Altercation: The Billion-Dollar Campaign for Right-Wing Extremist Judges

The man who reshaped the Supreme Court has just been handed $1.6 billion to degrade every other court.

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It’s easy to be nostalgic for the days before the GOP went collectively insane, though we shouldn’t ignore the early signs for the onset of the mass political dementia that has since resulted. A number of books have recently been published making the “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” argument in search of Trumpism’s antecedents. The most substantive of these appears to be Nicole Hemmer’s Partisans, which places Pat Buchanan as the one present at the creation with his “better in the original German” (credit: Molly Ivins) 1992 Republican National Convention speech. Dana Milbank’s The Destructionists begins with Newt Gingrich’s takeover of the House in 1994. I’ve only seen an excerpt from David Corn’s American Psychosis, and that piece began with Dwight Eisenhower’s decision not to renounce Joe McCarthy. Corn includes dialogue on that point that I could not locate for my 2020 book, Lying in State, and I’ve not received the book yet—Mother Jones does not have footnotes—so I must reserve judgment.

That said, even leaving aside the peculiarly nutty nature of the Trump movement’s beliefs, one problem that has always been with us—I’m guessing since the beginning of time—and always will be is the power of money in politics. It’s a problem everywhere and impossible to eliminate in its entirety. But as with so many such phenomena, we’ve allowed powerful forces in our politics to do virtually everything possible to make it worse.

The most important culprit in this story is the Supreme Court majority, led by Anthony Kennedy, whose decision in the 2010 Citizens United case opened the door to literally limitless spending by corporations and the super-wealthy to bend the body politic to their collective whim and will.

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The catastrophic consequences of that decision are literally everywhere around us but nowhere more evident than—wait for it—on the Supreme Court. With approximately $250 million spent on injecting far-right legal notions into both the legal and political worlds between 2014 and 2017 alone, Leonard Leo’s Federalist Society has remade the Court into a reactionary force that will almost certainly be successful in stymieing the will of the vast majority of the American people in almost all important respects. (Clarence Thomas once joked [observed? celebrated?] about Leo as the “number three most powerful person in the world.”) Now, Leo appears to be preparing to destroy the foundations of democracy itself, and he has the money to do it.

Leo has left the day-to-day management of the Federalist Society with its relatively meager budgets to set up something he is calling the “Marble Freedom Trust,” buoyed by an incredible $1.6 billion donation from the secretive right-wing billionaire Barre Seid (who managed to avoid all taxes on his earnings by another complicated maneuver that bespeaks the power of the wealthy and corporate elite to write laws that serve them and screw the rest of us). The details in this deep dive by ProPublica and The Lever into Leo’s new gig are eye-popping in every respect. They report that the trust is a “dark money group that is not required to publicly disclose its donors. It has wide latitude to spend directly on elections as well as on ideological projects such as funding issue-advocacy groups, think tanks, universities, religious institutions and organizing efforts.”

Leonard Leo’s Federalist Society has remade the Court into a reactionary force that will almost certainly be successful in stymieing the will of the American people.

You’ve probably never heard of Seid before this. I hadn’t. But he appears to be the donor (listed as “Barry Seid”) who gave $17 million to fund the distribution during the 2008 presidential campaign of millions of copies of a DVD of the deeply Islamophobic film Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West. He is also a prime candidate to be the anonymous donor who supplied Leo and company with $28 million in 2016 to block Obama Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland’s confirmation, among countless other nefarious causes and false claims.

Leo and the Federalists received free rein from Trump to choose his judges, whereupon he picked not only a third of the U.S. Supreme Court, but also 54 members of the circuit appeals courts and 174 district court judges (or about 30 percent). He’s done so, no surprise, with people like his latest BFF, the profoundly unqualified Judge Aileen Cannon, who would be better placed in a home for the (I’m being polite here) dangerously delusional rather than a court of law. Politico, deploying language designed to be extra-nice and nonjudgmental, noted some of the, um, strange decisions reached by Trump’s team of underqualified, ideologically obsessed Senate-approved nominees. They included:

Chief Justice Roberts claims, “That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.” This is nonsense. Roberts has lost control of the crazies on his Court and is trying to save face by playing its pitchman.

Now, with his unprecedented stash of political cash, Leo has indicated what would only recently have been an unimaginably ambitious agenda. The Roberts Court has already ruled that federal courts cannot do anything about partisan gerrymandering. Now, the Supreme Court accepted a case for review in which it may give Republican state legislatures the power to overturn the votes of their citizens in order to hand the election to their losing candidate. (That’s an almost unforgivably simplistic—yet accurate—description. Read Judd Legum’s post on “the radical legal theory that could upend the 2024 election” for a précis of all that is at stake.)

Axios reported back in January on Leo’s plans to “funnel tens of millions of dollars into conservative fights around the country.” That number sounds quaint in light of Seid’s gift of $1.6 billion. Having succeeded so far with a relatively meager investment in remaking the federal courts—there are 870 such positions—he now appears to be readying his massive war chest to go after the more than 30,000 state court judgeships. Whether appointed or elected, it does not matter. Money does its magic in both arenas.

There is only one solution to this problem and it’s simple and obvious, though “responsible” Democrats and pundits continue to rule it out: Abolish the filibuster, expand the Senate (to the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico), and most importantly, expand the Supreme Court and the rest of the federal courts. Remember, one-third of each were appointed by a madman criminal traitor conspiracy nut who, if there is any justice at all in this world, will be serving in federal prison by the time this crucial work to save democracy is done.

I’ve been listening to the massive CD box set recently released to celebrate the history of Blondie, Against the Odds: 1974-1982. It contains all six of their albums and two more of outtakes and rarities (which you can buy separately if you don’t want or already have the albums), along with a book of liner notes featuring new interviews with every band member, a 120-page annotated discography, and some other stuff.

It’s not easy to recall the excitement inspired by the weird and wonderful hybrid that was Blondie when I was a teenager: Imagine a band with a punk sensibility—schooled at CBGB—but writing classic pop hits and fronted (and named for) a singer with almost impossible Marilyn Monroe looks and sensuality. Their prescient forays into reggae, disco beats, and rap, and “heavy rotation” on MTV, helped to make all three kosher for white, mainstream audiences.

Back in the day, the band handed out promotional badges that read, “BLONDIE IS A GROUP!” but that proved pretty pointless. Blondie, at least as far as its millions of fans were concerned, was Debbie Harry. Madonna has called Harry a role model, while Harry looked to David Bowie—actually “David Jones”—as someone who successfully created a complete persona on stage separate from real life. It’s no accident that pre-Blondie Debbie worked as a model, a secretary for the BBC, a Playboy bunny, a waitress at Max’s Kansas City, and a clerk at a head shop; all those incarnations were up there on stage and in the videos at the same time. (A 1979 New York Times profile of Blondie noted Harry’s “disregard for underwear.”)

Here they are at their glorious peak in a live performance of ”One Way or Another” and state-of-the-art videos for “Hanging on the Telephone,” “Heart of Glass,” “The Tide Is High,” and the barrier-breaking “Rapture,” for a taste of what’s on this box set, a veritable cornucopia.

Finally, finally, someone unearthed some videos from The Band’s historic 1971 shows at the Academy of Music, where they were joined by Bob Dylan and formed the basis of “Rock of Ages.” They’re here.

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