation, we all laughed that Larry had taught him well. (Of course, that sort of political opportunism by a prosecutor is at best unethical, if not illegal.)

Another compatriot was George Conway (now Kellyanne's husband), who led a secretive group of right-wing lawyers — we called them "the elves" — who worked behind the scenes directing the litigation team of Paula Jones, who had sued Clinton for sexual harassment. I knew then that information was flowing quietly from the Jones team via Conway to Starr's office — and also that Conway's go-to man was none other than Brett Kavanaugh.

[Recommended OPINION

What could be Florida Gov. DeSantis’ undoing on the national stage? HBCUs.

OPINION

Trump's election plot was eye-opening. And the Senate is finally paying attention.]

But the cabal's godfather was Ted Olson, the then-future solicitor general for George W. Bush and now a sainted figure of the GOP establishment(and of some liberals for his role in legalizing same-sex marriage). Olson had a largely hidden role as a consigliere to the "Arkansas Project" — a multi-million dollar dirt-digging operation on the Clintons, funded by the eccentric right-wing billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife and run through The American Spectator magazine, where I worked at the time.

Both Ted and Brett had what one could only be called an unhealthy obsession with the Clintons — especially Hillary. While Ted was pushing through the Arkansas Project conspiracy theories claiming that Clinton White House lawyer and Hillary friend Vincent Foster was murdered (he committed suicide), Brett was costing taxpayers millions by pedaling the same garbage at Starr's office.

A detailed analysis of Kavanaugh's own notes from the Starr Investigation reveals he was cherry-picking random bits of information from the Starr investigation — as well as the multiple previous investigations — attempting vainly to legitimize wild right-wing conspiracies. For years he chased down each one of them without regard to the emotional cost to Foster’s family and friends, or even common decency.

[Related OPINION

Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination is the result of years of unopposed conservative organizing]

Kavanaugh was not a dispassionate finder of fact but rather an engineer of a political smear campaign. And after decades of that, he expects people to believe he's changed his stripes.

Like millions of Americans this week, I tuned into Kavanaugh's hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee with great interest. In his opening statement and subsequent testimony, Kavanaugh presented himself as a "neutral and impartial arbiter" of the law. Judges, he said, were not players but akin to umpires — objectively calling balls and strikes. Again and again, he stressed his "independence" from partisan political influences.

But I don't need to see any documents to tell you who Kavanaugh is — because I've known him for years. And I'll leave it to all the lawyers to parse Kavanaugh's views on everything from privacy rights to gun rights. But I can promise you that any pretense of simply being a fair arbiter of the constitutionality of any policy regardless of politics is simply a pretense. He made up his mind nearly a generation ago — and, if he's confirmed, he'll have nearly two generations to impose it upon the rest of us.

===

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB861917340688900500

clinton jihad:

no lnx

By Edward Felsenthal and David Rogers Staff Reporters of The Wall Street Journal

April 25, 1997

WASHINGTON -- Virginia Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, had to force herself to be pleasant when she met Hillary Clinton for the first time four years ago.

Mrs. Clinton had been an outspoken supporter of Anita Hill, the woman who had famously accused Mr. Thomas of sexual harassment during his 1991 confirmation hearings. Ms. Thomas couldn't get the association out of her mind.

"For me, it was, 'Wow, now I have to, in my role, be respectful and cordial and courteous,' " Ms. Thomas recalls thinking as she moved through a receiving line toward the new first lady. Although the brief encounter was awkward for her, Ms. Thomas says she was proud of how she handled it. She gave Mrs. Clinton some verses from the Bible, along with a warning about how tough this city can be.

Today Ms. Thomas feels a kinship with Mrs. Clinton. Like the first lady, she is best known as the spouse of a prominent man. But also like Mrs. Clinton, she has become a controversial political player and has been the subject of vigorous public criticism for her partisan activities.

Although she takes pains to carve out her own identity, Ms. Thomas, 40 years old, is inevitably linked with her husband in much of what she does. "A lot of people treat her a certain way ... because of who she is married to," says radio-host Armstrong Williams, a former close aide and a friend to Justice Thomas.

Awkward Predicament

Ms. Thomas says there are challenges that come with "being a Supreme Court spouse, as opposed to just a lawyer working in Washington." Her dual role highlights an increasingly common political phenomenon: Now that many political partners are professionals themselves, they face an awkward predicament. Many find they have to struggle to avoid being used as political tools or being perceived as benefiting from their spouse's position.

Barbara Olson,an aide to the Senate leadership who has worked in congressional investigations of the Clinton administration, has been a target of Democratic sniping that she is a proxy for her husband, Theodore Olson, a prominent lawyer who has represented one of the president's accusers in the Whitewater affair. Republicans in the last Congress delighted in cutting money for a small anticrime program that paid consulting fees to Sylvia Panetta, wife of then-White House Chief-of-Staff Leon Panetta. That put Mr. Panetta in the uncomfortable position of having to fight to get the money back.

Ms. Thomas had already made a name for herself as an activist in conservative circles before Republicans took over Congress in 1994. But her influence grew after that election when her boss, Rep. Dick Armey of Texas, became House majority leader.

Ms. Thomas operates much as an eager young administrative officer back at the base camp for the Republican infantry. She works behind the scenes, serving as part strategist and part cheerleader for the leadership's effort tobeef-up the GOP's ability to investigate and oversee the White House and executive agencies.[benghazi much later?]

Partisan Battles

It is a role that takes her from dry, detailed General Accounting Office reports to the higher-profile and more partisan-edged investigations of administration scandals. She has assisted with the investigations of White House ethics, Whitewater, the firing of the White House travel staff, and the late Commerce Secretary Ron Brown's financial dealings. When Republicans approved an expanded budget for House committee investigations last month, the move partly reflected Ms. Thomas's influence.

She has figured in several high-profile fights involving the House Appropriations Committee. Over the objections of some Republicans on the committee, she pressed hard for deep cuts in funding to Legal Services Corp., a provider of legal aid to the poor that she viewed as using federal money to advance liberal causes.

And in a stormy panel meeting in1995, she stood watch on behalf of Mr. Armey as Republicans reluctantly lined up behind a leadership attempt to bar funding for nonprofit organizations that engage in advocacy, in many cases for poor constituencies. The measure ultimately failed because of opposition in the Senate.

During this Congress, Ms. Thomas has stepped back, as the leadership has relaxed its efforts to control committee chairmen. But she is still a force behind continuing investigations, and before last year's election she helped gather information on White House scandals for Republicans to use on the campaign trail. (That project was abandoned after word of its existence leaked, prompting concern that it would make Republicans look like scandalmongers.)

A memo this past January titled "Foreign Money Contributions Scandal" illustrates Ms. Thomas's style. Throwing as wide a net as possible, she addressed it to Republican staff on 19 committees, including the sensitive Intelligence panel. In it, she cited statutes or regulations that might have been violated by overseas contributions to Democrats. She urged staff directors to be "watchful" for administration efforts to dismiss problems as just "campaign finance." Ms. Thomas wrote, "what we don't know is how much was for sale in the Clinton presidency."

Though Ms. Thomas is good-humored and engaging, her writing sometimes gets her into trouble.Much of her job is simply informational: She helps produce a biweekly "Oversight Bulletin" publicizing current investigations. But when she pens strategy, she betrays a partisan edge that makes experienced staff directors blanch.

A case in point is an April 1996 memo she wrote for Republican congressmen Bob Walker and Jim Nussleand sent to House committees, asking for "examples of dishonesty or ethical lapses in the Clinton administration" and "anecdotes that amplify these areas." The memo requested that all such materials be sent to her as quickly as possible and reminded committee chairs that "you are a tremendous resource for this project."

Democratic Backlash

Democrats quickly turned Ms. Thomas's memo on the Republicans, claiming it proved that the investigations were partisan. During one hearing, Democrats blew up the memo and posted it on an easel to suggest that the proceeding was part of a GOP plot to denigrate the administration.

Even some Republican staff members complained that it went too far. "It didn't dawn on her that in Congress, things aren't supposed to appear politically driven,"even if they are, says a senior GOP aide who has worked with her.

In May, two weeks after the memo was distributed, Democratic Rep. Jim Moran of Virginia spotted Ms. Thomas in the audience at a hearing on the White House travel-office firings. In a rare public attack on a congressional staffer, he demanded to know why "Mrs. Clarence Thomas in that bright blue dress" was present. "I really smell a political witch hunt," he said.

Ms. Thomas didn't endure the attack silently. Later that day, she confronted Mr. Moran on a House elevator and showed him a copy of a book, "Everything Men Know About Women," in which all the pages are blank. "This book is about you," she said.Justice Thomas later left his wife a voice-mail message in which he teasingly sang verses of the song, "Devil With a Blue Dress On."

Spousal Conflict?

Democratic Rep. Paul Kanjorski of Pennsylvania, who also questioned Ms. Thomas's role at the travel-office hearing, believes it is a conflict of interest for her to be involved in disputes between Congress and the White House that the Supreme Court might be called on to settle. "We may have a problem here where the marital relationship confuses the constitutional intent" of the separation of powers, Mr. Kanjorski says. Ms. Thomas laughs when told of Mr. Kanjorski's statement, but declines to comment....[much more]

===

https://www.thenation.com/article/how-the-2000-election-in-florida-led-to-a-new-wave-of-voter-disenfranchisement/

no lnx

AUGUST 17-24, 2015 ISSUE

How the 2000 Election in Florida Led to a New Wave of Voter Disenfranchisement

A botched voter purge prevented thousands from voting—and empowered a new generation of voting-rights critics.

By Ari Berman JULY 28, 2015

On November 7, 2000, Willie Steen, a Navy vet who had served in the Persian Gulf during Desert Storm, went to cast his ballot for president at the St. Francis Episcopal Church in Tampa, Florida.

He brought his 10-year-old son, Willie Jr., to the polls for the first time. They waited a half hour to reach a poll worker. When Steen gave the poll worker his name, she searched a list of registered voters in the precinct and told him, “You can’t vote. You’re a convicted felon.”

“You must be mistaken,” a shocked Steen replied. “I’ve never been arrested in my life.” He worked at a hospital, a Tampa orthopedics center, that wouldn’t employ anyone with a felony conviction.

The poll worker gave him a number to call at the board of elections, but no one picked up. The 75 people behind him in line grew antsy. Few would look him in the eye.

He left in embarrassment, struggling to explain to his son what had just happened. After fighting for his country abroad, he wasn’t able to exercise his most fundamental right at home. “I felt I was shafted,” Steen said. “I think there were a lot of things that weren’t done properly. My name was dragged through the mud.”

He later found out from journalist Greg Palast that he’d been confused with a convict named Willie O’Steen, who had committed a felony between 1991 and 1993, when Steen was in the Persian Gulf. Little did Steen know that the same thing was happening to voters across the state of Florida—and disproportionately to voters like him, who were African-American.

Before the election, Florida sent its county election supervisors a list of 58,000 alleged felons to purge from the voting rolls. Florida was one of eight states that prevented ex-felons from voting. The felon-disenfranchisement law dated back to 1868, when the state banned anyone with a felony conviction from voting unless the governor issued a pardon. The law targeted newly emancipated African-Americans, who during slavery were far more likely to be arrested than whites, including for such offenses as looking at a white woman. This racially discriminatory policy was still on the books in 2000. Blacks made up only 11 percent of registered voters in the state, but 44 percent of those on the purge list, which turned out to be littered with errors.

Hanging chads, butterfly ballots, the antics of Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, and thousands of Jews accidentally voting for Pat Buchanan in Palm Beach were among the stories that captured the headlines during the chaotic 36-day Florida recount between Al Gore and George W. Bush. The widespread and wrongful purging of registered voters was the most consequential—and least discussed—aspect of the Florida election.

“The parties and the candidates did not want to focus on the racial impact of decisions that were made in Florida,” said civil-rights lawyer Judith Browne Dianis. “It was one of those moments when race was being swept under the rug.”

The NAACP sued Florida after the election for violating the Voting Rights Act (VRA). As a result of the settlement, the company that the Florida legislature entrusted with the purge—the Boca Raton–based Database Technologies (DBT)—ran the names on its 2000 purge list using stricter criteria. The exercise turned up 12,000 voters who shouldn’t have been labeled felons. That was22 times Bush’s 537-vote margin of victory.

No one could ever determine precisely how many voters who were incorrectly labeled felons were turned away from the polls. But the US Civil Rights Commission launched a major investigation into the 2000 election fiasco, and its acting general counsel, Edward Hailes, did the math the best that he could. If 12,000 voters were wrongly purged from the rolls, and 44 percent of them were African-American, and 90 percent of African-Americans voted for Gore, that meant 4,752 black Gore voters—almost nine times Bush’s margin of victory—could have been prevented from voting. It’s not a stretch to conclude that the purge cost Gore the election. “We did think it was outcome-determinative,” Hailes said.

The 2000 election in Florida forever changed American politics and kicked off a new wave of GOP-led voter disenfranchisement efforts. “Other people began to see that in very competitive elections, you could make a difference by keeping certain voters from participating,” Hailes said. Bush’s election empowered a new generation of voting-rights critics, who hyped the threat of voter fraud in order to restrict access to the ballot, and remade a Supreme Court that would eventually gut the centerpiece of the VRA.

* * *

On election night in Florida, Bush led Gore by 1,784 votes. Because of the closeness of the election, an automatic recount began two days later in every county. Hundreds of lawyers flocked to Florida. Ben Ginsberg, national counsel for the Bush campaign, called it “Woodstock for constitutional lawyers.”

Ted Cruz, then 29, put together George W. Bush’s legal team in the 2000 election fight.

Roberts edited legal briefs, including the Bush campaign’s 50-page submission to the Supreme Court, and prepared Theodore Olson, a former assistant attorney general under Reagan, for oral arguments. He also advised Florida’s governor, Jeb Bush, on how the state legislature could assign its presidential electors to George W. Bush before the recount was finished. “I really appreciate your input on my role in this unique and historic situation,” Bush wrote to Roberts.

Roberts’s name appeared on no briefs, but his influence was unmistakable. “He is one of the finest legal writers of his generation,” Cruz said. “His editing pen was invaluable.”

The Bush campaign, which led by 327 votes after the automatic recount, wanted as few disputed ballots accepted as possible. When the Florida Supreme Court ordered a statewide manual recount, which favored Gore, Bush appealed to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court halted Florida’s recount four days later, on December 12, thereby declaring Bush the winner of the election. No justice put his name on the unsigned 5–4 opinion.

The Court asserted that the recount violated the equal-protection clause of the14th Amendment— established in 1868 to secure the rights of African-Americans—because there was no uniform statewide standard for counting disputed ballots in each county. In a draft of her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg observed in a footnote that if there was any equal- protection violation in Florida, it was because black voters encountered a disproportionate number of problems voting. Justice Antonin Scalia, her closest friend on the Court, objected to Ginsburg’s “Al Sharpton” footnote, according to The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin, and she took it out. When one read the Bush v. Gore decision, it was as if the disenfranchisement of black voters had never occurred.

Fifteen years later, Cruz and Jeb Bush are run- ning for the GOP’s nomination for president, and Roberts is celebrating his 10th year as chief justice of the United States.

* * *

On January 11, 2001, Jeb Bush testified before the Civil Rights Commission during its investigation into the election problems in Florida. “What, if anything, did you do to ensure the election laws were faithfully executed?” general counsel Hailes asked the Florida governor. Bush said that he wasn’t responsible for the problems in Florida, including the voter purge.He blamed Katherine Harris. “It is the responsibility of the secretary of state as part of our Constitution,” Bush answered.

“You had no authority, no responsibilities, and took no actions with regard to the election?” Hailes pressed.

“No, the secretary of state and the 67 supervisors of election were responsible for that,” Bush said.

But blatant warning signs were ignored by Bush and the state well in advance of the election. On the orders of state officials, names were added to the purge list if there was only a 70 percent matchbetween a name on the voter rolls and a name in the state’s felon database. This meant that voters could be tagged as felons even when middle initials, suffixes, nicknames, and even race and sex data didn’t match perfectly. Hence the confusion of Willie Steen with felon O’Steen.

DBT warned the state that it was compiling “false positives.” Bucky Mitchell, a senior attorney for the Division of Elections, told the company, “Obviously, we want to capture more names that possibly aren’t matches and let the supervisors make a final determination rather than exclude certain matches altogether.” Voters were deemed guilty until proven innocent. The election supervisors became responsible for Florida’s intentionally lax record-keeping.

In May 2000, after the first supposedly corrected batch of names was released, the election supervisor in Madison County found herself on the purge list. Ion Sancho, the election supervisor for Tallahassee’s Leon County, was the only election official to go through the list one by one. “We went for a five-for-five match,” he told Vanity Fair. “Those were criteria such as name, birth date, race, sex, Social Security number. When we applied that to this list of 697 that we got in 2000, I could verify only 33.”

Nonetheless, the highest-ranking officials in Florida did not urge the election supervisors to disregard a list that many knew was deeply flawed. “Once the problems emerged, Governor Bush could have made it clear that it wasn’t acceptable to wrongly take voters off the rolls,” says Matthew Corrigan, professor of political science at the University of North Florida and author of Conservative Hurricane: How Jeb Bush Remade Florida.

In January and February 2001, the Civil Rights Commission listened to 30 hours of testimony from more than 100 witnesses during three field hearings in Tallahassee and Miami—including Bush, Harris, the state attorney general, and numerous county election supervisors. The commission’s final report found evidence of “widespread voter disenfranchisement”—which likely violated the VRA—and concluded that an “overall lack of leadership in protecting voting rights was largely responsible for the broad array of problems in Florida during the 2000 election.”

A strenuous dissenting statement was filed by the conservative intellectual Abigail Thernstrom, whom Bush had appointed to the Civil Rights Commission at the beginning of his presidency, and Russell Redenbaugh, a Philadelphia businessman appointed by Bush’s father. Thernstrom had been the leading critic of the VRA since the 1980s, arguing that the law represented “an instrument for affirmative action in the electoral sphere.”

The civil-rights panel had focused on the wrong set of voting problems in Florida, the two commissioners asserted in their dissent: “The Commission should have looked into allegations of voter fraud, not only with respect to ineligible felons, but allegations involving fraudulent absentee ballots in nursing homes, unregistered voters, and so forth. Across the country in a variety of jurisdictions, serious questions about voter fraud have been raised.”

Despite this dissenting statement, a majority of the commission called on the Justice Department to immediately prepare litigation against Florida and its governor for violating the VRA. By then, however, it was too late: The Bush administration followed Thernstrom’s lead and prioritized prosecutions of voter fraud over investigations into voter disenfranchisement.

* * *

A thousand miles north of Florida, a similar electoral calamity, with equally profound ramifications, unfolded in St. Louis.

On Election Day 2000, Mahina Nightsage, a 41-year-old community organizer, went to her polling place of 20 years. But this time, she found that her name was not on the registration rolls. Her local alderman told her to visit the board of elections downtown to find out what had happened.

When she did, Nightsage saw a scene that resembled an election in a Third World country. Hundreds of voters were lined up around the block and packed inside, standing on tables to get the board’s attention. Nightsage waited two and a half hours before the board processed her paperwork and she was able to return to her polling place to vote for Gore.

Not everyone was as lucky. “There were many people who had been waiting for hours, and they just left,” Nightsage said. The line of jilted voters in the heavily Democratic city was predominantly African-American.

The problems started before the 2000 election, when the St. Louis Board of Election Commissioners sent voter registration cards to all eligible voters. Those whose mail was returned as “Attempted—Not Known,” “Not Deliverable as Addressed,” or “Forwarding Order Expired” were labeled “inactive” and removed from the rolls. More than 50,000 voters in St. Louis were placed on inactive status between November 1996 and November 2000. None were notified about the change in their status. Thus, thousands of voters like Nightsage arrived at the polls on Election Day only to learn that they were no longer on the rolls.

The Gore campaign filed an emergency suit late that afternoon asking a court to keep the polls open an extra three hours so that everyone could vote. When a circuit court ordered the polls open until 10 pm in St. Louis, the Bush campaign filed an immediate appeal. Forty-five minutes later, the Missouri Court of Appeals rescinded the order and closed the polls. Only 100 additional voters had been able to cast ballots during the brief additional time. “As of 10:00 pm on election day,” a Justice Department lawsuit later stated, “individuals were still standing in line at the downtown headquarters of the Board of Elections.”

The brief extension of polling hours infuriated Missouri Republicans, who had gathered at an election-night party at the St. Louis Marriott West Hotel. Missouri Senator John Ashcroft watched in disbelief as the election returns showed him losing to a dead man.

Ashcroft’s opponent in the closely watched Senate race, Missouri Governor Mel Carnahan, had been killed in a plane crash three weeks before the election. His name remained on the ballot, and his wife, Jean, ran in his stead.

Republicans viewed the extended poll hours as a last-ditch attempt to illegitimately oust Ashcroft from office. “I know there are very serious allegations of fraud and corruption as it related to the conduct of the election in the city of St. Louis,” Ashcroft said.

Missouri’s senior senator, Republican Kit Bond, was far more blunt. “Democrats in the city of St. Louis are trying to steal this election,” he screamed into the microphone at the Marriott, slamming his right fist on the podium in anger.

How else could a sitting senator lose to a dead man? For Missouri Republicans, St. Louis became the contemporary version of the 1960 election in Chicago, when ballots from dead voters allegedly elected John F. Kennedy president.

Ashcroft lost by 49,000 votes—a result that would not have been determined by 100 extra people voting from 7 to 7:45 pm. Nevertheless, Bond sent the FBI and the US Attorney’s office a 250-page report alleging “a major criminal enterprise designed to defraud voters.” Less than two months later, Bush nominated Ashcroft as attorney general, and a new right-wing voter-fraud movement was born.

Soon after Bush’s inauguration, his administration embarked on a dramatic effort to restrict voting rights. With Ashcroft in charge, longtime civil-rights lawyers were fired from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, which enforced the VRA, and replaced by ultraconservative zealots like voting-section chief Brad Schlozman, who vowed to “gerrymander all of those crazy libs right out of the section.” US Attorneys in states like New Mexico, Washington, and Missouri were fired for refusing to prosecute trumped-up cases of voter fraud.

Georgia’s strict voter-ID law, the first of its kind, was approved by the Justice Department under the VRA, despite objections from state lawyers and clear evidence that the law would disproportionately burden black voters. According to the Justice Department’s report, Representative Sue Burmeister of Augusta, the lead Republican sponsor of the bill, told department lawyers that “if there are fewer black voters because of this bill, it will only be because there is less opportunity for fraud. [Burmeister] said that when black voters in her black precincts are not paid to vote, they do not go to the polls.”

Most significantly, these new reactionaries soon found crucial allies in John Roberts and Samuel Alito, the two Supreme Court justices appointed by the Bush administration. In April 2008, the Court approved Indiana’s voter-ID law in the first major voting-rights case heard under Roberts. The Court backed the measure even though Indiana presented no instances of voter impersonation that the law would stop, which signaled that states could implement new voting restrictions merely by invoking the specter of voter fraud, even if such fraud had not actually occurred. (The author of the decision, John Paul Stevens, has since admitted that “the impact of the statute is much more serious” on poor, minority, disabled, and elderly voters than he’d initially recognized.)

Five years later, in a decision written byRoberts, the Supreme Court invalidated the centerpiece of the VRA: the formula that required states with the worst histories of voter discrimination to approve changes to their voting systems with the federal government.That decision has led to new voter-suppression efforts in states like North Carolina and Texas, and has set a chilling precedent for voting rights in the Obama era.

The result has been the most significant effort to restrict voting rights since the Jim Crow era.From 2011 to 2015, 468 voting restrictions have been introduced in 49 states. Half the states in the country have passed new laws making it harder to vote. None of this would have been possible if it wasn’t for the 2000 election in Florida.

Ari Berman TWITTER Ari Berman is a former senior contributing writer for The Nation.

reconstruction:

Theodore B. "Ted" Olson, is a former Assistant Attorney General to the Reagan Administration^[1]and former Solicitor General for the Bush administration. He was appointed June 10, 2005, by President George W. Bush to be a Member of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board.^[2] Olson had argued a dozen cases before the supreme court prior to his appointment, including Bush v. Gore, which ended the recount in the 2000 election and gave Bush the victory.^[3] Olson was listed among the "Top Contenders"^[4] to replace Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales. Most recently,Olson served as attorney for Citizens United in the Supreme Court case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.^[5]

Profile

Legal Career

According to an online biography, "Mr. Olson served President Ronald Reagan as Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel from 1981 to 1984. Before being named to that post, he was a partner in the Los Angeles office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, where he practiced constitutional, media, commercial and appellate litigation. After completing his service as Assistant Attorney General, Mr. Olson returned to Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, in its Washington, D.C. office, engaging in the practice of constitutional and appellate law and general litigation, and served as Partner-in-Charge of that office, on the firm's Executive and Management Committees and as co-chair of the firm's Appellate and Constitutional Law Practice Group.^[6]

"Mr. Olson has argued 37 cases before the Supreme Court of the United States, 14 while in private practice and 23 while serving in government, including cases involving constitutional and federal statutory questions regarding copyright, school vouchers, the internet, the 2000 census, property rights, punitive damages, telecommunications, criminal law, immigration, federal securities regulation, the Clean Air Act, antitrust, the right to a jury trial, due process, voting rights, equal protection, the ex post facto clause,the speech, press and religion clauses of the First Amendment and the constitutionality of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law. Before rejoining the Justice Department in 2001, he successfully represented candidates George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in the Supreme Court Bush v. Gore cases involving the 2000 presidential election.^[6]

"Mr. Olson is a Fellow of both the American College of Trial Lawyers and the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers. He has written and lectured extensively on appellate advocacy, oral advocacy in the courtroom and constitutional law."^[6]

Political Views

People for the American Way writes that Olson was,"One of the most prominent ultra-conservative lawyers in Washington," "came to Washington in 1981 to work in President Reagan's Justice Department and later represented the former president during the Iran-Contra scandal. Having argued the Supreme Court case of Vice President Albert Gore, Jr. v. Gov. George W. Bush that essentially decided the presidential election in his client's favor, Olson has remained a key player on the national stage.^[7]

"He has served on the boards of various right-wing foundations and think tanks, including the Washington Legal Foundation, a public interest law firm with an ultra-conservative and free-market emphasis, and the Independent Women's Forum. Olson also was the head of the Washington D.C. chapter of the right-wing Federalist Society.^[7]

"Olson, a former law partner of one-time Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, assisted Paula Jones' legal team [ELVES] in her sexual harassment suit against President Bill Clinton. Olson also represented Whitewater figure David Hale during Senate hearings investigating the Clintons' role in the Arkansas land deal. Olson wrote scathing articles about the Clinton administration and Janet Reno, and was involved in the "Arkansas Project," an effort by the American Spectator magazine to use private investigators to uncover damaging information regarding the Clintons. The project was funded with $2 million from right-wing billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. ^[7]

"Olson is known for his right-wing views on affirmative action and other civil rights issues. During his legal career he unsuccessfully defended both the Virginia Military Institute's decision to exclude women despite its state funding and theColorado initiative that would have barred cities and towns from passing gay rights statutes. He won the case that overturned affirmative action admission policies for the University of Texas Law School."^[7]

Personal Life

According to his official U.S. Department of Justice biography, "Olson was born in Chicago, Illinois, and was educated in public schools in California. He received his bachelor's degree cum laude from the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California, where he received awards as the outstanding graduating student in both journalism and forensics, and his law degree from the University of California at Berkeley (Boalt Hall), where he was a member of the California Law Review and Order of the Coif."^[8]

Olson's third wife was Barbara Olson, a right wing conservative TV commentator who was killed by Islamic militants in the September 11th, 2001 attack on the Pentagon. In 2002, Olson met Lady Booth, a tax attorney and native of Kentucky. The two were wed on October 21, 2006, in Napa Valley, California.^[9]

Olson is currently playing the part of Joe Biden in Mitt Romney's presidential campaign's preparations for debates with Vice Presidential pick Paul Ryan.^[10]

Argument in Citizens United v. Federal Election Committee

Olson broadcasted his argument in a Wall Street Journal opinion article on September 7th, 2009. Olson stated that he believed the attempt by Congress to limit financial political contributions by corporations violated the First Amendment's command that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. Olson would argue that limiting corporate contributions was "outlawing political speech based on the identity of the speaker." Olson also argued that the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, a bipartisan bill that attempted to reform campaign finance and was signed into law by George W. Bush in 2002,^[11], was unconstitutional because, he wrote, "The First Amendment does not permit the government to handicap speakers based on their wealth, or ration speech in order somehow to equalize participation in public debate." Olson also stated in the opinion piece, "Tomorrow's case is not about Citizens United. It is about the rights of all persons -- individuals, associations, corporations and unions -- to speak freely. And it is about our right to hear those voices and to judge for ourselves who has the soundest message." The supreme court would go on to vote in his favor.^[12]

Resources and Articles

External Articles

Jon Ponder, GOP Floating Ted Olson, Head of 1990s Anti-Clinton "Arkansas Project" for AG, Pensito Review, April 22, 2007 (re: Bush administration U.S. attorney firings controversy and Alberto Gonzales).

References

↑ Jake Tapper, Boies vs. Olson, Salon, November 19, 2000
↑ Office of the Press Secretary, U.S. White House, Personnel Announcement, governmental press release, June 10, 2005, archived on the Wayback Machine January 8, 2009
↑ Joe Canason, Ted Olson? You've got to be kidding, Salon, accessed September 24, 2012
↑ 5 Top Contenders for Attorney General, Associated Press, August 28, 2007, archived on the Wayback Machine September 23, 2007
↑ Jeffrey Toobin, Money Unlimited, New Yorker, accessed September 24, 2012.
↑ ^Jump ^up ^to:6.0 ^6.1 ^6.2 Theodore B. Olson, AllAmericanSpeakers.com, speaker biography website, accessed September 2012
↑ ^Jump ^up ^to:7.0 ^7.1 ^7.2 ^7.3 People of the American Way, The Right-Wing Affiliations of Bush Administration Officials, organizational website, archived on the Wayback Machine July 12, 2007
↑ U.S. Department of Justice, Theodore B. Olson, governmental biography, archived by the Wayback Machine August 31, 2009
↑ Napa Nuptials for Olson and His Lady, Washington Post, October 22, 2006
↑ Rebecca Kaplan, Former Solicitor General Ted Olson Plays Biden in Ryan Debate Prep, National Journal, September 15, 2012
↑ Federal Election Commission, Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, U.S. federal legislation, signed into law March 27, 2002, accessed September 2012
↑ Theodore B. Olson, The Chance for a Free Speech Do-Over, Wall Street Journal, accessed 9/24/2012.

Categories:

FinamdLaw
Caselaw
California
CA Ct. App.
CALIFORNIANS FOR SCIENTIFIC INTEGRITY v. REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

Court of Appeal, Third District, California.

CALIFORNIANS FOR SCIENTIFIC INTEGRITY v. REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

CALIFORNIANS FOR SCIENTIFIC INTEGRITY, Plaintiff and Appellant, v. The REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, Defendant and Respondent.

No. C028522.

-- July 06, 2000

Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, Theodore B. Olson, Los Angeles, Mark A. Perry, Thomas G. Hungar, Washington, DC, John C.Yoo, and Zumbrun & Findley, Ronald A. Zumbrun, Sacramento, John H. Findley, and Jeffrey H. Speich for Plaintiff and Appellant.Law Office of Eric G. Scheie, for The Claremont Institute, Amicus Curiae on behalf of Plaintiff and Appellant.

Christopher M. Patti, James E. Holst, John F. Lundberg and Eric K. Behrens, Oakland, for Defendant and Respondent.

PlaintiffCalifornians for Scientific Integrity filed suit against defendant Regents of the University of California (the University), alleging the University had improperly permitted a professor to use public funds and resources to advance anti-smoking efforts. The trial court granted the University's demurrer and entered judgment in its favor.

Plaintiff appeals, reiterating that the use of public funds and resources for these purposes is impermissible and a violation of the First Amendment. We disagree and shall affirm.

standard of Review

“In reviewing the sufficiency of a complaint against a general demurrer, we are guided by long-settled rules. ‘We treat the demurrer as admitting all material facts properly pleaded, but not contentions, deductions or conclusions of fact or law․ We also consider matters which may be judicially noticed.’ [Citation.] Further, we give the complaint a reasonable interpretation, reading it as a whole and its parts in their context. [Citation.] When a demurrer is sustained, we determine whether the complaint states facts sufficient to constitute a cause of action. [Citation.] And when it is sustained without leave to amend, we decide whether there is a reasonable possibility that the defect can be cured by amendment: if it can be, the trial court has abused its discretion and we reverse; if not, there has been no abuse of discretion and we affirm. [Citations.] The burden of proving such reasonable possibility is squarely on the plaintiff.” (Blank v. Kirwan (1985) 39 Cal.3d 311, 318, 216 Cal.Rptr. 718, 703 P.2d 58; see also CAMSI IV v. Hunter Technology Corp. (1991) 230 Cal.App.3d 1525, 1538-1539, 282 Cal.Rptr. 80.)

===

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Olson

Theodore Bevry Olson (born September 11, 1940) is an American lawyer, practicing at the Washington, D.C. office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. Olson served as United States Solicitor General (June 2001-July 2004) under President George W. Bush.

Early life[

Theodore Olson was born in Chicago, the son of Yvonne Lucy (Bevry) and Lester W. Olson.^[1] He grew up in Mountain View, California, in the San Francisco Bay Area. He graduated from Los Altos High (1958). In 1962, Olson completed his undergraduate degrees in Communications and History at the University of the Pacific where he was a charter member of the Phi Kappa Tau fraternity chapter. He earned his law degree fromBoalt Hall School of Law at the**University of California,** Berkeley (1965).^[2] At Boalt, Olson served as a contributor to the California Law Review.

Legal career[

Early legal career: 1965 to 2000[

In 1965, Olson joined the Los Angeles, California, office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher as an Associate. In 1972, he was named Partner.^[3]

From 1981 to 1984, Olson served as an Assistant Attorney General (Office of Legal Counsel) in the Reagan administration.^[4] While serving in the Reagan administration, Olson was Legal Counsel to President Reagan during the Iran-Contra Affair's investigation phase.^[4] Olson was also the Assistant Attorney General for the Office of **Legal Counsel**when then President Ronald Reagan ordered the Administrator of the EPA to withhold the documents on the ground that they contained "enforcement sensitive information." This led to an investigation by the House Judiciary Committee that later produced a report suggesting Olson had given false and misleading testimony before a House subcommittee during the investigation. The Judiciary Committee forwarded a copy of the report to the Attorney General, requesting the appointment of an independent counsel investigation.

Olson argued that the Independent Counsel took executive powers away from the office of the President of the United States and created a hybrid "fourth branch" of government that was ultimately answerable to no one. He argued that the broad powers of the Independent Counsel could be easily abused or corrupted by partisanship. In the Supreme Court Case Morrison v. Olson, the Court disagreed with Olson and found in favor of the Plaintiff and independent counsel Alexia Morrison.[1]

He returned to private law practice as a partner in the Washington, D.C., office of his firm, Gibson Dunn.

A high-profile client in the 1980s was Jonathan Pollard, who had been convicted of selling government secrets to Israel. Olson handled the appeal to United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Olson argued the life sentence Pollard received was in violation of the plea bargain agreement, which had specifically excluded a life sentence. Olson also argued that the violation of the plea bargain was grounds for a mistrial. The Court of Appeals ruled (2‑1) that no grounds for mistrial existed.

[](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Theodore_Olson_-2010_-David_Shankbone.jpg)

Olson in 2010

:{Olson argued a dozen cases before the Supreme Court prior to becoming Solicitor General;:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:[5] In one case, he argued against federal sentencing guidelines; and, in a case in New York state, he defended a member of the press who had first leaked the Anita Hill story.^[4] Olson successfully represented presidential candidate George W. Bush in the Supreme Court case Bush v. Gore, which effectively ended the recount of the contested 2000 Presidential election.

Later legal career: 2001 to present[

Olson was nominated for the office of Solicitor General by President Bush on February 14, 2001. He was confirmed by the United States Senate on May 24, 2001, and took office on June 11, 2001. In July 2004, Olson retired as Solicitor General and returned to private practice at the Washington office of Gibson Dunn.

In 2006, Olson represented a defendant journalist in the civil case filed by Wen Ho Lee and pursued the appeal to the Supreme Court.^[6] Lee sued the federal government to discover which public officials had named him as a suspect to journalists before he had been charged.^[6] Olson wrote a brief on behalf of one of the journalists involved in the case, saying that journalists should not have to identify confidential sources, even if subpoenaed by a court.^[6] In 2011, Olson represented the National Football League Players Association in the 2011 NFL lockout.^[7][8]

In 2009, he joined together with President Clinton's former attorney David Boies, who was also his opposing counsel in Bush v. Gore, to bring a federal lawsuit, Perry v. Schwarzenegger,challenging Proposition 8, a California state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.^[9] His work on the lawsuit earned him a place among the Time 100's greatest thinkers.^[10] In 2011, Olson and David Boies were awarded the ABA Medal, the highest award of the American Bar Association.^[11]

Apple Inc. hired Olson to fight the FBI–Apple encryption dispute court order to unlock an iPhone, which ended with the government withdrawing its case.^[12]

Olson also represented New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady in the Deflategate scandal,^[13] which ended with Brady electing not to pursue Supreme Court appeal of a four-game suspension.^[14][15]

More recently, Olson represents a group of billboard advertisers in a lawsuit against the City of San Francisco. The group is challenging a city law requiring soda companies to include in their advertisements warnings that consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages is associated with serious health risks like diabetes. The suit claims that the law is an unconstitutional restriction on commercial speech. In September 2017, a panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with Olson and provisionally barred the city's mandated warnings.^[16]

In March 2018, Olson turned down an offer to represent Donald Trump in the probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election.^[17]

Personal life

Olson has been married four times. His first marriage was to Karen Beatie whom he met in college at University of the Pacific.^[18] Olson's second wife was Jolie Ann Bales, an attorney and a liberal Democrat.^[18] Olson's third wife,^[19] Barbara Kay Olson (née Bracher), an attorney and conservative commentator, was a passenger on the hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 that crashed into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. Her original plan was to fly to California on September 10, but she delayed her departure until the next morning so she could wake up with her husband on his birthday.^[20][21] On October 21, 2006, Olson married Lady Booth, a tax attorney from Kentucky and alifelong Democrat.^[19][22]

Politics

Olson was a founding member of the Federalist Society.^[23] He has served on the board of directors of American Spectator magazine.^[24] Olson was a prominent critic of Bill Clinton's presidency, and he helped prepare the attorneys of Paula Jones prior to their Supreme Court appearance.^[4] Olson served Giuliani's 2008 presidential campaign as judicial committee chairman.^[23] In 2012 he participated in Paul Ryan's preparation for the Vice Presidential debate, portraying Joe Biden.^[25] He is one of the outspoken advocates for gay marriage in the Republican Party.^[26]

Executive appointment speculation[

Prior to President Bush's nomination of D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge John G. Roberts, Olson was considered a potential nominee to the Supreme Court of the United States to fill Sandra Day O'Connor's post. Following the withdrawal of Harriet Miers' nomination for that post, and prior to the nomination of Third Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Samuel Alito, Olson's name was again mentioned as a possible nominee.

In September 2007, Olson was considered by the Bush administration for the post of Attorney General to succeed Alberto Gonzales. The Democrats, however, were so vehemently opposed that Bush nominated Michael Mukasey instead.^[27]

Theodore B. Olson - SourceWatch

https://www.sourcewatch.org › index.php › Theodore_B._Olson

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

:{Sep 25, 2012 - Theodore B. ":{Ted:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:" :{Olson:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:, is a former Assistant Attorney General to the Reagan Administrationand former Solicitor General for the Bush ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

Ted Olson - Wikispooks

https://wikispooks.com › wiki › Ted_Olson

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:{May 5, 2017 - Person.png :{Ted Olson:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: C-SPAN :{Sourcewatch:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Rdf-icon.png (lawyer). :{Ted Olson:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:.jpg. Born, Theodore Bevry Olson 1940-09-11. Chicago, Illinois ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

Ted Olson slammed Trump after refusing to join his legal team ...

https://www.businessinsider.com › bush-lawyer-ted-olsen-slammed-trump-...

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:{Mar 27, 2018 - :{Ted Olson:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: has publicly rebuked President Donald Trump twice over the past two weeks and turned down the president's offer to work on his legal team. :{Olson:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:, who was President George W. Bush's solicitor general, has described Trump's White House as chaotic and criticized the ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}: