Tag: Federalist Society

Shadowy group behind Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation spending big to undermine Biden’s Justice Department

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The right-wing dark money group that helped Donald Trump “capture” the Supreme Court is now working to undermine the Biden administration’s efforts to enforce voting rights.

The Judicial Crisis Network is running ads attacking Justice Department nominees Vanita Gupta and Kristen Clarke — a pair of widely respected litigators and civil rights activists — as part of a related new organization, the Honest Elections Project, with an improbable name, reported The Daily Beast.

Conservative legal activist Leonard Leo, the longtime executive vice president of the Federalist Society, is coordinating efforts by the various dark-money front groups to pack the Supreme Court and then to bring voting rights cases in front of those right-wing courts. Continue reading.

Senator opening investigation into Federalist Society’s link to ‘dark money’ used to pack the courts

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According to a report from Punchbowl News, now that the Democrats have control of the U.S. Senate, one senator plans to use his ascension to chair of the Judiciary Committee’s Federal Courts, Oversight, Agency Action, and Federal Rights subcommittee to take a hard look at how “dark money” is being used to elevate conservative judges to lifetime federal appointments.

In particular, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) plans to focus on the Federalist Society which has long made recommendations to Republican presidents when it comes to critical appointments that can sway the balance of the courts.With Punchbowl describing Whitehouse’s plans as a “war” on the Federalist Society, the report notes that the Democrat has long been seeking to dig into the conservative group’s influence.

Reporting that Wednesday’s hearing is being called, “What’s Wrong with the Supreme Court: The Big-Money Assault on Our Judiciary,” the report states, “Whitehouse’s target is the Federalist Society, which he says has been involved in a years’ long effort to gain control of the federal judiciary — especially the Supreme Court. It’s a topic Whitehouse has railed about for awhile, including during the confirmation hearing for now Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett.” Continue reading.

Federalist Society Leader Helped Foment Capitol Riot

More than 200 judges have been embedded in the federal judiciary by outgoing Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump. The huge majority of those judges come from the Federalist Society, the right-wing dark money association that has been working for years to erode civil rights, end abortion, oppose LGBTQ equality, stop gun safety laws, and fight regulations protecting the environment, health care, and worker safety—aka everything achieved in roughly half a century of progress. They are responsible for the current makeup of the Supreme Court and most of the Republican Senate. And they also have at least partial responsibility for the insurrection that happened at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

John Eastman, until this week the chairman of the Federalist Society’s Federalism & Separation of Powers practice group, spoke at the pre-insurrection rally. “Anybody that is not willing to stand up and [vote to overturn the election] does not deserve to be in the office!” Eastman told the crowd. Standing next to Rudy Giuliani at the rally, he broke into a smile when Rudy incited the crowd with “Let’s have trial by combat!”

Those linked tweets are from Slate‘s Mark Joseph Stern, who highlighted Eastman’s role in pushing Trump’s various plots to overturn the election: “As the president’s actual attorneys backed away from his coup, Eastman rushed in to fill the void, attempting to bolster the scheme with incoherent legal theories,” Stern writes. “When Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton urged the Supreme Court to overturn the election by nullifying millions of votes, it was Eastman who intervened on Trump’s behalf to endorse Paxton’s suit.” Continue reading.

Federalist Society Co-Founder Calls For Trump’s Impeachment For Proposing To Postpone Election

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 published 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.

Continue reading.

36 Years Later, Conservatives Finally Read The Lyrics To ‘Born In The USA’

There is a long and storied history of Republicans misunderstanding Bruce Springsteen’s “Born In The USA.” They hear the chorus and think it’s a glorious patriotic anthem, full of hope and nationalism, and totally ignore the lyrics that are about a Vietnam veteran returning home and being unable to get a job. Reagan’s use of the song in his campaign is one of the classics of the “Musician Asks Evil Republican To Stop Using Their Music” genre — and while you’d think the publicity surrounding that incident would have ceased the practice, it has continued over decades. Trump is known to play it at his rallies, including at his most recent one, despite his ongoing feud with The Boss.

At this point, it’s honestly just funny. It feels like a metaphor for the Republican Party in general — unable and unwilling to see the whole picture in any situation because they’ve latched so fiercely onto the part that makes them feel some kind of way. In fact, it has inspired me to go out and write a song that has a super patriotic chorus, but with lyrics that are a fierce condemnation of the United States healthcare system. This is what we should all be doing.

But it looks like someone over at The Federalist has read the lyrics and now, 36 years later, has noticed that they are not, in fact, very “patriotic.” Continue reading.

How Federalist Society ‘Conservatives’ Encourage Trump’s Dictatorial Delusions

A pair of Donald Trump tweets Monday show beyond all doubt that he has no idea what’s in our Constitution and fashions himself a Sun King on the make, a wannabe dictator.

Trump asserted wrongly last July that thanks to our Constitution “I have an Article II, where I have to the right to do whatever I want as president.”

He has said that again and again as this video compilation shows. Continue reading.

Bill Barr’s alternate universe ‘investigation’ has a goal: Right-wing authoritarian rule

AlterNet logoStudents of the modern conservative movement often date the recent supercharged radicalization of the Republican Party to the rise of Newt Gingrich and the Republican Revolution in the early 1990s. It’s true that the GOP went seriously off the rails during that period and the craziness has been picking up speed ever since. But in reality, the conservative movement has been radical from its beginnings, starting with the anti-communist crusade after World War II all the way through Goldwater to Reagan, Gingrich and now Trump. Now it has finally shed all trappings of a sophisticated political ideology, culminating in this surreal parody of a presidency in 2019. The conservative “three legged stool” of small government, traditional values and global military leadership has completely disintegrated.

But one aspect of that earlier conservative movement has continued to chug along with its long-term project to transform the U.S. into an undemocratic, quasi-authoritarian plutocracy. That would be the group of far-right lawyers who started the Federalist Society, with the goal of packing the judiciary with true believers, along with a certain group of Reagan-era legal wunderkinds who came to believe that the GOP could dominate the presidency for decades to come. They developed the theory of the “unitary executive,” originally advanced by Reagan’s odious attorney general Ed Meese ( recently awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom) which holds that massive, unaccountable power is vested in the president of the United States.

Attorney General William Barr was one of those lawyers, along with White House counsel Pat Cipollone, former appeals court judge Michael Luttig and others who encouraged Barr to take the job, particularly after his famous memo declaring that what any normal person would see as obstruction of justice doesn’t apply to the president. (In a nutshell, Barr agrees with former President Richard Nixon, who said, “If the president does it, it’s not illegal.”)

View the complete October 25 article by Heather Digby Parton on the AlterNet website here.

Mitch McConnell really doesn’t care if you think he’s a hypocrite

He and his pals in the Federalist Society are laughing all the way to the bank.

For people who have been observing Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell very closely, recent remarks in which he casually flip-flopped from blocking Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court to saying that he would gladly confirm one from Trump during an election year came as no surprise.

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Mitch McConnell doesn’t care that you think he’s a hypocrite.

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The smirk on his face when he says that he would fill a vacant seat on the Supreme Court if one opened up in 2020 tells you all you need to know. He is very well aware of the fact that he is a hypocrite and doesn’t give a damn that you know it too.

That is because, unlike a lot of liberals, McConnell has a theory of change—which he explains in the remainder of the video. As we’ve seen with what Trump is attempting to do to Obama’s legacy, both legislation and executive actions can be undone in one election. But judges are given lifetime appointments. So McConnell isn’t interested in passing legislation (except to secure tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations), but has spent the majority of the Senate’s time over the last three years stacking the courts with conservatives, something he calls his most consequential political accomplishment.

View the complete May 30 article by Nancy LeTourneau from The Washington Monthly on the AlterNet website here.

Robert Mueller just dunked on the chairman of the Federalist Society

The bad news is that the Federalist Society is still picking Trump judges.

A federal appeals court that is widely viewed as the second-most powerful court in the country handed down an opinion on Tuesday holding that Robert Mueller’s appointment as special counsel is constitutional. This isn’t exactly a surprising decision.

Many of the issues raised in In re Grand Jury Investigation rehash questions that were settled in previous cases involving special or independent counsels. And the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit’s decision was joined by Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson — an arch-conservative judge who fairly often dissented from Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s right when Kavanaugh served on her court.

Yet, while the arguments in Grand Jury are not especially controversial, they’ve been treated as such by one of the most powerful organizations in the country. Steven Calabresi, a law professor and chairman of the Federalist Society’s board of directors, published a 21-page memo arguing that Mueller’s appointment is unconstitutional. The Federalist Society itself touted this argument in a teleconference that many journalists — including this reporter — were invited to attend.

View the complete February 26 article by Ian Hillhiser on the ThinkProgress website here.