The court was unanimous in determining that neither Colorado – which had banned Trump from the ballot – nor any other US state is qualified to decide on the eligibility of a presidential candidate. Furthermore, a majority opinion coming from the five conservative judges – three of them nominated by Trump himself – determined that only the US Congress can disqualify an individual from running for office on the grounds of insurrection.

This majority opinion, the three progressive judges in the minority warned, risked closing the door to any possible future US Supreme Court decision to ban an insurrectionist from becoming President. An indictment against Trump for his role in inciting the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, is still possible but the Supreme Court would probably not act on it.

On the other side of the Atlantic, in Germany, media attention is focused on a judicial proceeding taking place in Münster, a city in the West of the country. At the core of the dispute, we find the far-right party “Alternative für Deutschland” (Alternative for Germany or AfD) and the “Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz” (Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution or BfV), a domestic intelligence agency that has no clear counterpart in other European countries.

The agency’s role is to police anti-constitutional extremism. The BfV, however, has often been unable or unwilling to fulfill this vital task. From 2012 to 2018, when the president of the agency was Hans-Georg Maaßen, the AfD – founded in 2013 – grew more powerful and more radical. Maaßen recently founded a right-wing party called “Werteunion” (Values Union) that is willing to reach agreements with the AfD and embraces part of its agenda.

In 2021, the BfV determined that the AfD merited the category of “suspected case of far-right extremism.” The far-right party appealed against the decision and the case has dragged on until now. The hearing in Münster is the second and last appeal. The AfD is likely to lose the appeal, but that would not imply its illegalization. A win for the BfV would bring further rights to investigate and surveil the activities of the party.

Both Trump and the AfD have been following the same legal strategy when forced to appear before the courts: delay, delay, and, if possible, delay even further. CNN reporter Stephen Collinson notes that Trump “appears to want to also forestall jury verdicts until after the general election – likely because polls have suggested some voters would be less keen to vote for him if he is a convicted felon.”

Meanwhile, the AfD wants to prevent for as long as possible a final decision on whether the BfV was right in qualifying the AfD as a “suspected case of far-right extremism.” This could negatively affect its electoral performance. There are elections to the European Parliament in June and regional elections in the three Eastern states of Saxony, Thuringia, and Brandenburg in September. In the European elections, the AfD is polling second with around 20% of the vote, whereas in the three Eastern states, the radical right is polling first with over 30% of the vote.

After the September elections in three of the five eastern states, broad coalitions, or at least tacit alliances from the left to the center-right will be needed to avoid that the far-right reaches its highest level of power in Germany since the end of the Second World War. In this sense, it is very worrying that the leader of the center-right CDU, Friederich Merz, continues to equate the left-wing party “Die Linke” with the AfD, announcing it will reach agreements with neither of these forces. Unless the pre-election polls are wrong by a huge margin, the CDU will soon be forced to pick a side.

By delaying the legal process in Münster, the AfD does not only seek to preserve the pretense that it is just as legitimate as any other German party – if not more, according to their discourse. The far-right party also seeks to prevent the BfV from taking the next step and qualify the whole AfD as “proven right-wing extremist”. The regional AfD groups in the eastern states of Saxony, Thuringia, and Saxony-Anhalt are already classified in this category.

DW News Video: “Why is Germany’s far-right AfD party so successful? | DW News”

The AfD has close ties with openly neo-Nazi groups and some of its leaders, especially in eastern Germany, have adopted a language very often reminiscent of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party. Björn Höcke, the regional leader of the AfD in Thuringia and powerbroker within the national leadership of the party, has used multiple times the expression “Everything for Germany”, the motto of the SA, a paramilitary Nazi group that was key in Hitler’s power takeover in 1933.

Höcke has said that Africans have a biological reproduction strategy different from Europeans or, about Adolf Hitler, that “there is no black and white in history.” The AfD often employs terms such as “Volkstod” (death of the German nation), as well as “Stimmvieh” (voting cattle) for voters of opposing parties.

The AfD has often fantasized about the possibilities of “remigration”, a common term among far-right European groups. The concept refers to the deportation of people with a migration background and has been popularized by Martin Sellner, an Austrian neo-Nazi. The Austrian ideologist is banned from entering the US because he accepted money from – and probably met – Brenton Tarrant, a white supremacist terrorist. In 2019, Tarrant killed 51 people and injured 40 more in his attack against two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. On March 19 it became known that Sellner had been banned from entering Germany.

The concept of “remigration” is not a new one, and Höcke and other members of the most radical current within the AfD have been toying with the idea for years. However, many Germans became aware of how specific the concept of “remigration” has become in recent times when it was revealed that Sellner had presented his racist theses in a secret meeting in Potsdam organized by two businessmen. The meeting was attended by high-ranking AfD cadres – among them Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD leader in Sachsen-Anhalt – and some low-ranking members of the center-right CDU, who were later forced to resign. According to research by the independent investigative platform Correctiv, Sellner proposed that a far-right government in Germany should plan the deportation of asylum seekers, non-Germans with residency rights, and “non-assimilated” German citizens.

The Correctiv revelations triggered a wave of massive demonstrations in Germany against the far-right. They also renewed the discussion on whether a process should be started to ban the AfD. A call for a party ban can be issued by the German government, the parliament, or the Bundesrat, an institution where the different German states are represented. The final decision would always be in the hands of the German Constitutional Court. The process could take years and there would be no guarantee of success. The openly neo-Nazi National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) was deemed too politically irrelevant to be banned when the Constitutional Court decided on the matter in 2017.

There is no consensus between the different German parties on whether an attempt to ban the AfD is the path to follow. The differences of opinion are also found within the parties. Whereas a parliamentarian for the center-right CDU was one of the early proponents of banning the AfD, the leader of the party Frederich Merz is against this. The neoliberal FDP is generally against the ban. Meanwhile, the Social Democrats of Chancellor Olaf Scholz have not taken a clear position, as views diverge on the issue. Within the Greens, banning the AfD would probably find wider acceptance. Every case is different, but the governing coalition in the northwestern state of Bremen, where the Social Democrats lead a government with the Greens and the left-wing “Die Linke”, has asked for an AfD ban.

German society appears to be equally divided on the appropriateness of initiating a process to illegalize the AfD. According to a poll from February 2024, 51 percent of the population was against starting such a process and 37 percent was in favor. The percentages change significantly when citizens are asked whether the AfD should continue to receive public funding as the other parties do. 41 percent are in favor while 48 percent want public funds not to reach the AfD.

On February 23, I attended a counterdemonstration against Martin Sellner, the neo-Nazi who has been pushing for “remigration”, when he visited the city of Chemnitz, in the state of Saxony. The protest was organized by “Chemnitz Nazifrei”, a group that has been mobilizing against the far-right for fourteen years in a city that represents a radical right stronghold.

Before the march against Sellner, I discussed with two activists of the “Chemnitz Nazifrei” movement their views on whether a procedure should be started to ban the AfD. They told me this had been a major issue of discussion within their group in recent times. Although more members of the “Chemnitz Nazifrei” movement are in favor of an AfD ban than against it, there is no clear majority.

One of the strongest arguments in favor of a ban, the activists I interviewed remarked, is the significant consequences this would have for the AfD’s financial situation, which could be forced to reduce its activities. At the same time, they fear that AfD followers could become more violent if a ban was implemented. They did not discard that something similar to the assault on the Capitol in Washington could take place in Germany if the AfD was banned. The open question for the members of “Chemnitz Nazifrei”, as for many others, is: If you ban the AfD, what about the situation afterward? A poll from February 2024 shows that only 43 percent of those who plan to vote for the AfD would be willing to consider voting for another party in the coming years.

It is certainly urgent to discuss whether Trump should be able to run again for president, or whether the AfD should be banned by the Constitutional Court. But the key issue is that broad sectors of both German and US society – a far stronger one in the latter case – have radicalized themselves to the extent that they are ready to use the instruments of democracy to undermine its foundations. This does not mean that every Trump or AfD voter is anti-democratic, and part of these voters can still be convinced to move to less extremist positions. But a considerable percentage of them, and maybe even the majority, have crossed the point of no return.

Democracy is not only destroyed through authoritarian power grabs or military coups but also through free and fair elections. While Germany has known this for a long time due to its historical trajectory, this does not necessarily imply that it is better prepared than other countries. The poor performance of the BfV in protecting the Constitution is proof of this.

While democratic systems offer many opportunities that right-wing radicals can exploit, they are not defenseless and have mechanisms to combat radicalism. If all democratic forces in Germany take the right-wing threat seriously – and here the center-right CDU needs to play a responsible role – and focus on what unites them, the AfD can still be kept away from the main centers of power in the country. It might be too late for the US, where Biden has recovered some ground in the polls in recent months but lags behind Trump in the states that will probably decide the November election. Germany, meanwhile, still has a strong anti-AfD majority but should not be too complacent.

Sadly enough, justice delayed (and possibly denied) is once again front and center in America as we face the specter of Donald Trump and his insistence on eternally evading the reach of the law. What’s at stake isn’t just the fate of the former president, but an essential aspect of democracy.

The Georgia Case

Recently, the country was privy to attempts by Donald Trump’s lawyers to delay, if not completely derail, legal proceedings in a Georgia courtroom where Trump faces 13 felony counts for, in essence, trying to steal an election. In a hearing linked to that Georgia election interference case, originally scheduled to begin in August, a team of Trump defense attorneys attempted to remove prosecuting District Attorney Fani Willis from the case. The defense team has argued that Willis was not only having an affair with a man she had appointed as lead prosecutor in that case but had gained financially from doing so.

Should the judge indeed order her removed, the trial could be delayed until well past the November presidential election and might never take place at all. A new prosecutor could decide not to bring charges against Trump and his 14 co-defendants, and even finding one could prove painfully difficult, given the size, complexity, and cost of the case. According to NBC News politics reporter Dareh Gregorian, it would be a “massive undertaking.” Not to mention that selecting a new prosecutor could spark all sorts of internal politics in the Georgia justice system. The “delay,” in other words, could well amount to an utter defeat. Originally scheduled to be decided before the 2024 presidential election, the trial would, at best, be postponed into the distant future and might never take place.

And that’s not the only case in which Trump’s team is deploying a strategy of delay in the service of strangling future legal proceedings.

The Jack Smith Federal Cases

Special Counsel Jack Smith — appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland in November 2022 after more than a year of persistent calls for an investigation into the January 6th insurrection — has mounted two federal criminal cases against Trump. One involves classified documents he took back to his Mar-a-Lago estate and refused to return. It’s now before a Florida federal court (and a Trump-appointed judge). The other is the January 6th election interference case taking place in Washington, D.C. Both have repeatedly succumbed to “assorted motions and maneuvers” of delay, as Mother Jones columnist David Corn aptly puts it.

In truth, delay has been front and center in each case. Only recently, Trump’s lawyers petitioned the Supreme Court to put Smith’s potentially devastating election interference case on hold while the former president appealed a lower court ruling that he doesn’t have presidential immunity from federal prosecution. He has now filed an appeal with the Supreme Court, asking the justices to determine whether or not he indeed does have immunity. This comes after the D.C. appellate court took over a month to issue its decision, just one more way in which timeliness has been left in the lurch at a moment when time should be of the essence.

Buy the Book

In a second delaying maneuver in that case, the former president’s lawyers have asked the Supreme Court to pause proceedings until the trial of another January 6th defendant — subject to similar charges — concludes. Originally scheduled to begin on March 4th, the case has already been successfully stalled, though it could still, at least theoretically, begin in July, overlapping with the Republican National Convention or even during the fall election period itself.

In a similar fashion, Trump’s legal team has sought to push off Smith’s second case, the one involving those boxes of classified documents, some of which Trump so tellingly piled up in his Mar-a-Lago bathroom and shower. That case involves a 37-count indictment, including charges of willfully retaining national security documents, withholding and mishandling classified documents, and the purposeful obstruction of justice. Repeatedly, Trump’s lawyers have asked for delays in the case, including a request that Judge Aileen Cannon postpone the trial until after the November election. That Trump-appointed judge has indeed agreed to some delays but so far has kept the trial’s starting date at May 20th. In frustration at the slow pace of that case, Smith has called the Trump team’s persistent attempts at delay “relentless and misleading.” According to New York Times reporters Alan Feuer and Maggie Haberman, the trial date “will almost certainly be delayed” — the only question is how long the delay will be.

The New York State Case

As in the Georgia case, the fourth criminal indictment against the former president is taking place in state court. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has indicted him in what’s commonly known as “the hush-money case.” What’s at stake, however, is not only the silencing of porn star Stormy Daniels with whom Trump had an affair just before the 2016 election. The indictment accuses him of “falsifying New York business records in order to conceal damaging information and unlawful activity from American voters before and after the 2016 election.” As Bragg explained to WNYC’s Brian Lehrer, “The core is not money for sex. We would say it’s about conspiring to corrupt a presidential election and then lying in New York business records to cover it up. That’s the heart of the case as we’ve laid out in court filings.”

Here, too, Trump sought a delay, alleging that showing up in court for the trial, as required by law, would interfere with his campaign for president. His appeals were, however, denied by the judge overseeing the case, which may indeed mean that it will be the first criminal case against him to actually take place. It’s now scheduled for March 25th in Manhattan.

Undermining Democracy

Delay matters when it comes to the 2024 election. As has become ever clearer, potential peril of a remarkable sort may lie ahead for our democracy, given Trump’s warnings about his plans, if reelected, to dismantle the civil service, pull out of NATO, deploy federal troops domestically, and gut the Department of Justice, as well, undoubtedly, as trying to pardon himself in the federal cases against him. And that’s just to begin down a list of the possible dangers.

But part of what’s now at stake, even without such an election outcome, is the viability and legitimacy of the judicial system itself. While the question of whether a president is above the law hovers over political discourse these days, there should be another major concern here — namely, the perception that our courts may not be up to the tasks assigned to them. Nowhere has this test been more strained than when it comes to the issue of timely justice, the right, that is, to a fair and speedy trial.

The notion of a timely trial, after all, has been part of the fabric of American justice since the founding of the legal system. The Sixth Amendment very specifically calls for the ensuring of “a speedy and public trial.” Later statutes passed by Congress — notably the 1974 Speedy Trial Act — offered additional support for the idea that justice must be dealt out in a timely fashion. Under that act, the disposition of a case is supposed to occur within 70 days, although numerous exceptions are allowed for extending that timeframe in the name of fair and just proceedings, among them the many pre-trial motions we’re now seeing in the Trump cases.

Guantánamo

It’s worth noting that the potential failure of the courts to operate in a timely fashion is anything but new to this Trump-era moment. Notably, in the major national security case of the twenty-first century, the courts failed dismally. Imagine this: more than 22 years after the nightmarish 9/11 attacks, this country has been unable to try the individuals, long in custody, who are accused of being co-conspirators in those attacks that killed thousands of Americans and took down the Twin Towers in New York, while devastating the Pentagon in Washington.

The 9/11 case has, in fact, been in a pretrial phase for nearly two decades now. In 2008, prosecutors for the military commissions set up at Guantánamo, Cuba, produced an initial indictment in the case. In 2009, Eric Holder, President Barack Obama’s attorney general, moved to transfer the case from the military commissions to federal court in Manhattan, a place where numerous international terrorism cases had been tried from the 1990s on. At the time, Holder’s Department of Justice issued a federal sealed indictment against the five 9/11 defendants.

Holder’s explanation spoke directly to the connection between timeliness and justice. He already rued the five years that had passed since those men were brought to Guantánamo. “I am confident in the ability of our courts to provide these defendants a fair trial, just as they have for over 200 years. The victims’ loved ones deserve the opportunity to see the alleged plotters of those attacks held accountable in court, an opportunity that has been too long delayed.”

Before the federal courts even had a chance to take up the case, however, public reaction ensured further obstacles to a federal trial. New York officials, family members of the victims, and congressional representatives insisted that security concerns made Holder’s proposal too dangerous. The pushback took the form of fears of violence on the streets of New York, along with anger that American rights and laws would be extended to terrorists. New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg and eventually Senator Chuck Schumer withdrew their support for Holder’s plan.

Sent back to Guantanamo in 2011, the 9/11 trial still has no set date. And because the defendants were tortured while in CIA custody — subjected to sleep deprivation, long periods of solitary confinement, waterboarding, and beatings — defense attorneys have persistently argued that the confessions of any of the defendants or tortured witnesses are invalid. In 2024, it’s hard to imagine the actual trial ever starting, though pre-trial hearings go on year after year after year.

Prior to the pandemic, jury selection for the trial was scheduled to begin in January 2021. Three years later, no trial date has yet been set and it may never be. Currently, the judge in the case has been asked to rule on an argument by one of the 9/11 case defense attorneys that, due to “outrageous government conduct” — that is, the torture of his client at a CIA “black site” — the case should be dismissed.

To make matters worse, after so many years, judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys attached to the trial continue to resign or retire, including the presiding judge and, last month, one of the longest-serving prosecutors, both in the wake of the resignations of others in recent years, including a lead defense attorney and the chief prosecutor in the case.

What’s at Stake

While the military commissions, the federal courts, and the state courts each have different expectations of speed, they do share the mandate of upholding a fundamental element of democracy. In adjudicating guilt and punishment according to the laws of the land, they promise victims the right to a resolution and remedy and defendants the right to a fair trial. In a larger sense, they promise society security and safety, premised on the expectation that those who have broken the law will be punished in a timely fashion and serve as a deterrent to others who might seek to do the same.

In an address to the American Bar Association in August 1970, then-Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger waxed eloquent about the foreseeable and devastating fallout that would follow a loss of trust in the courts. In his words, “A sense of confidence in the courts is essential to maintain the fabric of ordered liberty for a free people.”

According to the former chief justice, delay was one of three things that “could destroy that confidence and do incalculable damage to society.” He concluded that “the delays in trials are often one of the gravest threats to individual rights. Both the accused and the public are entitled to a prompt trial.”

Unfortunately, so many years later, Donald Trump and his lawyers seem hard at work proving that the institutionalization of delay and the damage to the legitimacy of the court system that goes with it wasn’t restricted to those 9/11 cases. Quite the opposite, we now find ourselves in an era when the institutions designed to keep the United States a functioning democracy, including those courts, are at risk.

The 118th Congress is currently on course to be “one of the least productive in U.S. history.” In the name of partisanship, it has opted for stasis over passing bills. And thanks to this Congress — and the encroaching influence of Donald Trump –the executive branch is under duress as well. Witness the ludicrous congressional impeachment drives now underway against both President Joe Biden and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. So, too, the Supreme Court may be getting its lowest approval ratings ever, having reversed important rulings like Roe v. Wade and the Voting Rights Act.

Rather than rising to the moment, our courts seem to be succumbing to the uncertainty of it all, delaying justice again and again rather than demonstrating the power of our judicial system to operate responsibly. In the current context, should such failure continue, justice delayed could all too easily become democracy denied.

Copyright 2024 Karen Greenberg

Via Tomdispatch.com

( ProPublica ) – Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ decadeslong friendship with real estate tycoon Harlan Crow and Samuel Alito’s luxury travel with billionaire Paul Singer have raised questions about influence and ethics at the nation’s highest court.

In early January 2000, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was at a five-star beach resort in Sea Island, Georgia, hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.

After almost a decade on the court, Thomas had grown frustrated with his financial situation, according to friends. He had recently started raising his young grandnephew, and Thomas’ wife was soliciting advice on how to handle the new expenses. The month before, the justice had borrowed $267,000 from a friend to buy a high-end RV.

At the resort, Thomas gave a speech at an off-the-record conservative conference. He found himself seated next to a Republican member of Congress on the flight home. The two men talked, and the lawmaker left the conversation worried that Thomas might resign.

Congress should give Supreme Court justices a pay raise, Thomas told him. If lawmakers didn’t act, “one or more justices will leave soon” — maybe in the next year.

At the time, Thomas’ salary was $173,600, equivalent to over $300,000 today. But he was one of the least wealthy members of the court, and on multiple occasions in that period, he pushed for ways to make more money. In other private conversations, Thomas repeatedly talked about removing a ban on justices giving paid speeches.

Thomas’ efforts were described in records from the time obtained by ProPublica, including a confidential memo to Chief Justice William Rehnquist from a top judiciary official seeking guidance on what he termed a “delicate matter.”

The documents, as well as interviews, offer insight into how Thomas was talking about his finances in a crucial period in his tenure, just as he was developing his relationships with a set of wealthy benefactors.

Congress never lifted the ban on speaking fees or gave the justices a major raise. But in the years that followed, as ProPublica has reported, Thomas accepted a stream of gifts from friends and acquaintances that appears to be unparalleled in the modern history of the Supreme Court. Some defrayed living expenses large and small — private school tuition, vehicle batteries, tires. Other gifts from a coterie of ultrarich men supplemented his lifestyle, such as free international vacations on the private jet and superyacht of Dallas real estate billionaire Harlan Crow.

Precisely what led so many people to offer Thomas money and other gifts remains an open question. There’s no evidence the justice ever raised the specter of resigning with Crow or his other wealthy benefactors.

George Priest, a Yale Law School professor who has vacationed with Thomas and Crow, told ProPublica he believes Crow’s generosity was not intended to influence Thomas’ views but rather to make his life more comfortable. “He views Thomas as a Supreme Court justice as having a limited salary,” Priest said. “So he provides benefits for him.”

Thomas and Crow didn’t respond to questions for this story. Crow, a major Republican donor, has not had cases at the Supreme Court since Thomas joined it and has previously said Thomas is a dear friend. David Sokol, a conservative financier who has taken Thomas on vacation on a private jet, said in a statement that he and Thomas had never discussed the justice’s finances or when he might retire.

Thomas’ comments in 2000 were to Florida Rep. Cliff Stearns, a vocal conservative who’d been in Congress for 11 years and occasionally socialized with the justice. They set off a flurry of activity across the judiciary and Capitol Hill. “His importance as a conservative was paramount,” Stearns said in a recent interview. “We wanted to make sure he felt comfortable in his job and he was being paid properly.”

There’s an often-criticized dynamic surrounding most important jobs in the federal government: The posts pay far less than comparable jobs in the private sector, but officials can cash in once they leave. Ex-regulators sell advice to the regulated. Generals retire to join military contractors. Former senators get jobs lobbying Congress.

But there is no revolving-door payday waiting on the other side of a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court. Justices generally stay on the bench past their 80th birthday, if not until death. In 2000, justices were paid more than cabinet secretaries or members of Congress, and far more than the average American. Still, judges’ salaries were not keeping pace with inflation, a source of ire throughout the federal judiciary. Young associates at top law firms made more than Supreme Court justices, while partners at the firms could earn millions a year.

Some of Thomas’ colleagues were extremely wealthy — Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was married to a high-paid tax lawyer and Justice Stephen Breyer to the daughter of a wealthy British lord. Thomas did not come from money. When he was appointed to the court in 1991, he was 43 years old and had spent almost all his adult life working for the government. At the time, he still had student loans from law school, Thomas has said.

MSNBC: “Jamelle Bouie: Rich conservatives aim to keep ‘Clarence Thomas satisfied'”

The full details of Thomas’ finances over the years remain unclear. He made at least two big purchases around the early ’90s: a Corvette and a house in the Virginia suburbs on 5 acres of land. When Thomas and his wife, Ginni, bought the home for $522,000 a year after he joined the court, they borrowed all but $8,000, less than 2% of the purchase price, property records show.

Public records suggest a degree of financial strain. Throughout the first decade of his tenure, the couple regularly borrowed more money, including a $100,000 credit line on their house and a consumer loan of up to $50,000. Around January 1998, Thomas’ life changed when he took in his 6-year-old grandnephew, becoming his legal guardian and raising him as a son. The Thomases sent the child to a series of private schools.

In early January 2000, Thomas took the trip to the Georgia beach resort. Thomas was there to deliver a keynote speech at Awakening, a “conservative thought weekend” featuring golf, shooting lessons and aromatherapy along with panel discussions with businessmen and elected officials. (A founder and organizer of the annual event, Ernest Taylor, told ProPublica that Thomas’ trip was paid for by the organization. Thomas reported 11 free trips that year on his annual financial disclosure, mostly to colleges and universities, but did not disclose attending the conservative conference, an apparent violation of federal disclosure law.)

On a commercial flight back from Awakening, Thomas brought up the prospect of justices resigning to Stearns, the Republican lawmaker. Worried, Stearns wrote a letter to Thomas after the flight promising “to look into a bill to raise the salaries of members of The Supreme Court.”

“As we agreed, it is worth a lot to Americans to have the constitution properly interpreted,” Stearns wrote. “We must have the proper incentives here, too.”

Stearns’ office soon sought help from a lobbying firm working on the issue, and he delivered a speech on the House floor about judges’ salaries getting eroded by inflation. Thomas’ warning about resignations was relayed at a meeting of the heads of several judges’ associations. L. Ralph Mecham, then the judiciary’s top administrative official, fired off the memo describing Thomas’ complaints to Rehnquist, his boss.

“I understand that Justice Thomas clearly told him that in his view departures would occur within the next year or so,” Mecham wrote of Thomas’ conversation with Stearns. Mecham worried that “from a tactical point of view,” congressional Democrats might oppose a raise if they sensed “the apparent purpose is to keep Justices [Antonin] Scalia and Thomas on the Court.” (Scalia had nine children and was also one of the less wealthy justices. Scalia, Mecham and Rehnquist have since died.)

It’s not clear if Rehnquist ever responded. Several months later, Rehnquist focused his annual year-end report on what he called “the most pressing issue facing the Judiciary: the need to increase judicial salaries.”

Several people close to Thomas told ProPublica they believed that it was implausible the justice would ever retire early, and that he may have exaggerated his concerns to bolster the case for a raise. But around 2000, chatter that Thomas was dissatisfied about money circulated through conservative legal circles and on Capitol Hill, according to interviews with prominent attorneys, former members of Congress and Thomas’ friends. “It was clear he was unhappy with his financial situation and his salary,” one friend said.

Former Sen. Trent Lott, then the Republican Senate majority leader, recalled in a recent interview that there were serious concerns at the time that Thomas or other justices would leave.

The public received hardly a hint that such conversations about Thomas were unfolding in Washington. Thomas did once allude to government salaries, in a 2001 speech praising the value of public service. “The job is not worth doing for what they pay. It’s not worth doing for the grief,” he said. “But it is worth doing for the principle.”

Around that time, Thomas was also pushing to allow justices to make paid speeches — a source of income that had been banned in the 1980s. On several occasions, Thomas discussed lifting the ban with appellate Judge David Hansen, who chaired the judiciary’s committee responsible for lobbying Congress on issues like pay, according to Mecham’s memo.

At Sen. Mitch McConnell’s request, a provision removing the ban for judges was quietly inserted into a spending bill in mid-2000. Why McConnell made the proposal became a subject of scrutiny in the legal press. After the Legal Times reported the measure had been dubbed the “Keep Scalia on the Court” bill, Scalia responded that the “honorarium ban makes no difference to me” and denied that he would ever leave the court for financial reasons. (The ban was never lifted. McConnell did not respond to a request for comment.)

During his second decade on the court, Thomas’ financial situation appears to have markedly improved. In 2003, he received the first payments of a $1.5 million advance for his memoir, a record-breaking sum for justices at the time. Ginni Thomas, who had been a congressional staffer, was by then working at the Heritage Foundation and was paid a salary in the low six figures.

Thomas also received dozens of expensive gifts throughout the 2000s, sometimes coming from people he’d met only shortly before. Thomas met Earl Dixon, the owner of a Florida pest control company, while getting his RV serviced outside Tampa in 2001, according to the Thomas biography “Supreme Discomfort.” The next year, Dixon gave Thomas $5,000 to put toward his grandnephew’s tuition. Thomas reported the payment in his annual disclosure filing.

Larger gifts went undisclosed. Crow paid for two years of private high school, which tuition rates indicate would’ve cost roughly $100,000. In 2008, another wealthy friend forgave “a substantial amount, or even all” of the principal on the loan Thomas had used to buy the quarter-million dollar RV, according to a recent Senate inquiry prompted by The New York Times’ reporting. Much of the Thomases’ leisure time was also paid for by a small set of billionaire businessmen, who brought the justice and his family on free vacations around the world. (Thomas has said he did not need to disclose the gifts of travel and his lawyer has disputed the Senate findings about the RV.)

By 2019, the justices’ pay hadn’t changed beyond keeping up with inflation. But Thomas’ views had apparently transformed from two decades before. That June, during a public appearance, Thomas was asked about salaries at the court. “Oh goodness, I think it’s plenty,” Thomas responded. “My wife and I are doing fine. We don’t live extravagantly, but we are fine.”

A few weeks later, Thomas boarded Crow’s private jet to head to Indonesia. He and his wife were off on vacation, an island cruise on Crow’s 162-foot yacht.

ProPublica

( ProPublica ) – The party guests who arrived on the evening of June 23, 2022, at the Tudor-style mansion on the coast of Maine were a special group in a special place enjoying a special time. The attendees included some two dozen federal and state judges — a gathering that required U.S. marshals with earpieces to stand watch while a Coast Guard boat idled in a nearby cove.

Caterers served guests Pol Roger reserve, Winston Churchill’s favorite Champagne, a fitting choice for a group of conservative legal luminaries who had much to celebrate. The Supreme Court’s most recent term had delivered a series of huge victories with the possibility of a crowning one still to come. The decadeslong campaign to overturn Roe v. Wade, which a leaked draft opinion had said was “egregiously wrong from the start,” could come to fruition within days, if not hours.

Over dinner courses paired with wines chosen by the former food and beverage director of the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., the 70 or so attendees jockeyed for a word with the man who had done as much as anyone to make this moment possible: their host, Leonard Leo.

Short and thick-bodied, dressed in a bespoke suit and round, owlish glasses, Leo looked like a character from an Agatha Christie mystery. Unlike the judges in attendance, Leo had never served a day on the bench. Unlike the other lawyers, he had never argued a case in court. He had never held elected office or run a law school. On paper, he was less important than almost all of his guests.

If Americans had heard of Leo at all, it was for his role in building the conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court. He drew up the lists of potential justices that Donald Trump released during the 2016 campaign. He advised Trump on the nominations of Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Before that, he’d helped pick or confirm the court’s three other conservative justices — Clarence Thomas, John Roberts and Samuel Alito. But the guests who gathered that night under a tent in Leo’s backyard included key players in a less-understood effort, one aimed at transforming the entire judiciary.

Many could thank Leo for their advancement. Thomas Hardiman of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled to loosen gun laws and overturn Obamacare’s birth-control mandate. Leo had put Hardiman on Trump’s Supreme Court shortlist and helped confirm him to two earlier judgeships. Kyle Duncan and Cory Wilson, both on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, both fiercely anti-abortion, were members of the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, the network of conservative and libertarian lawyers that Leo had built into a political juggernaut. As was Florida federal Judge Wendy Berger, who would uphold that state’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. Within a year of the party, another attendee, Republican North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Phil Berger Jr. (no relation), would write the opinion reinstating a controversial state law requiring voter identification. (Duncan, Wilson, Berger and Berger Jr. did not comment. Hardiman did not comment beyond confirming he attended the party.)

The judges were in Maine for a weeklong, all-expenses-paid conference hosted by George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, a hub for steeping young lawyers, judges and state attorneys general in a free-market, anti-regulation agenda. The leaders of the law school were at the party, and they also were indebted to Leo. He had secured the Scalia family’s blessing and brokered $30 million in donations to rename the school. It is home to the C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State, named after the George H.W. Bush White House counsel who died this May. Gray was at Leo’s party, too. (A spokesperson for GMU confirmed the details of the week’s events.)

The judges and the security detail, the law school leadership and the legal theorists — all of this was a vivid display not only of Leo’s power but of his vision. Decades ago, he’d realized it was not enough to have a majority of Supreme Court justices. To undo landmark rulings like Roe, his movement would need to make sure the court heard the right cases brought by the right people and heard by the right lower court judges.

Leo began building a machine to do just that. He didn’t just cultivate friendships with conservative Supreme Court justices, arranging private jet trips, joining them on vacation, brokering speaking engagements. He also drew on his network of contacts to place Federalist Society protégés in clerkships, judgeships and jobs in the White House and across the federal government. He personally called state attorneys general to recommend hires for positions he presciently understood were key, like solicitors general, the unsung litigators who represent states before the U.S. Supreme Court. In states that elect jurists, groups close to him spent millions of dollars to place his allies on the bench. In states that appoint top judges, he maneuvered to play a role in their selection.

And he was capable of playing bare-knuckled politics. He once privately lobbied a Republican governor’s office to reject a potential judicial pick and, if the governor defied him, threatened “fury from the conservative base, the likes of which you and the Governor have never seen.”

To pay for all this, Leo became one of the most prolific fundraisers in American politics. Between 2014 and 2020, tax records show, groups in his orbit raised more than $600 million. His donors include hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer, Texas real estate magnate Harlan Crow and the Koch family.

Leo grasped the stakes of these seemingly obscure races and appointments long before liberals and Democrats did. “The left, even though we are somewhat court worshippers, never understood the potency of the courts as a political machine. On the right, they did,” said Caroline Fredrickson, a visiting professor at Georgetown Law and a former president of the American Constitution Society, the left’s answer to the Federalist Society. “As much as I hate to say it, you’ve got to really admire what they achieved.” Belatedly, Leo’s opposition has galvanized, joining conservatives in an arms race that shows no sign of slowing down.

Historians and legal experts who have watched Leo’s ascent struggle to name a comparable figure in American jurisprudence. “I can’t think of anybody who played a role the way he has,” said Richard Friedman, a law professor and historian at the University of Michigan.

To trace the arc of Leo’s ascent, from his formative years through the execution of his long-range strategy to his plans for the future, ProPublica drew on interviews with more than 100 people who know Leo, worked with him, got funding from him or studied his rise. Many insisted on anonymity for fear of alienating allies or losing access to funders close to Leo. This article also draws on thousands of pages of court documents, tax filings, emails and other records.

After months of discussions, Leo agreed to be interviewed on the condition that ProPublica not ask questions about his financial activities or relationships with Supreme Court justices. We declined and instead sent a detailed list of questions as well as facts we planned to report. Leo’s responses are included in this story.

Having reshaped the courts, Leo now has grander ambitions. Today, he sees a nation plagued with ills: “wokism” in education, “one-sided” journalism, and ideas like environmental, social and governance, or ESG, policies sweeping corporate America. A member of the Roman Catholic Church, he intends to wage a broader cultural war against a “progressive Ku Klux Klan” and “vile and immoral current-day barbarians, secularists and bigots” who demonize people of faith and move society further from its “natural order.”

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Leo has the money to match his vision. In 2021, an obscure Chicago businessman put Leo in charge of a newly formed $1.6 billion trust — the single-largest known political advocacy donation in U.S. history at the time. With those funds, Leo wants to expand the Federalist Society model beyond the law to culture and politics.

The guests at Leo’s party in June 2022 celebrated into the night. One esteemed attendee imbibed so much he needed help to get up a set of stairs. Eventually, the guests boarded buses back to their hotel. The next morning, the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization news broke: The Supreme Court had overturned the constitutional right to an abortion. When Leo next stepped out for his regular walk, it was into a world he had remade.

When Leo was in kindergarten, he got in a fight over Matchbox cars. “There was a classmate who had a nasty habit of punching me in the nose on the playground,” Leo wrote in response to a question about his earliest memories of growing up Catholic. “I gave him one of my Matchbox cars, hoping a little kindness would help. He accepted the gift and punched me again anyway. I saw then that doing what our faith requires isn’t always going to make life easier or more comfortable, but you have to do it anyway.”

Leo was born on Long Island in 1965. When he was a toddler, his father, a pastry chef, died. His mother remarried and the family eventually settled in Monroe Township, a central New Jersey exurb where you’re not sure if you root for the Yankees or the Phillies.

In the 1983 yearbook for Monroe Township High School, Leo, who often dressed in a shirt and tie, was named “Most Likely to Succeed.” He shared the distinction with a classmate named Sally Schroeder, his future wife. In the yearbook photo, they sit next to each other holding bills in their hands, with dollar signs decorating their glasses. Leo told ProPublica that he was so effective at raising money for his senior prom and class trip that his classmates nicknamed him “Moneybags Kid.”

When Leo arrived at Cornell University as an undergraduate in the fall of 1983, a counterrevolution in the legal world was gaining momentum. Iconoclastic scholars led by Yale University’s Robert Bork and the University of Chicago’s Antonin Scalia were building the case for a novel legal doctrine known as originalism. When interpreting the Constitution, they argued, judges and scholars should rely solely on the “original intent” of the framers or the “original public meaning” of the document’s words when they were written. Originalism was a rebuke to the idea of a “living Constitution” and the more expansive approach taken by the liberal Supreme Court majority under Chief Justice Earl Warren.

Law students were also fueling this new movement: In the spring of 1982, three of them founded the Federalist Society, a debating and networking group for conservatives and libertarians who felt ostracized on their campuses. Scalia and Bork spoke at the group’s first conference, at Yale Law School. There weren’t enough people to fill the school’s auditorium, so they held it in a classroom.

Leo encountered the Federalist Society while working as an intern for the Senate Judiciary Committee in Washington in the fall of 1985. At a luncheon hosted by the group, Leo heard a speech that he later said “had an enormous impact on my thinking.” It was delivered by Ed Meese, Reagan’s new attorney general. Meese made an impassioned declaration that originalism would be the guiding philosophy for the Reagan administration. “There is danger,” Meese said, “in seeing the Constitution as an empty vessel into which each generation may pour its passion and prejudice.”

Leo continued to Cornell Law School. The Federalist Society had no presence on campus, so Leo founded a chapter in the fall of 1986. He brought Meese and other conservative scholars to give talks. This went largely unnoticed by Leo’s classmates. To be a conservative legal thinker in those days was to be dismissed as a fringe type. Originalism “wasn’t something that I personally took very seriously,” said Mike Black, a classmate of Leo’s at Cornell Law. “I was clearly wrong.”

If his early brushes with the Federalist Society shaped Leo’s legal philosophy, then the battle over Robert Bork’s Supreme Court nomination in the fall of 1987 showed him how rancorous judicial fights could be. The attacks on Bork’s views were “character assassination,” Leo would later say, fueling a sense of grievance that liberals and the mainstream media demeaned conservatives. But it was also a failure on the part of the Reagan White House, which hadn’t anticipated the fierce opposition to Bork and was unprepared to defend him.

Leo and his new wife, Sally, moved to Washington after Leo finished law school so he could clerk for two federal judges. Then he had a choice: Take a job with a firm, or work full time for the fledgling Federalist Society.

Leo chose the Federalist Society. But first, he took a short leave to work on what would turn into one of the most contentious Supreme Court nominations in modern history. The nominee was an appeals court judge named Clarence Thomas who Leo had befriended during a clerkship. Leo was only 25 years old. Allegations of sexual harassment by law professor and former Thomas adviser Anita Hill had surprised Thomas and his supporters, and the George H.W. Bush White House scrambled to discredit her. Leo was tasked with research. He spent long hours in a windowless room gathering evidence to bolster Thomas. The Senate confirmed him 52 to 48, the narrowest tally in a century.

The searing experience of the Thomas nomination was soon followed by another shock.

In a 5-4 decision in 1992, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey to uphold the constitutional right to an abortion. The three justices who wrote the majority’s opinion — Anthony Kennedy, Sandra Day O’Connor and David Souter — were all Republican appointees. Here was the greatest challenge to the movement: Even an ostensibly conservative nominee could disappoint. So Leo and his allies set out to solve this recurring problem. They needed to cultivate nominees who would not only start out loyal to the cause but remain stalwart through all countervailing mainstream pressures. Leo and his allies concluded that they needed to identify candidates while they were young and nurture them throughout their careers. What they needed was a pipeline.

That meant finding young, talented minds when they were still in law school, advancing their careers, supporting them after setbacks and insulating them from ideological drift. “You wanted Leonard on your side because he did have influence if you wanted to become a Supreme Court clerk or an appellate clerk,” said one conservative thinker who has worked with Leo. “He was very good at making it in people’s interests to be cooperating with him. I don’t know if he did arm-twisting exactly. It was implicit, I would say.”

The strategy was a hit with donors. As Leo took on more responsibilities as the group’s de facto chief fundraiser, the Federalist Society’s budget quadrupled during the ’90s, with industry executives and major foundations making large donations. The Federalist Society did not respond to a detailed list of questions.

When George W. Bush became president, Leo seized the opportunity to have even greater influence. He recommended lawyers to hire for key administration jobs and was tapped as one of four outside advisers on judicial nominees — a group nicknamed the “four horsemen.” Leo and Brett Kavanaugh, then a young White House lawyer and an active Federalist Society member, teamed up to break a logjam in the Senate blocking Bush’s lower-court nominees. In one email, a White House aide called Leo the point person for “all outside coalition activity regarding judicial nominations.”

In another email chain, previously unreported, a group of Bush Justice Department lawyers discussed how best to publicize a white paper promoting a controversial nominee to an appeals court. One lawyer said he was looking for an organization to “launder and distribute” the paper, presumably so it wouldn’t come from the Bush administration itself. “Use fed soc,” Viet Dinh, a Federalist Society member who was then a high-ranking official at the DOJ, replied. “Tell len leo I need this distributed asap.” (Leo declined to comment on this.)

In 2005, Leo’s bonds with the White House tightened further, when Bush was presented with two U.S. Supreme Court vacancies in rapid succession. On a flight on Air Force Two, Vice President Dick Cheney gave Steve Schmidt, then a White House deputy assistant, two duffel bags full of binders on potential nominees. Schmidt gathered a team to push through the nomination of John Roberts, Bush’s choice to fill the seat of Chief Justice William Rehnquist. The group met in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, a warren of offices next to the White House. At first, Leo was one among the crowd. But he pushed his way up, Schmidt said. “If you take it down to a school committee, like the PTA committee, who’s going to be the chairperson of the committee? It’s going to be the person who cares the most and shows up to all the meetings,” Schmidt said in an interview. “This is what Leonard Leo did.”

Leo worked outside the administration, too. In a sign of his growing sophistication, he formed what would be a key weapon in furthering the conservative takeover of the courts. He and several other lawyers launched the Judicial Confirmation Network, a tax-exempt nonprofit that could spend unlimited sums without publicly revealing its donors. The group did something unusual for that time: It treated a confirmation battle like a political campaign. JCN ran positive ads about Roberts while its spokespeople fed reporters glowing quotes. On paper, the network was independent of the Federalist Society and the White House, but the boundaries were porous. Leo didn’t formally run it, but White House staffers understood that JCN was a Leo group. “Leonard was the guy,” Schmidt said. “A hundred percent.” In his response to questions, Leo confirmed he helped launch the group. (JCN did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)

Roberts’ confirmation was swiftly followed with yet another Supreme Court opening. Bush at first nominated his counsel, Harriet Miers. Conservatives — Leo’s allies — protested: Her resume was thin, her views on abortion suspect. Bush soon withdrew her nomination and offered a hard-right conservative: Samuel Alito. JCN ran yet more ads.

At a 2006 Federalist Society gala, Leo introduced now-Justice Alito to rapturous applause. He also made light of the group’s growing influence over judicial selection, which had drawn suspicions from Democrats. “It is a pleasure to stand before 1,500 of the most little known and elusive of that secret society or conspiracy we call the Federalist Society,” he said. “You may pick up your subpoenas on the way out.”

One of the first things a visitor sees upon entering the Catholic Information Center in downtown Washington is a painting of a smiling young girl. Jesus Christ stands above her, eyes closed and a hand on her head. The girl is identified as “Margaret of McLean.” Margaret was Leo’s oldest child, who died in 2007 from complications related to spina bifida when she was 14 years old. Leo has said that his faith was deepened by Margaret’s life and death.

The Catholic Information Center is a bookstore, event space and place of worship. Its location in the nation’s capital is no accident: On its website, the center boasts that it is the closest tabernacle to the White House. Leo is a major supporter of the CIC, and its unabashed projection of political power aligns with the central role of religion in Leo’s political project. Standing at the nexus of the conservative legal movement and the religious right, Leo forged a connection with several of the Supreme Court’s conservative justices, who shared a deep Catholic faith and a legal ideology with Leo. Antonin Scalia, Leo has said, became “like an uncle.” Thomas is a godfather to one of Leo’s daughters and keeps a drawing by Margaret in his chambers. Leo has dined and traveled with Alito, displaying in his office a framed photo of himself, Alito and Alito’s wife, Martha-Ann, standing outside the Palace of Versailles.

George Conway saw this courtship firsthand. Before he became one of the most prominent “Never Trumpers,” Conway had been a veteran of the conservative movement. He served on the Federalist Society Board of Visitors, donated to the group and was briefly considered for a top position in the Trump Justice Department. His then-wife, Kellyanne Conway, was a prominent pollster who later managed Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

From his rarefied position, Conway watched Leo become what he called a “den mother” to the justices. In liberal Washington, conservatives — even the most powerful ones — believed themselves to be misunderstood and unfairly maligned. Leo saw it as his responsibility, Conway said, to help take care of the judges even after they had made it to the highest court in the country. “There was always a concern that Scalia or Thomas would say, ‘Fuck it,’ and quit the job and go make way more money at Jones Day or somewhere else,” Conway said, referring to the powerful conservative law firm. “Part of what Leonard does is he tries to keep them happy so they stay on the job.”

On the sidelines of the Federalist Society’s annual conference, Leo made a habit of hosting a dinner at a fancy restaurant where he invited one or two justices or prominent political or legal figures (Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma attorney general who would later serve in Trump’s cabinet, was one guest) and major donors. “With Leonard, it went both ways,” Conway said. “It made the justices happy to meet people who revered them. It made the donors happy to meet the justices and no doubt more inclined to give to Leonard’s causes.”

In 2008, as ProPublica first reported, he helped organize a weekend of salmon fishing in Alaska that included Alito and Paul Singer, the hedge fund billionaire and Leo donor. Leo invited Singer on the trip, according to ProPublica’s reporting, and Leo also asked Singer if he and Alito could fly on Singer’s plane. The Alaskan fishing lodge where the three men stayed was owned by Robin Arkley II, a California businessman and also a Leo donor. (Alito has written that the trip did not require disclosure.)

Leo has helped arrange for Scalia and Thomas to attend private donor retreats hosted by the Koch brothers dating as far back as 2007; once, Leo even interviewed Thomas at a Koch summit. The Federalist Society flew Scalia to picturesque locales like Montana and Napa Valley to speak to members. After his Napa appearance, Scalia flew to Alaska for a fishing trip on a plane owned by Arkley. Both Singer and Arkley were generous and early donors to JCN. (Arkley said in a statement: “Nothing has been more consequential in transforming the courts and building a more impactful conservative movement than the network of talented individuals and groups fostered by Leonard Leo.” Singer did not comment.)

Leo came to the aid of Thomas’ wife, Ginni, when she launched her own consulting firm, and he directed Kellyanne Conway in 2012 to pay her at least $25,000 as a subcontractor, according to The Washington Post. “No mention of Ginni, of course,” Leo instructed Conway. Leo denied that the payments had any connection to the Supreme Court’s work, and he said he obscured Ginni Thomas’ role to “protect the privacy of Justice Thomas and Ginni.”

Leo was not the only person who used faith and ideology as a bridge to the justices. Reverend Rob Schenck is a longtime evangelical Protestant minister who spent decades as a leader in the religious right. Schenck didn’t work directly with Leo, but he said he too befriended several justices, praying with them in their chambers and socializing with them outside of the court. He came to recognize the justices’ “feet of clay,” their human appetites and frailties.

“I know how much it benefited me to say to donors, ‘I was with Justice Scalia last night or last week’” or that I “‘had a lovely visit with Justice Thomas in chambers,’” Schenck said in an interview. “Anybody can try to get change at the Supreme Court by filing an amicus brief — almost anybody, let’s put it that way. But how many people can get into chambers, or better yet into a justice’s home?”

In 2007, Leo gave the young Republican governor of Missouri, Matt Blunt, a career-defining test. A vacancy had opened up on the state Supreme Court. Missouri has had a nonpartisan process for picking new justices, in which a panel of lawyers and political appointees select candidates for the governor to choose. Known as the Missouri Plan, it had been adopted in some way by dozens of states. Blunt, the scion of a Missouri dynasty, was likely to uphold that tradition as his state’s governors had for the last 60 years. But Leo pressed him to jettison it. Leo did not do this politely.

That year, with the Alito and Roberts confirmations in hand, the Federalist Society was turning its attention to the state courts, devoting nearly a fifth of its budget to the initiative. Leo traveled the country, delivering a stump speech of sorts. His early target, in ways that have not been previously reported or understood, was Missouri.

He and his allies did not like the state’s system. To conservatives, the plan’s nonpartisan structure was a cover for allowing the left-leaning bar to pack the bench with centrist or left-wing justices. Leo’s allies preferred, according to interviews, that the power to select judges be put in the hands of the executive or given to voters at the ballot box. “If you could beat the Missouri Plan in Missouri, you could tell the rest of the states, ‘There is no more Missouri Plan,’” the former chief justice of Missouri’s supreme court, Michael Wolff, said in an interview. “It was a big deal.”

To achieve that, Leo worked a back channel directly to Blunt. The outlines of Leo’s campaign are contained in the paper records of an old whistleblower lawsuit and in emails obtained by The Associated Press as part of a 2008 legal settlement with the Missouri governor’s office. These records show Leo lobbying Blunt’s chief of staff, Ed Martin, and sometimes Blunt himself.

In the summer of 2007, the judicial panel offered Blunt three finalists. Two were Democrats. The third was Patricia Breckenridge, a centrist Republican. When her name appeared, Leo and his team mobilized, collecting negative research on Breckenridge and lobbying the governor. “I was shocked to see the slate tendered by the Commission the other day,” Leo wrote in an email to Blunt. “It would be very appropriate for you to scrutinize the candidates, and if they fail to pass those tests, to return the names.”

“Return the names” sounded anodyne; it was not. Leo and other Federalist Society leaders had a strategy: They wanted to tarnish Breckenridge’s reputation, spike her candidacy and then use the ensuing disarray to pry Missouri away from its long-standing way of picking justices. Blunt found the character attacks distasteful and worried that if he rejected Breckenridge, the panel would pick one of the Democrats, according to a person familiar with his thinking. Leo wasn’t having it. “He will have zero juice on the national scene if he ends up picking a judge who is a disgrace,” Leo wrote to Martin, the chief of staff. “If this happens, there will be fury from the conservative base, the likes of which you and the Governor have never seen.”

Blunt appointed Breckenridge anyway. Leo piled on. “Your boss is a coward and conservatives have neither the time nor the patience for the likes of him,” he wrote to Martin.

The person familiar with Blunt’s thinking said the governor did not feel threatened. But a few months later, Blunt, surprising nearly everyone, said he wasn’t running for reelection. He had, he said, accomplished all he wanted. At 37 years old, his political career was over.

For four more years, Leo’s team continued to target the Missouri Plan in Missouri. The Judicial Confirmation Network, now rebranded as the Judicial Crisis Network, gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to the effort. It failed again. But Leo, JCN and the Federalist Society took the lessons they learned in Missouri and applied them elsewhere, with profound implications for democracy.

As Leo continued to work his influence with state judicial appointments, he also homed in on what proved to be a softer target: states that elected their top judges. Judicial elections were low-information races, where money could make a difference. After a decade and a half, he achieved what he had not in Missouri: more partisan courts, with hard-line conservatives having a shot and many taking their places on the bench.

Leo became interested in Wisconsin in 2008. An incumbent state Supreme Court justice, Louis Butler, had angered the state’s largest business group with his ruling in a lead paint case. The ensuing ad campaign was contentious and expensive, featuring commercials showing Butler, who is Black, next to the picture of a sex offender who was also Black. To have those two pictures “right next to each other, one sex offender, one a justice on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, took our breath away,” Janine Geske, a former justice on the court, said in an interview. (She was initially appointed by a Republican governor to fill a vacancy.) “Most of us were looking at that, thinking, what have we descended to in terms of ads?”

Behind the scenes, Leo himself raised money for Butler’s challenger, Michael Gableman, according to a person familiar with the campaign. Leo passed along a list of wealthy donors with the instructions to “tell them Leonard told you to call,” this person said. Each donor gave the maximum. Gableman won the race, the first time a challenger had unseated an incumbent in Wisconsin in 40 years. Leo declined to comment on his role.

The push for loyal conservatives intensified after the 2010 election cycle. Republicans took over many state houses and legislatures. But they realized they could sweep to power, yet judges could overrule their initiatives. Republicans counted on Leo for $200,000 to elect a judge who would back Republican Gov. Scott Walker, who was then embroiled in a recall campaign, according to emails. That judge won. Walker stayed in power.

In 2016, Walker had a vacancy to fill, and it was a plum one: The new justice would fill out three and a half years before having to run for the seat. Walker had three people on his shortlist: two court of appeals judges and Dan Kelly. Kelly had been an attorney for an anti-abortion group and was the Milwaukee lawyers chapter head of the Federalist Society, but he had never been a judge.

“Leo stepped in and said it’s going to be Dan Kelly,” a person familiar with the selection said. “There is zero question in my mind, the Federalist Society put the hammer down.” When asked about this, Leo wrote, “I don’t remember,” adding, “I have known Dan Kelly for a number of years.” Walker said he had not discussed the race with Leo. Kelly did not respond to requests for comment.

Over the next several years, Leo, through the Judicial Crisis Network, continued to back conservative candidates in Wisconsin, where judicial elections are, putatively, nonpartisan. In one 2019 race, JCN funneled over a million dollars into the contest in its final week; the Republican narrowly won. But money can’t always deliver in politics. In the complicated political year of 2020, Kelly, even with the backing of Leo and Trump, lost the race to hold on to his seat.

He ran again in 2023. By this time, the Democrats had caught on and the arms race was joined. Democrats, activated by the Dobbs decision and a gerrymander that had left Republicans with a dominant position in the state Legislature, ponied up with big money.

At least $51 million was spent, including millions from groups associated with Leo. He personally donated $20,000, the maximum allowable, to the Kelly campaign. This was after Kelly aligned himself with those rejecting the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

The most expensive state Supreme Court race in U.S. history ended the night of April 4, 2023. The candidate the Democratic Party supported, Janet Protasiewicz, won handily, giving the liberals control of the state court for the first time in years. Kelly conceded on a bitter note. “It brings me no joy to say this,” he told the affirming crowd. “I wish in a circumstance like this I would be able to concede to a worthy opponent. But I do not have a worthy opponent to which to concede.”

Kelly’s loss was Leo’s loss. But it was also, paradoxically, a win. Conservatives were acting as if judgeships were a prize for a political party, rather than an independent branch of government — what Geske calls “super-legislators.” And thanks to Leo, those super-legislators could be especially hard-line.

In North Carolina, Leo and his allies found another lab for their strategy.

In 2012, JCN began spending in North Carolina, part of an infusion of funds that toppled Judge Sam Ervin IV, the grandson of the Watergate prosecutor. “All of a sudden we started seeing what I would consider misleading and distortive” political ads, Robert Orr, a former Republican state Supreme Court justice in North Carolina, said in an interview. “We’d never seen those in judicial races.” Democrats were able to resist the onslaught for several years, maintaining control of the high court. But conservative outside groups consistently outspent their Democratic-leaning counterparts, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan legal institute. The Republican State Leadership Committee, or RSLC, a group focused on state elections, outspent all the other groups. JCN has been a top donor to the group.

By 2021, tax returns show, virtually all of JCN’s budget came from the Marble Freedom Trust, for which Leo is trustee and chairman. JCN and RSLC did not respond to requests for comment.

In 2022, a year generally unfavorable to Republicans, the RSLC claimed credit for flipping North Carolina’s top court to a 5-2 Republican majority. Almost as soon as it was seated, the freshly Republican-dominated court did something extraordinary. In March 2023, the court reheard two voting rights cases its predecessor had just decided. The first was over gerrymandered districts that heavily favored Republicans. The second was over a voter identification law the previous court had found discriminated against Black people.

Nine months earlier, Justice Phil Berger Jr., son of the state Senate president, had attended the party at Leo’s home, in Northeast Harbor, Maine, as conservatives basked in the triumph of their movement.

Now, the newly elected conservative majority delivered victories for Republicans in the two cases. The voter ID decision was authored by Berger.

In 2013, Mike Black, Leo’s former classmate at Cornell Law, was leading the civil division of the Montana attorney general’s office as a career employee. A new attorney general had just been elected, bringing with him a number of new staffers to the office. Black had a matter to discuss with one of them: a tall, rangy Harvard Law School graduate named Lawrence VanDyke. VanDyke had been hired as solicitor general, the top appellate litigator in the attorney general’s office, responsible for defending state laws.

Standing in VanDyke’s office, Black noticed several bobblehead dolls on a shelf. “There was like Scalia for sure. And I think probably Alito, there were like four or five. And then there was this one younger-looking guy, and I said, ‘Well, who the heck is this?’” Black recalled. “And he goes, ‘Well, that’s Leonard Leo.’”

Black was astonished.

What Black did not know was by that time that Leo had helped to cultivate an entire generation of conservative lawyers on the rise. The system was like a positive feedback loop: Young attorneys could accelerate their own careers by affiliating with the Federalist Society and then prove their worth by advancing bold, conservative doctrines in the courts. Leo himself would suggest candidates to state attorneys general. According to one former Republican attorney general: “He won’t say, ‘Hire this person,’ in a bossy way. He’ll say: ‘This is a good guy. You should check him out.’”

In 2014, the Republican Attorneys General Association, a campaign group, became a standalone organization. The first 17 contributions were each for $350 apiece. Then came a donation of a quarter of a million dollars. It came from JCN. Rebranded as The Concord Fund, the group remains RAGA’s biggest and most reliable funder today. (In response to questions for this story, RAGA’s executive director said “Leonard Leo has done more to advance conservative causes than any single person in the history of the country.”)

Attorneys general are more likely than private plaintiffs to have the ability, or standing, to bring the types of high-impact cases prioritized by Leo and his network. After the federal government itself, state attorneys general collectively are the second-largest plaintiff in the Supreme Court.

VanDyke had been a Federalist Society member since his time at Harvard Law. He was an editor of the conservative Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. He worked at a major firm in Washington under Gene Scalia, the Supreme Court justice’s son, before becoming assistant solicitor general in Texas.

Despite his skill and credentials, VanDyke quickly alienated colleagues in the Montana attorney general’s office. Black said VanDyke had little appetite for the bread-and-butter state court cases that came with the job. Instead, emails show, VanDyke was excited by hot-button issues, often happening out of state. For example, he recommended Montana join a challenge to New York’s restrictive gun laws, passed after the Sandy Hook school massacre, adding as an aside in an email, “plus semi-auto firearms are fun to hunt elk with, as the attached picture attests :)” VanDyke persuaded Montana to join an amicus in the Hobby Lobby case, which led to the Supreme Court recognizing for the first time a private company as having religious rights.

For many years, solicitor general was considered a slow-metabolism job. VanDyke, who declined to comment, represented a new generation who had a distinctly aggressive, national approach to the law. Just recently, state solicitors obtained an injunction blocking federal agencies from working with social media companies to fight disinformation, persuaded the U.S. Supreme Court to undo the Biden administration’s student debt relief plan and limited the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate greenhouse gasses. Dobbs, the ruling that ended women’s right to an abortion, was argued by Mississippi’s solicitor general.

For VanDyke, state solicitor general was a stepping stone on the judiciary path, especially with Leo’s hand at his back. In 2014, he quit the Montana attorney general’s office to run for state Supreme Court, in what turned out to be a bitter contest inflamed by record independent expenditures. The Republican State Leadership Committee, which received funding from JCN, spent more than $400,000 to support VanDyke. He lost. After that, Leo made at least one call on VanDyke’s behalf to an official who might be in a position to give him a job, a person with knowledge of the situation said. This was not an uncommon move.

Leo said he did not recall making calls on VanDyke’s behalf. He acknowledged nurturing the careers of a whole generation of young conservative attorneys, among them VanDyke; Andrew Ferguson, the Virginia solicitor general; Kathryn Mizelle, the federal judge who struck down the federal mask mandate for air travel; and Aileen Cannon, the federal judge overseeing the Trump Mar-a-Lago documents case.

After Montana, VanDyke landed in Nevada as solicitor general under Adam Laxalt, an ally of Leo’s. In the Trump administration, VanDyke worked briefly for the Justice Department before the president nominated him to be a judge on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Less than a year later, Trump released a fourth list of potential Supreme Court nominees. More than a third of the names were alumni of state attorney general offices.

The final name on the list: Lawrence VanDyke.

In August 2012, the attorney general of Texas, Greg Abbott, had a conference call scheduled with Leo. It was Leo’s third calendar meeting with Abbott that year, records show. (Abbott is now the governor.) This meeting included not only Abbott and Leo, but also Paul Singer, the hedge fund manager who had been on the Alaska fishing trip. Two attorneys representing a small Texas bank, which had sued the Obama administration over its rewrite of banking laws, were invited. The meeting, which hasn’t previously been reported, highlights another key lever in Leo’s machine: The ability to bring donors’ policy priorities to public servants who can do something about those priorities.

After the 2008 financial crisis, Congress passed the Dodd-Frank regulatory overhaul, aimed at preventing another meltdown. Singer became one of the law’s biggest critics. In op-eds and in speeches, he argued that the new banking rules were unworkable and that efforts to prevent banks from becoming too big to fail could in fact make the system more fragile. Singer was especially critical of a provision known as “orderly liquidation authority,” which allows regulators to quickly wind down troubled institutions, calling it “entirely nutty.”

Leo took up the cause. According to interviews and meeting details obtained by the liberal watchdog group Accountable.US, Leo spoke with attorneys general in at least three states about a legal challenge to Dodd-Frank. He scheduled conference calls with the Oklahoma and Texas attorneys general at the time, Scott Pruitt and Abbott, respectively, to talk about what they could do about Dodd-Frank.

Oklahoma and Texas joined the bank’s case as co-plaintiffs. Montana joined, too. A person who worked in the Montana attorney general’s office said Leo called its newly elected leader, Republican Tim Fox, about the case. Montana would not have joined the suit, this person said, if Leo had not called Fox. VanDyke, then Montana’s solicitor general, became an attorney of record on the case.

Singer, Fox, Abbott and VanDyke did not comment for this story. Leo told ProPublica he didn’t recall a meeting with Abbott and Singer, and didn’t remember placing a call to Fox. He said he supported a legal challenge to the Dodd-Frank law on the grounds that its creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is unconstitutional.

In total, 11 states signed on. When they joined, the suit was amended to specifically challenge orderly liquidation authority as unconstitutional — the provision that Singer had singled out for criticism. For two years, the suit advanced through the courts, landing in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 2015. After an adverse ruling there, the attorneys general dropped out.

There had been doubters. A high-ranking attorney in the Texas attorney general’s office thought the suit was likely to fail. One former Republican attorney general from a different state said he didn’t believe the suit was critical to his state’s interests.

Leo’s network made an example of one. After Greg Zoeller, Indiana’s Republican attorney general, did not sign on, The Washington Times ran an opinion piece by JCN’s policy counsel — himself a former assistant attorney general in Missouri — speculating that Indiana’s attorney general may have been motivated by “strong alliances with Wall Street banks.” After two terms, Zoeller chose not to run for reelection in 2016, saying before he left office, “I don’t know if I fit today’s political arena.”

On a chilly day in March 2017, about six weeks into Trump’s presidency, Leo arranged for a select group to have a private audience with Justice Clarence Thomas at the U.S. Supreme Court. The attendees were a group of high-net-worth donors who had been organized by Singer to marshal huge resources toward electing Republicans and pushing conservative causes. That afternoon, the donors spoke with Thomas. The previously unreported meeting was described by a person familiar with it and corroborated by planning documents.

The donors left the meeting on a high and walked a short distance to the soaring Jefferson building of the Library of Congress. Singer’s group, the American Opportunity Alliance, was holding a gala dinner for 75 people, where they would hear from “scholars, university leaders and academics bringing unique insights on the issue of free speech,” according to planning documents obtained by ProPublica. Leo told ProPublica that while not all of the alliance’s donors give money to his causes: “They are thought leaders who should know more about the Constitution and the rule of law. I was happy to arrange for them to hear about these topics from one of the best teachers on that I know, Clarence Thomas.” Singer declined to comment. The Supreme Court didn’t respond to a request for comment.

A year and a half later, when Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court was teetering, Leo turned to Alliance donors to raise emergency funds for advertisements that would counter the relentless stream of negative press. He told donors that he needed to raise $10 million as fast as possible, according to a person familiar with the call. Swiftly, JCN was on the airwaves defending Kavanaugh. Leo called Mike Davis, the top aide on nominations for Senate Republicans, and urged him to press ahead, emails show. (Leo declined to comment on this.)

Leo had been in a state of high mobilization since Scalia’s death in February 2016 while Barack Obama was still president. “Staring at that vacancy,” Leo later said, “fear permeated every day.” In late March, with Trump’s nomination all but wrapped up, Leo, Trump and his campaign lawyer Don McGahn met at the offices of the law firm Jones Day. Trump emerged with a list of potential nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court and then advertised it: “We’re going to have great judges, conservative, all picked by the Federalist Society,” he said.

With Scalia’s vacancy and two more justices approaching the end of their careers, Leo embraced a more public position. “He makes a calculation to kind of come out from the shadows and put himself front and center, because he knows that that will give Republican voters confidence to vote for Donald Trump in the 2016 election,” Amanda Hollis-Brusky, a Pomona College professor and author of “Ideas With Consequences: The Federalist Society and the Conservative Counterrevolution,” said in an interview. “But that’s sort of an Icarus moment too, where they’re getting really close to the sun.”

Once Trump took office, he gave control over judicial picks to Leo, McGahn and other conservative lawyers with strong connections to the Federalist Society. With Leo’s help, Trump appointed 231 judges to the bench in his four years. Of the judges Trump appointed to the circuit courts and the Supreme Court, 86% were former or current Federalist Society members.

The Federalist Society’s alliance with Trump appalled some of its prominent members. Andrew Redleaf, a longtime donor and adviser to the group who has known its co-founders since college, viewed Leo’s work for Trump as “an existential threat to the organization,” he said in an interview. Redleaf and his wife, Lynne, offered to donate $100,000 to pay for a crisis communications firm that could distance the group from Leo and his work for Trump. Federalist Society President Gene Meyer was “genuinely sympathetic” to his position, Redleaf said, but declined the money and advice. Meyer did not respond to requests for comment.

Leo said in a statement: “The Federalist Society today is larger, more well-funded, and more relied upon by the media and thought leaders than ever before. So much for Mr. Redleaf’s ‘existential threat.’”

In early 2020, Leo told the news site Axios he planned to leave his day-to-day role at the Federalist Society after nearly 30 years, though he would remain on the board. Soon, Leo received all the money he would ever need to fuel his next efforts. For more than a decade, he had cultivated a relationship with a businessman named Barre Seid, who ran and owned the Chicago electronics manufacturer Tripp Lite.

Seid, who is Jewish, had long donated to conservative and libertarian causes, from George Mason University to the climate-skeptic group the Heartland Institute. Seid decided to put Leo in charge of his fortune — $1.6 billion, what was then the largest known political donation in the country’s history. Through a series of complicated transactions, Seid transferred ownership of his company to a newly created entity called Marble Freedom Trust, of which Leo was the sole trustee. (Seid did not respond to requests seeking comment.)

In late 2021, Leo took over as chairman of a “private and confidential” group called the Teneo Network. In a promotional video for the group, Leo sits on a couch in a charcoal jacket, no tie. Over upbeat music, Leo says: “I spent close to 30 years, if not more, helping to build the conservative legal movement. At some point or another, I just said to myself, ‘Well, if this can work for law, why can’t it work for lots of other areas of American culture and American life where things are really messed up right now?’” Leo went on to say his goal was to “roll back” or “crush liberal dominance.” The group had long quietly gathered conservative capitalists and media figures with politicians like Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley. Under Leo’s watch its budget soared, and new members have joined from all the corners of Leo’s network: federal and state judges, state solicitors general, a state attorney general and the leaders of RAGA and RSLC.

Other of Leo’s ventures show a willingness to embrace increasingly extreme ideas that could have sweeping consequences for American democracy. The Honest Elections Project, a direct offshoot of a group in Leo’s network, focused on election law and voting issues, was a major proponent of a legal concept known as independent state legislature theory. That theory claimed that, under the Constitution, state legislatures had the sole authority to decide the rules and outcomes of federal elections, taking the role of courts out of the equation entirely. If the theory prevailed, experts said, it could have given partisan state legislators the power to not only draw gerrymandered maps but potentially subvert the result of the next presidential election.

The Honest Elections Project filed an amicus brief when a case about the theory reached the Supreme Court. (The Supreme Court ultimately ruled against an expansive reading of the theory but did not entirely rule it out in the future.) Leo defended the Honest Elections Project, saying that “in all of its programming” it “seeks to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat. That’s a laudable goal.”

Leo’s own rhetoric has grown more extreme. Late last year, he accepted an award from the Catholic Information Center previously given out to Scalia and Princeton scholar Robert George. Rather than strike a celebratory tone, he reminded his audience of Catholicism’s darkest days in history starting with the Siege of Vienna by the Ottomans in the 17th century. Today, he continued, Catholicism remained under threat from what he called “vile and immoral current-day barbarians, secularists and bigots” who he calls “the progressive Ku Klux Klan.” These opponents, he said, “are not just uninformed or unchurched. They are often deeply wounded people whom the devil can easily take advantage of.” And after Dobbs, these barbarians were “conducting a coordinated and large-scale campaign to drive us from the communities they want to dominate.”

It wasn’t long before the backlash to Dobbs, and to Leo’s role in that decision, arrived on his doorstep. In 2020, Leo and his family moved to Northeast Harbor, a wealthy enclave on the Maine coast. The Leo family had spent time each summer there for almost two decades. In 2019 they bought a $3 million mansion, Edge Cove, from an heir of W.R. Grace, founder of the chemicals corporation.

Leo told The Washington Post that Edge Cove — which underwent more than a million dollars’ worth of renovations — would serve as “a retreat for our large family and for extending hospitality to our community of personal and professional friends and co-workers.” The Leo family eventually started living there most of the year.

But Northeast Harbor has not proven to be the quiet retreat that Leo hoped it would be. In 2019, Leo hosted a fundraiser at the Maine house for Republican Sen. Susan Collins. Collins had cast the deciding vote in favor of Kavanaugh’s nomination, and the news of the fundraiser sparked protests by local residents and liberal activists in the area. After the Dobbs decision, locals say, Leo’s presence became an ongoing flashpoint and a source of drama in a town unaccustomed to such things.

On the evening of the Dobbs decision, protesters held a vigil outside Leo’s house, which was followed by frequent protests. One resident planted a sign in her yard that urged passersby to “Google Leonard Leo.” Another wrote messages like “LEONARD LEO = CORRUPT COURT” in chalk in the street outside Leo’s house.

Bettina Richards runs a record company in Chicago and spends the summers in Northeast Harbor. She lives just down the road from Leo. She didn’t know much about Leo until the Dobbs decision, but afterward, she said protestors got permission from a neighbor of Leo’s to hang a pink fist flag across from his house. Leo displayed several different flags with Catholic iconography outside his house.

One day Richards got a call that Leo’s security guard had walked onto private property to tear the fist flag down. Richards biked over to repair it. Leo approached with his guard, and Richards told them not to touch it. “I will allow it,” Leo replied, according to Richards. (Leo said in his written statement: “The owner of that property came to us some weeks later stating that whoever put the flag up did not have permission and that the property owner would be taking it down.” Richards said another household member had OK’d the flag.)

As Leo enters his fifth decade of activism, he has become too big to ignore. Liberal opposition research groups with their own anonymous donors have launched campaigns to expose his influence and his funders; one group even projected an image of Leo’s face onto the building that houses the Federalist Society’s headquarters in Washington. In August, Politico reported that the District of Columbia’s attorney general was investigating Leo for possibly enriching himself through his network of tax-exempt nonprofit groups. A lawyer for Leo has denied any wrongdoing and said Leo will not cooperate with the probe. In response to ProPublica’s reporting about Leo’s role in connecting donors with Supreme Court justices, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., demanded information from Leo, Paul Singer and Rob Arkley about gifts and travel provided to justices. A lawyer for Leo responded that he would not cooperate, writing that “this targeted inquiry is motivated primarily, if not entirely, by a dislike for Mr. Leo’s expressive activities.”

Through it all, Leo has remained defiant. His vision goes beyond a judiciary stocked with Federalist Society conservatives. It is of a country guided by higher principles. “That’s not theocracy,” he recently told a conservative Christian website. “That’s just natural law. That’s just the natural order of things. It’s how we and the world are wired.”

( ProPublica ) – Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ decadeslong friendship with real estate tycoon Harlan Crow and Samuel Alito’s luxury travel with billionaire Paul Singer have raised questions about influence and ethics at the nation’s highest court.

On Jan. 25, 2018, dozens of private jets descended on Palm Springs International Airport. Some of the richest people in the country were arriving for the annual winter donor summit of the Koch network, the political organization founded by libertarian billionaires Charles and David Koch. A long weekend of strategizing, relaxation in the California sun and high-dollar fundraising lay ahead.

Just after 6 p.m., a Gulfstream G200 jet touched down on the tarmac. One of the Koch network’s most powerful allies was on board: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

During the summit, the justice went to a private dinner for the network’s donors. Thomas has attended Koch donor events at least twice over the years, according to interviews with three former network employees and one major donor. The justice was brought in to speak, staffers said, in the hopes that such access would encourage donors to continue giving.

That puts Thomas in the extraordinary position of having served as a fundraising draw for a network that has brought cases before the Supreme Court, including one of the most closely watched of the upcoming term.

Thomas never reported the 2018 flight to Palm Springs on his annual financial disclosure form, an apparent violation of federal law requiring justices to report most gifts. A Koch network spokesperson said the network did not pay for the private jet. Since Thomas didn’t disclose it, it’s not clear who did pay.

Thomas’ involvement in the events is part of a yearslong, personal relationship with the Koch brothers that has remained almost entirely out of public view. It developed over years of trips to the Bohemian Grove, a secretive all-men’s retreat in Northern California. Thomas has been a regular at the Grove for two decades, where he stayed in a small camp with real estate billionaire Harlan Crow and the Kochs, according to records and people who’ve spent time with him there.

A spokesperson for the Koch network, formally known as Stand Together, did not answer detailed questions about his role at the Palm Springs events but said, “Thomas wasn’t present for fundraising conversations.”

“The idea that attending a couple events to promote a book or give dinner remarks, as all the justices do, could somehow be undue influence just doesn’t hold water,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

“All of the sitting Justices and many who came before them have contributed to the national dialogue in speeches, book tours, and social gatherings,” the statement added. “Our events are no different. To claim otherwise is false.”

In a series of stories this year, ProPublica reported that Thomas has accepted undisclosed luxury travel from Crow and a coterie of other ultrawealthy men. Crow also purchased Thomas’ mother’s home and paid private school tuition for the child Thomas was raising as his son. Thomas has said little in response. In a statement earlier this year, he said that Crow is a close friend whom he has joined on “family trips.” He has also argued that he was not required to disclose the free vacations. Thomas did not respond to questions for this story.

The code of conduct for the federal judiciary lays out rules designed to preserve judges’ impartiality and independence, which it calls “indispensable to justice in our society.” The code specifically prohibits both political activity and participation in fundraising. Judges are advised, for instance, not to “associate themselves” with any group “publicly identified with controversial legal, social, or political positions.”

But the code of conduct only applies to the lower courts. At the Supreme Court, justices decide what’s appropriate for themselves.

“I can’t imagine — it takes my breath away, frankly — that he would go to a Koch network event for donors,” said John E. Jones III, a retired federal judge appointed by President George W. Bush. Jones said that if he had gone to a Koch summit as a district court judge, “I’d have gotten a letter that would’ve commenced a disciplinary proceeding.”

“What you’re seeing is a slow creep toward unethical behavior. Do it if you can get away with it,” Jones said.

The Koch network is among the largest and most influential political organizations of the last half century, and it’s underwritten a far-reaching campaign to influence the course of American law. In a case the Supreme Court will hear this coming term, the justices could give the network a historic victory: limiting federal agencies’ power to issue regulations in areas ranging from the environment to labor rights to consumer protection. After shepherding the case to the court, Koch network staff attorneys are now asking the justices to overturn a decades-old precedent. (Thomas used to support the precedent but flipped his position in recent years.)

Two years ago, one of the network’s groups was the plaintiff in another Supreme Court case, which was about nonprofits’ ability to keep their donors secret. In that case, Thomas sided with the 6-3 conservative majority in the Koch group’s favor.

Charles Koch did not respond to detailed questions for this story. David Koch died in 2019.

The Koch network is an overlapping set of nonprofits perhaps best known for its work helping cultivate the Tea Party movement in the Obama years. Recently rebranded as Stand Together, the network includes the powerful Americans for Prosperity Action, which spent over $65 million supporting Republican candidates in the last election cycle.

Though Charles Koch is one of the 25 richest people in the world, worth an estimated $64 billion, he raises money from other wealthy people to amplify the network’s reach. The network brought in at least $700 million in 2021, the most recent year for which data is available. It has more than 1,000 employees who, on paper, work for different groups.

But for all its complexity, the network is a centralized operation, staffers said. Many of the groups occupy the same buildings in Arlington, Virginia, and share leadership and often staff. Many of the donations go into a central pot, from which hundreds of millions of dollars are disbursed to the smaller groups focused on various political and social concerns, according to tax filings and former employees.

For decades, the Kochs have held deep antipathy to government regulation. When Charles Koch’s brother David ran for vice president on the Libertarian Party ticket in 1980, the party platform called for abolishing the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy and the Food and Drug Administration.

Every winter, the network holds its marquee fundraising event in the Coachella Valley in Southern California. Hundreds of donors fly in to learn how their money is being spent and plan for the coming year. Former staffers describe an emphasis on preventing leaks that bordered on obsession. The network often rents out an entire hotel for the event, keeping out eavesdroppers. Documents left behind are methodically shredded. One recent attendee recalled Koch security staff in a golf cart escorting their Uber driver out of the hotel to make sure he left. The former staffers spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation.

To score an invite to the summit, donors typically have to give at least $100,000 a year. Those who give in the millions receive special treatment, including dinners with Charles Koch and high-profile guests. Doling out access to powerful public officials was seen as a potent fundraising strategy, former staffers said. The dinners’ purpose was “giving donors access and giving them a reason to come or to continue to come in the future,” a former Koch network executive told ProPublica.

Thomas has attended at least one of the dinners for top-tier donors, according to a donor who attended and a former high-level network staffer.

“These donors found it fascinating,” said another former senior employee, recounting a Thomas appearance at one summit where the justice discussed his judicial philosophy. “Donors want to feel special. They want to feel on the inside.”

A former fundraising staffer for the Koch network said the organization’s relationship with Thomas was considered a valuable asset: “Offering a high-level donor the experience of meeting with someone like that — that’s huge.”

Many details about Thomas’ role at the summits, including the specifics of his remarks, remain unclear. The network spokesperson declined to answer if Thomas’ appearances were ever tied to a specific initiative or program.

Thomas’ appearances were arranged with the help of Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society leader, according to the former senior network employee. “Leonard was the conduit who would get him,” the former employee said. During one summit, Thomas gave a talk with Leo in an interview format, the donor recalled.

“Justice Thomas attends events all over the country, as do all the Justices, and I was privileged to join him,” Leo said in a statement in response to questions about the Koch donor events. “All the necessary due diligence was performed to ensure the Justice’s attendance at the events was compliant with all ethics requirements.”

While attending the donor events would likely violate the lower courts’ prohibition on fundraising, experts said, the Supreme Court has a narrow internal definition of a fundraiser: an event that raises more money than it costs or where attendees are explicitly asked for money while the event’s happening.

On the Thursday before the January 2018 summit in Palm Springs, Thomas flew there on a chartered private jet, according to records reviewed by ProPublica. Four days later, the plane flew to an airport outside Denver, where Thomas appeared at a ceremony honoring his former clerk, federal Judge Allison Eid. The next day, it flew back to northern Virginia where Thomas lives.

Thomas’ financial disclosure for that year contains two speaking engagements: one in New York City and another at a Federalist Society conference in Texas. His trip to the Koch event in California is not on the form.

For the event that year, the Koch network rented out the Renaissance Esmeralda Resort and Spa. On the main stage, donors heard from Hall of Fame NFL cornerback Deion Sanders, who was working with the Kochs on anti-poverty programs in Dallas. Another speaker delivered a report card on the group’s political wins large and small: “repealed voter-approved donor disclosure initiative”; “retraction of mining & environmental overreach”; “stopped Albuquerque paid sick leave mandate.”

During the event, the group announced a new initiative focused on getting conservatives on the Supreme Court and the federal bench. The network, which had already given millions of dollars to Leo’s Federalist Society, planned to mobilize its activists and buy advertisements to push senators to vote for President Donald Trump’s judicial nominees. They appointed a former employee of Ginni Thomas, the justice’s wife, to lead the effort.

The first glimpse of Thomas’ connection to the network came more than a decade ago. In 2010, reporters obtained an invitation sent to potential Koch donors that mentioned Thomas had been “featured” at one of the network’s previous summits.

After critics called for more information about Thomas’ attendance, the Supreme Court press office downplayed the episode. A court spokesperson acknowledged Thomas had been in the Palm Springs area during the Kochs’ January 2008 summit. However, she said he was there to talk about his memoir at a Federalist Society dinner that was separate from the donor summit but was also sponsored by Charles Koch. She added that Thomas made a “brief drop-by” at the network summit that year but said he “was not a participant.” (Thomas disclosed the 2008 Palm Springs trip as a Federalist Society speech.)

In the 15 years since, the Koch network has left a deep imprint on American society. Its advocacy is credited with helping stamp out Republican Party support for combating climate change, once an issue that drew bipartisan concern. The “full weight of the network” was thrown behind passing the 2017 Trump tax cut, securing a windfall for the Kochs and their donors. And the upcoming Supreme Court term could bring the network a victory it has pursued for years: overturning a major legal precedent known as Chevron.

While most Americans aren’t familiar with the 1984 case Chevron v. NRDC, it’s one of the Supreme Court’s most-cited decisions. Legal scholars sometimes mention it in the same breath as Brown v. Board of Education and Roe v. Wade. In essence, Chevron is about government agencies’ ability to issue regulations. After a law is enacted, it’s generally up to agencies across the government to make detailed rules putting it into effect. The Chevron decision said courts should be hesitant to second-guess the agencies’ determinations. In the years that followed, judges cited Chevron in upholding rules that protect endangered species, speed up the approval process for new cellphone towers and grant benefits to coal miners suffering from black lung.

The Koch network has challenged Chevron in the courts and its lobbyists have pushed Congress to pass a law nullifying the decision. It has also provided millions of dollars in grants to law professors making the case to overturn it.

The network’s position has become increasingly popular in recent years. Once broadly supported by academics and judges on the right, Chevron is now anathema to many in the conservative legal movement. And there’s no more prominent convert than Thomas.

In 2005, Thomas wrote the majority opinion in a case that expanded Chevron’s protections for government agencies. Ten years later, he was openly questioning the doctrine. Then in 2020, Thomas renounced his own earlier decision, writing that he’d determined the doctrine is unconstitutional after all — a rare reversal for a justice with a reputation for being unmovable in his views.

By last year, Koch network strategists sensed that victory could be at hand. During an internal briefing for network staff, Jorge Lima, a senior vice president at Americans for Prosperity, said the Supreme Court seemed primed to radically change its approach to the issue. The network was trying to find cases that could bring about major changes in the law, according to a video of the meeting obtained by the watchdog group Documented. “We’re doubling down on this strategy,” Lima told the crowd.

Several months later, the Supreme Court announced it would take up a case, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, in which Koch network staff attorneys represent the plaintiffs. If Thomas and his colleagues side with them this coming term, Chevron will be overturned once and for all.

Without Chevron, “any place you would need regulation to address a pressing social problem, it’s going to be more costly to get it, harder to implement it and it’s not going to go as far,” said Noah Rosenblum, a professor at New York University School of Law.

“​​Loper Bright is a case seeking to restore one of the core tenets of our democracy: that Congress, not the administrative agency, makes the laws,” the Koch network spokesperson said.

Ethics experts said Thomas’ undisclosed ties to the Koch network could call his impartiality in the case into doubt. This sort of potential conflict is why the judiciary has rules against both political activity and fundraising, they said. “Parties litigating in the court before Justice Thomas don’t know the extent of Thomas’ relationship with the parties on the other side,” said James Sample, a Hofstra University law professor who studies judicial ethics. “You have to be pretty cynical to not think that’s a problem.”

The Supreme Court itself said in a recent statement to The Associated Press that “justices exercise caution in attending events that might be described as political in nature.” But unlike with lower court judges, there is no formal oversight of the justices.

Two decades ago, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg delivered the opening remarks at a lecture cosponsored by the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund, a women’s rights group that filed friend-of-the-court briefs at the Supreme Court. It was a public event co-sponsored by the New York City Bar Association. But some judicial ethics experts criticized the justice for affiliating herself with an advocacy group.

Thirteen Republican lawmakers, including Mike Pence and Marsha Blackburn, who now sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, went further, calling on Ginsburg to recuse herself from any future cases related to abortion. The justice brushed off the criticism: “I think and thought and still think it’s a lovely thing,” she said of the lecture series. (Ginsburg died in 2020.)

Charles and David Koch’s access to Thomas has gone well beyond his participation in their donor events. For years, the brothers had opportunities to meet privately with Thomas thanks to the justice’s regular trips to the Bohemian Grove, an all-male retreat that attracts some of the nation’s most influential corporate and political figures. Thomas has been a regular at the Grove for 25 years as Harlan Crow’s guest, according to internal documents and interviews with dozens of members, other guests and workers at the retreat.

“What we’re seeing emerge is someone who is living his professional life in a way that’s seeing these extrajudicial opportunities as a perk of the office,” said Charles Geyh, a judicial ethics expert at Indiana University law school. Judges can have social lives, he said, and there are no clear lines for when a social gathering could pose a problem. But the confluence of powerful political actors and undisclosed gifts puts Thomas’ trips far outside the norm for judges’ conduct, Geyh said: “There’s a culture of impartiality that’s really at risk here.”

The Grove is an exclusive, two-week party held in the Sonoma County redwoods every July. A member or his guest can wander from the Grove’s shooting range to a lecture by Blackwater founder Erik Prince, or from a mint julep party to a performance by the Grove’s symphony orchestra. Wine, sometimes at $500 a bottle, flows freely, and late at night, members consume clam chowder and chili by the gallon. More than one attendee recalled walking outside in the morning to find a former cabinet secretary who fell asleep drunk in the grass.

There’s a saying among the Bohemians, as the club’s members call themselves: The only place you should be publicly associated with the Grove is in your obituary. That privacy is paramount, members said, in part to allow the powerful to speak freely — and party — without worrying about showing up in the press. Only designated photographers are allowed to take pictures. Cellphones are strictly forbidden.

Members typically must pay thousands of dollars to bring a guest. Several people ProPublica spoke to said that before the pandemic, they saw Thomas there just about every year. ProPublica was able to confirm six trips Thomas took to the retreat that he didn’t disclose. Flight records suggest Crow has repeatedly dispatched his private jet to Virginia to pick up Thomas and ferry him to the Sonoma County airport and back, usually for a long weekend in the middle of the Grove festival.

“I was taken with how comfortable he was in that environment and how popular,” a person who stayed in the same lodge as Thomas one year said. “He holds court there.”

In response to questions about his travel to the Grove with Thomas, Crow said Thomas is “a man of incredible integrity” and that he’s never heard the justice “discuss pending legal matters with anyone.” Neither Crow nor Thomas responded to questions about whether the justice reimbursed him for the trips.

(Other justices have Grove connections too. The mid-20th-century Chief Justice Earl Warren was a member. Among modern justices, Thomas appears to have been the most frequent guest. Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016, attended many years ago. Justice Stephen Breyer went in 2006; he told ProPublica he was the guest of his brother and that to the best of his memory, he paid his own way. Justice Anthony Kennedy went at least twice before he retired. Kennedy, who did not respond to a request for comment, did not disclose the trips. It’s unclear if he needed to because his son is a member and gifts from family don’t need to be reported.)

The Grove is broken up into more than 100 “camps,” essentially adult fraternity houses where the same group of men stay together year after year. Hill Billies was George H. W. Bush’s camp. Nancy Pelosi’s husband has been a longtime member of Stowaway. Thomas stays with Crow at a camp called Midway.

One of the ritzier camps, Midway employs a staff of cooks and personal valets and boasts an extensive wine cellar. The men sleep in private cabins that zigzag up a hillside. Known for its Republican leanings, Midway has a string of superrich political donors as members, including an heir to the Coors beer empire and the owner of the New York Jets. Charles Koch is an active member, as was his brother David. It’s not clear if Thomas has ever been the guest of a member other than Crow.

During the annual retreats, the Kochs often discussed political strategy with fellow guests, according to multiple people who’ve spent time with them at Midway. A few years ago, Brian Hooks, one of the leaders of their political network, was a guest at the camp the same weekend Thomas was there. A former Midway employee recalled the brothers discussing super PAC spending during the Obama years and complaining about government regulation.

“Chevron was one of the big things the Koch brothers were interested in,” the former employee said. He did not remember if Thomas was present for any of the discussions of the doctrine.

But Thomas and the Kochs developed a bond over their years at the retreat, according to five people who spent time with them there. They discussed politics, business and their families. They often sat together at meals and sat up talking at night at the lodge. A photo obtained by ProPublica captures Thomas and David Koch smiling on Midway’s deck. David’s windbreaker features an owl insignia, the symbol of the club.

One tradition at Midway is a lecture series, often held beneath the redwoods on the camp’s deck. The weekend Thomas was there in July 2016, the Midway schedule featured a talk from Henry Kissinger and another by Michael Bloomberg and Arthur Brooks, then president of the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute. Over breakfast Friday morning, the author Bjorn Lomborg delivered a lecture on climate change. Lomborg has for years argued the threat of global warming is overstated, saying that rising temperatures will actually save lives.

Thomas spoke that year as well. He talked about his friend Justice Scalia, who had recently died, according to a person who attended. Scalia, a conservative luminary, had been a prominent advocate for the Chevron doctrine, but Thomas said he believed his colleague was coming around to Thomas’ revised view on it before his death.

Thomas didn’t explain what he meant by that. “It was an aside,” the person said, “like he assumed most of the people in the room knew his position.”

Via ProPublica

( ProPublica ) – Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ decadeslong friendship with real estate tycoon Harlan Crow and Samuel Alito’s luxury travel with billionaire Paul Singer have raised questions about influence and ethics at the nation’s highest court.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas for the first time acknowledged that he should have reported selling real estate to billionaire political donor Harlan Crow in 2014, a transaction revealed by ProPublica earlier this year. Writing in his annual financial disclosure form, Thomas said that he “inadvertently failed to realize” that the deal needed to be publicly disclosed.

In the form, which was made public Thursday after he’d received an extension on the filing deadline, Thomas also disclosed receiving three private jet trips last year from Crow. ProPublica reported on two of those trips.

Thomas defended his previous practice of not disclosing private jet flights provided to him over the years.

In a statement Thursday, an attorney for Thomas, Elliot Berke, said that “after reviewing Justice Thomas’s records, I am confident there has been no willful ethics transgression, and any prior reporting errors were strictly inadvertent.”

Thomas’ expanded disclosures for 2022 follow a series of ProPublica stories that documented an array of undisclosed luxury vacations and other gifts Thomas has received over the years from a cadre of billionaires, including Crow. ProPublica revealed Texas real estate magnate Crow’s generosity toward Thomas, including yacht cruises, private jet flights, the purchase of his mother’s house in Georgia and tuition payments. Subsequently, we reported that Thomas has received at least 38 destination vacations and 26 private jet flights from multiple billionaires. Thomas’ latest filing brings the total number of jet flights he’s received even higher.

In its initial story, ProPublica reported Thomas took a trip to Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks last July and to a conservative think tank conference in Dallas last May, noting that flight records suggested he flew to and from both places on Crow’s jet. In his new form, Thomas confirmed that Crow provided the private plane travel.

In the form, Thomas said that his security detail recommended he fly private whenever possible “because of the increased security risk following the Dobbs opinion leak.” The Supreme Court did not respond to a question about whether all justices are now advised to take private jet flights for security purposes.

Thomas also disclosed one previously unknown private jet trip he received from Crow. He reported taking a private plane on the way home from a February conference in Dallas because of an “unexpected ice storm.”

In his form, Thomas wrote that he “continues to work” with judiciary staff to determine “whether he should further amend his reports from any prior years.”

The disclosure contains Thomas’ first public comments on his failure to disclose a 2014 real estate deal with Crow. As ProPublica reported this spring, Crow purchased Thomas’ mother’s house and two nearby vacant lots from Thomas and his relatives for $133,363. Thomas’ mother continues to live at the property, which Crow now owns. Crow has said he plans to someday turn the house, which was Thomas’ childhood home, into a museum.

In the form, Thomas said he took a loss on the deal because he and his wife “put between $50,000 to $75,000 into his mother’s home in capital improvements over the years.”

Thomas also defended his practice for more than two decades of not disclosing private jet trips provided by Crow and other wealthy businessmen.

Justices are required by a federal ethics law passed after Watergate to publicly disclose most gifts. Thomas’ defense centers on a carve-out in the law known as the “personal hospitality” exemption. The exemption states that gifts of “food, lodging, or entertainment received as personal hospitality” don’t have to be disclosed. The judiciary updated its guidelines earlier this year to make explicit that the exemption doesn’t apply to private jet travel.

Seven ethics law experts told ProPublica that even before the update, both the law and the judiciary’s regulations have required that gifts of transportation, such as private jet travel, be disclosed because they are not food, lodging or entertainment. Reviewing other federal judges’ financial disclosure filings, ProPublica found at least six examples of judges disclosing gifts of private jet travel in recent years prior to the update.

In the new filing, Thomas for the first time said he got advice that he did not have to disclose such flights from staff at the Judicial Conference, the policymaking arm of the federal judiciary. He said he received that advice from “Conference staff, and in conversations with court officers and colleagues early in his tenure on the Court.” In his previous statement on the matter, Thomas did not say he had consulted the ethics staff.

Prior to his most recent disclosure, Thomas had reported receiving one private jet trip from Crow in 1997, the year after the pair met.

Thomas also pointed to advice received in 2006 by a lower court federal judge, Ray Randolph, that a private jet flight to Alaska didn’t need to be disclosed.

A judiciary spokesperson declined to comment Thursday on whether it has ever been the Judicial Conference’s position that judges can accept gifts of private jet travel without disclosing them.

She also declined to confirm Thomas’ account of past advice he’d received from conference staff. “Advice sought by any filer is confidential and we do not discuss that advice publicly,” the spokesperson said.

The Supreme Court press office did not immediately respond to a request for more details on the advice Thomas said he received.

Thomas’ attorney criticized watchdog groups and Democratic members of Congress who have called for Thomas to be investigated.

“The attacks on Justice Thomas are nothing less than ridiculous and dangerous, and they set a terrible precedent for political blood sport through federal ethics filings,” Berke wrote.

Justice Samuel Alito’s filing was also released Thursday. His did not contain any new disclosures of gifts. Earlier this year, ProPublica reported that in 2008, Alito accepted a private jet flight to Alaska from a hedge fund billionaire who later had cases before the Supreme Court. Alito said that he was not required to disclose the gift, and that when the billionaire’s companies came before the court, Alito was unaware of his connection to the cases.

Via ProPublica

The fullest accounting yet shows how Thomas has secretly reaped the benefits from a network of wealthy and well-connected patrons that is far more extensive than previously understood.

By Brett Murphy and Alex Mierjeski | –

( ProPublica) – During his three decades on the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas has enjoyed steady access to a lifestyle most Americans can only imagine. A cadre of industry titans and ultrawealthy executives have treated him to far-flung vacations aboard their yachts, ushered him into the premium suites at sporting events and sent their private jets to fetch him — including, on more than one occasion, an entire 737. It’s a stream of luxury that is both more extensive and from a wider circle than has been previously understood.

Like clockwork, Thomas’ leisure activities have been underwritten by benefactors who share the ideology that drives his jurisprudence. Their gifts include:

At least 38 destination vacations, including a previously unreported voyage on a yacht around the Bahamas; 26 private jet flights, plus an additional eight by helicopter; a dozen VIP passes to professional and college sporting events, typically perched in the skybox; two stays at luxury resorts in Florida and Jamaica; and one standing invitation to an uber-exclusive golf club overlooking the Atlantic coast.

This accounting of Thomas’ travel, revealed for the first time here from an array of previously unavailable information, is the fullest to date of the generosity that has regularly afforded Thomas a lifestyle far beyond what his income could provide. And it is almost certainly an undercount.

While some of the hospitality, such as stays in personal homes, may not have required disclosure, Thomas appears to have violated the law by failing to disclose flights, yacht cruises and expensive sports tickets, according to ethics experts.

Perhaps even more significant, the pattern exposes consistent violations of judicial norms, experts, including seven current and former federal judges appointed by both parties, told ProPublica. “In my career I don’t remember ever seeing this degree of largesse given to anybody,” said Jeremy Fogel, a former federal judge who served for years on the judicial committee that reviews judges’ financial disclosures. “I think it’s unprecedented.”

This year, ProPublica revealed Texas real estate billionaire Harlan Crow’s generosity toward Thomas, including vacations, private jet flights, gifts, the purchase of his mother’s house in Georgia and tuition payments. In an April statement, the justice defended his relationship with Crow. The Crows “are among our dearest friends,” Thomas said. “As friends do, we have joined them on a number of family trips.”

The New York Times recently surfaced VIP treatment from wealthy businessmen he met through the Horatio Alger Association, an exclusive nonprofit. Among them were David Sokol, a former top executive at Berkshire Hathaway, and H. Wayne Huizenga, a billionaire who turned Blockbuster and Waste Management into national goliaths. (The Times noted Thomas gives access to the Supreme Court building for Horatio Alger events; ProPublica confirmed that the access has cost $1,500 or more in donations per person.)

Records and interviews show Thomas had another benefactor, oil baron Paul “Tony” Novelly, whose gifts to the justice have not previously been reported. ProPublica’s totals in this article include trips from Crow.

Each of these men — Novelly, Huizenga, Sokol and Crow — appears to have first met Thomas after he ascended to the Supreme Court. With the exception of Crow, their names are nowhere in Thomas’ financial disclosures, where justices are required by law to publicly report most gifts.

The total value of the undisclosed trips they’ve given Thomas since 1991, the year he was appointed to the Supreme Court, is difficult to measure. But it’s likely in the millions.

Huizenga sent his personal 737 to pick Thomas up and bring him to South Florida at least twice, according to John Wener, a former flight attendant and chef on board the plane. If he were picked up in D.C., the five-hour round trip would have cost at least $130,000 each time had Thomas chartered the jet himself, according to estimates from jet charter companies. In February 2016, Thomas flew on Crow’s private jet from Washington to New Haven, Connecticut, before heading back on the jet just three hours later. ProPublica previously reported the flight, but newly obtained U.S. Marshals Service records reveal its purpose: Thomas met with several Yale Law School deans for a tour of the room where they planned to display a portrait of the justice. (Crow’s foundation also gave the school $105,000, earmarked for the “Justice Thomas Portrait Fund,” tax filings show.)

Don Fox, the former general counsel of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics and the senior ethics official in the executive branch, said, “It’s just the height of hypocrisy to wear the robes and live the lifestyle of a billionaire.” Taxpayers, he added, have the right to expect that Supreme Court justices are not living on the dime of others.

Fox, who worked under both Democratic and Republican administrations, said he advised every new political appointee the same thing: Your wealthy friends are the ones you had before you were appointed. “You don’t get to acquire any new ones,” he told them.

Thomas and Novelly did not respond to a detailed list of questions for this story. Huizenga died in 2018 and his son, who is the president of the family’s holding company, also did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

In a statement to ProPublica, Sokol said he’s been close friends with the Thomases for 21 years and acknowledged traveling with and occasionally hosting them. He defended the justice as upright and ethical. “We have never once discussed any pending court matter,” Sokol said. “Our conversations have always revolved around helping young people, sports, and family matters.”

“As to the use of private aviation,” he added, “I believe that given security concerns all of the Supreme Court justices should either fly privately or on governmental aircraft.”

The justices have said they follow court rules prohibiting them from accepting gifts from a group of people so frequently that “a reasonable person would believe that the public office is being used for private gain.” But what actually constitutes a gift under those rules is ambiguous and, in practice, justices have few restrictions on what they can accept. Other members of the court have accepted travel underwritten by wealthy businessmen and speaking invitations at universities. Stephen Breyer accepted a flight to a Nantucket wedding from a Democratic megadonor. Ruth Bader Ginsburg took a tour of Israel and Jordan paid for by an Israeli billionaire. Those gifts are public because Breyer and Ginsburg disclosed them.

Thomas, however, is apparently an extreme outlier for the volume and frequency of all the undisclosed vacations he’s received. He once complained that he sacrificed wealth to sit on the court, though he depicted the choice as a matter of conscience. “The job is not worth doing for what they pay,” he told the bar association in Savannah, Georgia, in 2001, “but it is worth doing for the principle.”

To track Thomas’ relationships and travel, ProPublica examined flight data, emails from airport and university officials, security detail records, tax court filings, meeting minutes and a trove of photographs from personal albums, including cards that Thomas’ wife, Ginni, sent to friends. In addition, reporters interviewed more than 100 eyewitnesses and other sources: jet and helicopter pilots, flight attendants, airport workers, yacht crew members, security guards, photographers, waitresses, caterers, chefs, drivers, river rafting guides and C-suite executives.

ProPublica has not identified any legal cases that Huizenga, Sokol or Novelly had at the Supreme Court during their documented relationships with Thomas, although they all work in industries significantly impacted by the court’s decisions.

In a small-circulation biography given to Huizenga’s friends and family, Thomas acknowledged that he and Huizenga discussed some of the billionaire’s companies but said their relationship was never transactional. “It wasn’t that kind of friendship,” he told the interviewer. The justice said they’d prefer to go to a small restaurant in a strip mall or sit on the billionaire’s lawn and drink tea or diet soda.

“We are in a society where everything is quid pro quo,” Thomas said, but not with the Huizengas. “I don’t do anything for them and they can’t do anything for me.”

“Four Lucky Couples”

On Labor Day weekend 2019, Thomas boarded a private plane in Washington, D.C., for the first leg of a sojourn out West. The vacation had been months in the making and, thanks to Sokol, it was all taken care of. He’s hosted the Thomases virtually every summer for a decade.

The first stop was the Great Plains. It was the home opener at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, which Ginni Thomas had attended before transferring. The Thomases were joined there by other couples, including one of the justice’s most vocal advocates, Mark Paoletta, who then worked for the federal government, and his wife.

Sokol, a major university donor who graduated from the Omaha campus, arranged for the group to attend the football and volleyball games with all-access passes. Clarence Thomas met with the football team the day before the game. The group walked out of the tunnel before kickoff. During halftime, they stood on the sidelines to watch the marching band perform, at one point posing for a picture in the end zone: “The Sokols took four lucky couples to the first Nebraska footbal game of the season,” Ginni Thomas wrote in one of the card captions.

Sokol runs a private equity firm and now also chairs a holding company that owns large international shipping and power utility corporations. He resigned from Berkshire Hathaway in 2011 amid an internal investigation by the company that found he had violated its insider trading policy. (At the time, Sokol denied wrongdoing and said his resignation was unrelated to the episode; he was never indicted.)

That Saturday, the group watched both the football and volleyball games from luxury suites. The football skybox, which typically costs $40,000 annually, belonged to Tom Osborne, a former Republican congressman who was also the head coach of the team for 25 years. Hosting the Thomases had ripple effects. A local priest requested a ticket for his 87-year-old mother, but the volleyball coach had to tell him none was available. “All of our tickets have been taken for Clarence Thomas and his group,” the coach wrote.

The Thomases have been treated to at least seven University of Nebraska-Lincoln games — five arranged by Sokol — in recent years. The Times first reported on Thomas’ appearances at some of them.

Thomas has never reported any of those tickets on his yearly financial forms. Judiciary disclosure rules require that most gifts worth more than $415 be disclosed. “It’s so obvious,” said Richard Painter, former chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush. “It all has to be reported.” ProPublica identified more than 60 federal judges who disclosed tickets to sporting events between 2003 and 2019. In 1999, Thomas disclosed private flight and accommodations for the Daytona 500 but hasn’t reported any other sporting events before or since.

In a statement, Osborne confirmed Thomas has “watched a couple of football games” in his suite, which the university had given to him. He said he is “taxed” for the use of the suite but did not answer whether Thomas has ever reimbursed him. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln did not respond to requests for comment.

On Sunday, the morning after the football game in Nebraska, Sokol flew with Thomas by private jet to Sokol’s Paintbrush Ranch just outside Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The property, valued in the low eight figures, sits in the foothills of Shadow Mountain. A local radio personality said of the estate: “This is the ultimate home and it has the most iconic view of the Tetons I’ve seen. Ever.”

Sokol also owns a waterfront mansion in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, currently worth $20.1 million, where he’s hosted the Thomases as well, according to photos of the visits. The 12,800-square-foot property includes a home theater, elevator, walk-in wine cellar and yacht docking. (In addition, Sokol and Thomas have shared an opulent lodge together while vacationing at Crow’s private lakeside resort, Camp Topridge, in the Adirondacks.)

In Wyoming, the Thomases fished, rafted on the Snake River and sat by a campfire overlooking the Teton Range with the other couples. At one point, the Paolettas serenaded the justice with a song they wrote about him.

Like Thomas, Paoletta did not disclose the trip on his yearly financial filings. At the time, Paoletta was general counsel and the designated ethics official at the Office of Management and Budget. In a statement, Paoletta said he wasn’t required to disclose the trip because he had reimbursed Sokol, but he did not say how much or provide documentation of those payments. “I complied with all ethics laws and regulations,” Paoletta said.

Details of the vacation to Nebraska and Wyoming were drawn from photographs, trip planning emails and social media posts, as well as interviews with airport workers, local residents and others familiar with the travel, including river raft guides.

Since 1990, Sokol and his wife have donated more than $1 million to Republican politicians and groups, along with smaller amounts to Democrats. Last October, in New Orleans, Sokol made a direct reference to a pending Supreme Court case while addressing a group of former Horatio Alger scholarship recipients. (Thomas was not in attendance.)

The speech veered into territory that made many of those in attendance uncomfortable and left others appalled, emails and others messages show. Sokol, who has written extensively about American exceptionalism and the virtues of free enterprise, minimized slavery and systemic racism, some felt. He then criticized President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan, arguing Biden had overstepped the government’s authority, according to a recording of the speech obtained by ProPublica.

“It’s going to get overturned by the Supreme Court,” Sokol predicted, echoing a common legal commentary.

He was right. This summer, the court struck down Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan. Thomas voted in the majority.

Deep Sea Fishing in the Caribbean

Nearly every spring, Novelly, a billionaire who made his fortune storing and transporting petroleum, takes his two yachts on a fishing expedition to the Bahamas’ Exuma Islands. Photographs from the trips show porcelain beaches, cerulean waters and fresh mahi-mahi. Friends and family come and go for days at a time.

Three of Novelly’s former yacht workers, including a captain, told ProPublica they recall Thomas coming on board the vessels multiple times in recent years. Novelly’s local chauffeur in the Bahamas said his company once picked Thomas up from the billionaire’s private jet and drove him to the marina where one of the yachts, Le Montrachet, frequently docks.

Le Montrachet, named after the premium French wine, is a 126-foot luxury vessel complete with a full bar, multiple dining areas, a baby grand piano, accommodations for 10 guests and a handful of smaller fishing boats and jet skis. Novelly charges about $60,000 a week to outsiders who want to charter it.

Another past guest on Novelly’s yacht is “Alligator” Ron Bergeron, one of the biggest land and roadway developers in Florida. Around 2018, Novelly and Thomas went to Bergeron’s private ranch on the edge of the Everglades — a sprawling, gated estate with centuries-old cypress trees and an 1800s-style saloon on site. He described Novelly as a man who likes to share his success with others. “He’s very generous with all his friends,” Bergeron told ProPublica.

Bergeron said his conversations with Thomas at the ranch were strictly about charity work and not business. “You’re talking about a great man,” Bergeron said, “who gives his time to make a difference for America.”

Since 1999, Novelly’s family and companies have publicly disclosed at least $500,000 to conservative causes and Republican candidates in federal elections. (Before then, he had given to both parties.)

Novelly, who recently stepped down from his CEO roles, ran his business affairs aggressively, ending up on the wrong side of the government in at least two cases. He spends much of his time between St. Louis and Boca Raton, Florida, where he has a 23,000 square-foot palatial estate appraised at $22.2 million. In 2002, Novelly established residency and a holding company in the Virgin Islands. During a hearing with local officials, Novelly described the arrangement there as a “quid pro quo,” meaning the U.S. territory received a boost to the local economy in return for offering substantial tax breaks. The IRS would later call it an “abusive tax avoidance scheme” and pursued Novelly for millions in back taxes and penalties. Novelly denied the characterization and eventually settled with the government for a negotiated amount.

There’s no evidence his friendship with Thomas helped Novelly in one of his most significant disputes. In 2005, the Justice Department sued Novelly’s company, Apex Oil, because its corporate predecessor had contributed to a massive groundwater contamination beneath an Illinois village and then Apex refused to help with the cleanup. Apex argued the spill had occurred before the company went through a bankruptcy years earlier. Several judges ruled against Apex, which eventually appealed to the Supreme Court in 2010. The justices declined to hear the case, and the company had to pay about $150 million to help remove oil from the soil.

It’s not clear how Thomas voted in the case because such votes are not typically public. The vacations ProPublica identified appear to have occurred after the case was resolved.

In 2020, Apex Oil, Sokol and Crow helped fund a documentary defending Thomas as a response to an HBO film that was critical of the justice. Sokol called the HBO movie a “Molotov cocktail into our homes” and a prime example of America’s eroding civility.

The “Most Coveted” Invitation in the World

Thomas’ first billionaire benefactor is likely H. Wayne Huizenga, believed to be the only person in American history to build three separate Fortune 500 companies. One of the three was AutoNation, which Huizenga founded in 1996 before building it into the largest car dealer in the country. Between 1998 and 1999, Huizenga’s holding company spent $500,000 lobbying federal agencies that regulate the automotive industry, according to OpenSecrets data. Over the years, the Huizenga family and companies gave millions to state and federal Republican candidates and once threw a fundraiser for the Florida GOP that helped keep the party afloat for months.

The billionaire was known to regularly lavish gifts and perks on those in his orbit. He routinely took friends on opulent vacations. He paid his employees handsomely and sometimes covered their bills and personal expenses. On a whim, Huizenga once handed box tickets for the opera, which were worth thousands, to his caterer, Bob Leonardi.

“I led the life of a multimillionaire without being one,” Leonardi said.

For 20 years, Thomas benefited from Huizenga’s attention as well, availing himself of the billionaire’s fleet of aircraft and other luxuries. Huizenga took Thomas to see the Miami Dolphins and Florida Panthers several times between the mid-’90s and mid-2000s, according to interviews and photographs. Huizenga owned both teams at the time.

Executives saw Thomas around Huizenga’s office often. Richard Rochon, the former president of Huizenga Holdings, said Thomas once shadowed the billionaire during meetings. “He just wants to see what I do every day,” Rochon recalled Huizenga saying.

On at least two occasions, Thomas attended Huizenga’s birthday and Christmas parties, which the billionaire held inside his private hangar at the Fort Lauderdale airport. Van Poole, a lobbyist and former chairman of the Florida GOP, recalled riding down the elevator at the nearby Hyatt Pier 66 hotel — which Huizenga also controlled — when the Thomases stepped in with a security detail. The group discussed college sports and then traveled to the party together, Poole said.

Thomas occasionally flew on Huizenga’s helicopters, sometimes taking off from the roof of the corporate headquarters, and at least one of his Gulfstream jets around Florida, according to his former pilots. But the billionaire’s most luxurious planes were a pair of 737 jets he had retrofitted like a lounge, complete with recliners, love seats, mahogany dining and card tables and gourmet food.

At least two times in the mid 2000s, Huizenga sent one of them to pick up Thomas and deliver him to Fort Lauderdale, said John Wener, the flight attendant on board.

Wener recalled chatting with the justice about his nomination to the Supreme Court and the tumultuous Senate confirmation hearings after Thomas’ former aide, Anita Hill, accused him of sexual harassment. “He said, ‘Just imagine a job interview and you’re in front of 100 people that hate you,’” Wener recalled Thomas remarking. “‘How would that interview go?’”

In the early 2000s, Huizenga gave Thomas something that was priceless at the time: a standing invitation to his exclusive, members-only golf club, the Floridian. Designed by golf legend Gary Player, the course was lined with cottages for Huizenga’s friends, a yacht marina for them to dock and a helipad if they wanted to fly in. One family friend told the Huizenga family biographer that the Floridian was “the most coveted private golf invitation in the world.” Those who worked and played there said the membership rolls were a Rolodex of the rich, famous and powerful: From Michael Douglas and Rush Limbaugh to Michael Bloomberg and former Vice President Dan Quayle. Donald Trump once asked to be a member but Huizenga spurned him, according to three of Huizenga’s former employees.

All 200-plus members were “honorary” and didn’t pay dues — Huizenga covered everything. “It was a little slice of heaven, a magical place,” former media personality Matt Lauer told the biographer. “You drove through the gates and it was this fairytale land that he had created.”

It’s unclear if Thomas was a member or Huizenga’s frequent guest with similar privileges. The billionaire’s former personal photographer and two former golf pros at the club recalled seeing Thomas there multiple times over the years. One of Huizenga’s helicopter pilots said he had picked the justice up from the property. And a fifth employee, a former waitress and concierge, said she once served Thomas and Huizenga, who were wearing golf attire, as they dined alone in the enormous waterfront clubhouse for lunch. “Have you met a Supreme Court justice?” Huizenga asked the waitress before she took their order. “This is Clarence Thomas.”

Today, the Floridian, which the Huizenga family sold in 2010 before it underwent renovations, has a $150,000 initiation fee.

Paying for Access to the Supreme Court Chambers

Thomas first met Huizenga at a formal gala in Washington, D.C., in 1992, when they were both inducted into the Horatio Alger Association. Henry Kissinger and Maya Angelou were among the other honorees that year. The organization, named after the 19th-century novelist who popularized rags-to-riches folklore, gives millions in college scholarships each year and also brings together some of the country’s wealthiest, self-made business tycoons for opulent events. (In real life, Alger was a minister on Cape Cod who resigned from his parish after he was credibly accused of molesting boys.)

“We were proud to honor Justice Thomas more than 30 years ago,” an association spokesperson said in a statement, “and remain grateful for his continued involvement in our organization.” She said Thomas spends countless hours mentoring scholarship recipients.

Thomas appears to have met Huizenga, Sokol, Novelly and Bergeron through the organization. Several of Thomas’ trips to Florida in the 2000s appear to have been connected with the association. In that time period, he joined Huizenga at Horatio Alger scholarship ceremonies in South Florida, travel that the justice disclosed in several of his yearly financial filings.

However, he never identified Huizenga in any of his disclosures. The association spokesperson confirmed to ProPublica that the billionaire hosted those events “and covered all costs involved.”

Experts said that means Thomas’ disclosures would be, at a minimum, incomplete and misleading because the rules require federal judges to identify the source of the gifts they receive. “Source means the person or entity that paid for it,” said Kathleen Clark, a legal ethics authority at Washington University in St. Louis.

Belonging to the association has had its privileges. As part of a board meeting, the Thomases once went on a lavish trip to Jamaica, where they were hosted by a wealthy donor who owned a luxury hotel atop a former sugar plantation. Johnny Cash performed. Horatio Alger Association membership itself is worth at least $200,000, according to the organization’s meeting minutes in 2007, a sum that those who nominate a new member are responsible for raising in that person’s honor. The association spokesperson said there was no requirement to raise money for new members back when Thomas was inducted.

Thomas has likely helped the group earn many times that figure since then. Every year, the justice hosts an event for members inside the Supreme Court’s Great Hall. The Times previously reported that the event afforded the Horatio Alger Association unusual access to the court.

ProPublica examined boxes of the association’s historical archives, including financial records that show the group has required donations of at least $1,500 — $7,500 for nonmembers — to attend the Supreme Court event. In 2004, those who donated $100,000 for a table at the main ceremony got 10 seats inside the Supreme Court. In the judiciary’s code of conduct — which is general guidance that does not apply to Supreme Court justices, though they say they consult it — there is explicit language advising federal judges against using their position to fundraise for outside organizations.

But that’s what Thomas has done, said Virginia Canter, a former government ethics lawyer who served in administrations of both parties and reviewed the association’s financial records at ProPublica’s request.

“To use the Supreme Court to fundraise for somebody’s charity is, to me, an abuse of office,” she said. Canter acknowledged the organization may do good work, but that’s besides the point, she said, because wealthy donors aren’t supposed to be able to pay thousands of dollars to visit a justice inside the courthouse walls.

“It’s pay to play,” Canter added, “isn’t it?”

Via ProPublica

Dear  Chief Justice Roberts.  Let me give you a hanky.  All those nasty critics of “your” court, including those three hectoring female justices hanging off the edge of it, I’m sorry you’re so disturbed.

Well, C.J. Roberts, let me help.  I’ll  give you a little lesson in Judicial Process 101, which they don’t teach in law school.  For example, what is a “court” anyway?  Does Russia have a real court system?  China?  Did the Nazis?  The answer is, no. Judges in those systems knew or know very well what to decide.  They follow the party line or they get canned, killed or exiled. They have no independence, and would be frightened of asserting any such thing.

My first four books were studies about court systems around that world. In order for courts  to be considered “legitimate”,  they need be considered  by the legal system and the general public to be impartial and objective arbiters of disputes. I was one of the first new wave of political scientists / lawyers to define and explore the concept of “judicial role,” essential for any judge to play in real life empirical courts, in real courts that routinely pass relatively neutral judgments.  That is why you have life or long fixed terms to make you independent of politics in making such key decisions.

So, what characterizes this judicial role that allows a man or woman to be a legitimate impartial arbiter in any dispute?  It is this, Sir.  In order for a judge to be the chief decider in a genuine court, he or she must be bound by the law, by constitutions, statutes or established judicial precedent.  That’s why we have to stand when you enter the courtroom.

American politicians say that “the rule of law” applies to everyone and is essential to “democracy”.  No one is “above the law.” That surely includes judges.  In the American system of jurisprudence and politics, the court is distinguished from other branches of government because judges are not supposed to let their political party, ideology, or economic or political interests get the better of them in deciding cases.  In the Anglo-American system, judges are bound by an ancient and stringent doctrine called, in Latin: stare decisis . . . which means “let the previous decisions stand.”

Further, judges must simply apply existing law.  They do not have the power to change the law according to their political and economic theories and personal prejudices. To do so is bias and means that the judge is really not a judge at all but a policy maker and a political actor.  Exhibiting extreme partiality of the sort that the Roberts court has repeatedly shown demonstrates that the justice or judge is not objective and therefore undermines any claim of the tribunal judging the merits of a case to being a court at all.  It has become, instead, a political tribunal, and should now be demoted to that status by the other branches of government. That’s you and your ‘Court”, Sir.   You are not “Your Honor.”

In America, Congress and the President can change the very structure of a Supreme Court that devolves into just another political institution.  When SCOTUS does this habitually, it must be neutered, since it is not neutral.

It is not always wrong to overturn a precedent, if the precedent was clearly unconstitutional. The Warren Court most famously did this by overruling Plessy vs Ferguson (1896) by Brown v. Board of Education (1954).  The Plessy case legitimized Jim Crow Apartheid that ruled the latent Confederacy of the South for nearly six decades .  The Brown case changed that and recognized the Fourteenth Amendment the real law of the land again. 

In the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, whereby you overruled Roe v. Wade, however, you cited no constitutional right that had been denied to women by Roe. Indeed, despite Justice William O. Douglas’s correct finding that the Constitution creates “zones of privacy, such as the First Amendment right of association, the Third Amendment prohibition against quartering soldiers in a home, the Fourth Amendment right to be secure in one’s person, house, papers and effects, the Fifth Amendment right to not surrender anything to one’s detriment, and the Ninth Amendment right to not deny or disparage any right retained by the people,” you began whittling away at our right to privacy.

Perhaps this new Trump Court thinks it can toss even the Brown case striking down “separate but equal” racial facilities into the garbage can as well?  Give it a try, C. J. Roberts, and see what happens.  We all know you can be trusted to overrule any precedent.  You proved that in Citizens United which gave monopolies and Big Wealth (the new Billionaire Class) almost complete control over all federal elections in the U.S.A.  Despite your sworn testimony at your Senate confirmation hearings, you have no respect for your predecessor Supreme Courts and you are but a loose political cannon hidden by a black shroud.

Reform the court?  How can anyone do that when SCOTUS is obviously a political panther?  It must first be caged . . . because with its unbridled power it is, by far, as one Judicial Politics scholar said recently, “the most dangerous branch of American government.” 

The Founders believed that in order to insure judicial independence, SCOTUS justices need to feel free from political pressure.  But life terms?  Ridiculous and dangerous. Surely 8-10 year terms are sufficient to grant that independence.  The best reform for defanging this political supervisor of the Constitution and laws of the land, would be to require that any ruling that a law is unconstitutional would have to be made by a unanimous vote (9-0).  The same requirement should be there for overruling executive orders, Congressional statutes, and administrative decisions.  Implementing such a requirement will take time. 

It is possible, Justice Roberts, that your SCOTUS, created by the Federalist Society, is consistent with the ideals of that 18^th century American political scene, which is to say, it is woefully outmoded. Your resurrected Federalist Party has been from the start proudly anti-democratic and strongly favored a national government designed to be ruled by rich white men only. That outcome clearly violates 21^st century American values, and if the Constitution is to survive it must be flexible enough to encompass contemporary mores.  Your runaway political institution that is above the law, and which is attempting to make the Constitution brittle and hated, must be corralled ASAP.

In the meantime, excuse me, you need to be impeached for perjury, since you swore before Congress that abortion rights were settled law. Moreover, two of your political henchmen need to be impeached for clearcut violations of governmental ethics. Not only is your court no longer a court, it is now a pay-to-play abomination.   

( Inequality.org ) – In our United States today, all of us do not have an “equal opportunity” to become rich — or even comfortable. Rich people like things that way. Grand fortunes only grow grander when the richest among us have plenty of exploitable people around to exploit.

To keep things that way, rich people have gone out of their way over the past half-century to make sure all of us do not have “equal opportunity” to a quality education. This week, with the Supreme Court’s stunning ruling that strikes down affirmative action in higher ed admissions, the most fervent advocates of plutocratic privilege have now completed their squashing of the world’s most ambitious attempt to create a system of public education that can truly guarantee all kids a quality education.

That ambitious effort began all the way back in 1787 when our new nation’s earliest lawmakers, in the Northwest Ordinance, required towns in future states to reserve prime real estate for public schools. Their goal: to ensure that “the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”

“Without education, the founders feared democracy would devolve into mob rule and open doors to unscrupulous politicians and hucksters,” the University of South Carolina Law School’s Derek Black has pointed out. “Our democratic experiment might very well just fail.”

Realizing the founders’ goal of “forever” encouraging public education would end up taking almost forever. Not until the years after World War II would the United States have anything remotely close to a public school system that extended equal opportunity to young people of all colors and classes, to children with and without disabilities. In the 1960s, federal tax dollars finally began helping every community offer all children a quality educational experience.

Those dollars came via progressive tax rates that actually had most of America’s richest contributing something close to their fair tax share.

In those same mid-20th-century decades, we overhauled American higher education. We created networks of public community colleges, all with free or low-cost tuition. We created student grant and loan programs that enabled millions of young people to earn four-year and postgraduate degrees without building up debts that would take them lifetimes to pay off.

Americans who wanted to opt out of this ambitious new world of public education remained free to do so. The rich could still send their kids to private academies. Any families that so chose could send their kids to religious schools — but not on the public dime. Public tax dollars went to fund public education. Those dollars, we believed, were building democracy, teaching people of all backgrounds how to work with and learn from each other.

These noble goals would, of course, regularly go unmet. But the goals themselves — the rhetoric of “equal educational opportunity” — did really matter. Parents and communities, armed with this rhetoric, ventured forth and did noble battle against the still formidable barriers to equal opportunity. They even won many of those battles. We were moving, as a nation, in the right direction.

And then rich people said stop. These rich felt like saps. High taxes on their “hard-earned” incomes were bankrolling the education of other people’s children. Their alma maters, our wealthiest fretted, might even start cutting back on the “legacy admissions” that guaranteed their offspring easy entry into the nation’s most prestigious colleges and universities.

The “indignities” these wealthy endured went well beyond the “disrespect” they felt. They saw the source of their fortunes, their “right” to run Corporate America as they saw fit, under direct threat as the United States entered into the 1970s. The federal government — under a Republican president no less — seemed to be hobbling business at every turn.

At the end of 1970, Richard Nixon had signed into law legislation that created a new federal agency to protect workers from injury and illness. Just a few weeks earlier, the first administrator of another new federal office, the Environmental Protection Agency, had announced his attention to give business polluters no quarter. As an independent agency, William Ruckelshaus pronounced, the EPA had “only the critical obligation to protect and enhance the environment.”

Things were clearly getting out of hand. Business seemed to be taking a shellacking from every direction. New federal agencies. A restless labor movement. Campuses full of profs and students who felt free to ridicule business values. Corporate America clearly had to respond. But how? The U.S. Chamber of Commerce would put that question to Lewis Powell, a leading corporate attorney.

Powell’s answer would come in a confidential 1971 memo, just two months before his nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. The time had come, Powell declared, “for the wisdom, ingenuity, and resources of American business to be marshalled against those who would destroy it.”

Business confronts, Powell would contend, critics “seeking insidiously” to “sabotage” free enterprise. “Extremists on the left,” he insisted, have become “far more numerous, better financed, and increasingly are more welcomed and encouraged by other elements of society, than ever before.”

Corporate America, Powell would exhort, must show more “stomach for hard-nose” combat. Yet individual corporate leaders, Powell understood, can only do so much. Real strength, he would go on to explain, lies “in careful long-range planning” and “consistency of action over an indefinite period of years.” Real strength demands a “scale of financing available only through joint effort” and “the political power available only through united action and national organizations.”

Powell’s 1971 musings, notes historian Kim Phillips-Fein, “crystallized a set of concerns shared by business conservatives in the early 1970s” — and gave “inspiration” to corporate leaders who would later become familiar names and powerful forces, men like arch Colorado right-winger Joseph Coors.

Together, these newly energized corporate leaders would unleash upon America what political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson have called “a domestic version of Shock and Awe.” The number of corporate public affairs offices in Washington, D.C. would quintuple between 1968 and 1978, from 100 to over 500. In 1971, only 175 U.S. corporations had registered lobbyists in Washington. The 1982 total: almost 2,500.

Corporate leaders also bankrolled a series of new militantly “free market” think tanks and action centers: the Heritage Foundation and American Legislative Exchange Council in 1973, the Cato Institute in 1977, the Manhattan Institute in 1978, among many others.  The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, for its part, would double its membership between 1974 and 1980 and triple its budget.

Photo by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash

Complementing this new ideological infrastructure: a torrent of campaign contributions to rich people-friendly pols. In the mid-1970s, U.S. senators were depending on labor for almost half their campaign funding. By the mid-1980s, senators were getting less than a fifth of their funding from union PACs.

By the early 2000s, adds Jacob Hacker, the Republican Party had solidified its intimacy with “very, very, very rich billionaire donors” and corporate groups. The GOP now marched in total sync with the policy priorities of America’s most fortunate: more regressive tax cuts, more deregulation, and more extreme conservatives on the nation’s judicial benches.

The personal payoff from this synchronization would be huge for America’s deepest pockets. Between 1995 and 2007, sinking effective income tax rates saved America’s 400 richest households an average $46 million per year. The “flip side” of this “aggressive pursuit of lower taxes by the rich”? Hacker and fellow analyst Nathan Loewentheil have the consequential answer: chronic government budget deficits and insufficient funds for public goods like public education.

The predictable result? Everything from overcrowded elementary school classrooms to tuition rates that make higher education unaffordable for vast numbers of American households.

George Washington would not approve. In 1796, in his annual presidential address to Congress, Washington opined that our nation’s lawmakers had no duty “more pressing” than “the common education of a portion of our youth from every quarter.”

We are failing that youth. We are coddling our rich instead.

Via Inequality.org

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