Tag: judicial crisis network
Amy Comey Barret dark money

REPORT: A Flood Of Dark Money Fueled Amy Coney Barrett's Confirmation

Although Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the United States’ last eight presidential elections, six of the U.S. Supreme Court’s nine justices are Republican appointees — including Justice Amy Coney Barrett, whose confirmation was rammed through the U.S. Senate only a month before then-President Donald Trump was voted out of office. The far right wanted Barrett confirmed ASAP, and according to Daily Poster reporters Andrew Perez and Julia Rock, “conservative dark money” played a major role in Barrett’s “confirmation campaign.”

Perez and Rock, in an article published on December 19, report, “A conservative dark money group led by former President Donald Trump’s judicial adviser Leonard Leo bankrolled Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court confirmation campaign with nearly $22 million in anonymous cash, while another nonprofit that Leo helps steer saw a fundraising bonanza and showered cash on other organizations boosting Barrett, according to tax returns obtained by The Daily Poster. The new tax returns shed light on how Barrett’s successful last-minute confirmation campaign was aided by a flood of dark money.”

Those tax returns, the reporters add, “also reveal the rapid growth of Leo’s already highly successful dark money network and its tentacles in the broader conservative movement.”

“Leo is a longtime executive at the Federalist Society, a group for conservative lawyers,” Perez and Rock explain. “He formed the Rule of Law Trust (RLT) in 2018, and the group quickly raised nearly $80 million. RLT started spending that money in 2020, donating $21.5 million to the Judicial Crisis Network (JCN), another group steered by Leo that played a key role in Republicans flipping the Supreme Court and building a conservative supermajority.”

Perez and Rock add that JCN “spent millions pressing Republican senators to block (President Barack) Obama’s 2016 Supreme Court pick, Merrick Garland, and subsequently spent millions boosting each of Trump’s High Court nominees — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Barrett — all while Leo was advising Trump’s judicial strategy.”

The fact that JCN opposed Garland’s nomination so vehemently speaks volumes. After Justice Antonin Scalia’s death in 2016, Obama went very centrist with his Garland nomination; he didn’t nominate someone as liberal as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg or Chief Justice Earl Warren. And Obama was more than willing to meet Republicans halfway.

In fact, Garland, as U.S. attorney general under President Joe Biden, has cited Edward Levi — Republican President Gerald R. Ford’s attorney general during the mid-1970s — as his role model for how the U.S. Department of Justice should operate. Ford, of course, was vice president under President Richard Nixon before Nixon resigned, in August 1974, because of the Watergate scandal. And the JCN is so far to the right that they consider even the legal and judicial standards of the Ford Administration too liberal.

“Leo also helps direct the 85 Fund, a charitable organization being used to fiscally sponsor a host of conservative nonprofits, including the Judicial Education Project, which has long been JCN’s sister arm,” Perez and Rock note. “The 85 Fund reported bringing in nearly $66 million in 2020, according to its latest tax return. That’s a huge increase over the roughly $13 million the organization raised in 2019, per OpenSecrets, which found the majority of the 85 Fund’s 2020 money came from DonorsTrust, a group known as a ‘dark money ATM,’ for its use as a pass-through vehicle.”

Article reprinted with permission from Alternet

Senate Confirms Vanita Gupta To Civil Rights Post Despite GOP Attacks

Senate Confirms Vanita Gupta To Civil Rights Post Despite GOP Attacks

Reprinted with permission from DailyKos

After months of Republican attacks, Vanita Gupta was confirmed Wednesday afternoon as associate attorney general. Vice President Kamala Harris was available to break a tie, but Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) voted to advance Gupta's nomination to a full Senate vote earlier in the day, then followed up in making it a 51 to 49 vote to confirm. Gupta is the first woman of color and the first civil rights lawyer in this role.

Gupta is eminently qualified: She headed the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division under then-President Barack Obama and is the president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. But she's a woman of color who has focused her career on civil rights, which means Republicans see her as an enemy.

Gupta has been the target of nearly $1 million in attack ads by the far-right Judicial Crisis Network, and a group of Republican state attorneys general also attacked her, focusing on her work in the Obama Justice Department heading up investigations of police departments after white officers killed Black people. Those attacks came despite glowing endorsements from many law enforcement leaders. "She always worked with us to find common ground even when that seemed impossible," wrote the head of the nation's largest police union.

At her confirmation hearing, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) sneeringly attacked Gupta for having the nerve to believe that implicit bias is a real thing, trying to turn it around on her by asking: "Against which races do you harbor racial bias?" Cotton also claimed that Gupta supports "decriminalization of all drugs," which she does not, and that she had misled the Senate Judiciary Committee about her stance on decriminalization, which she had not.

The Republican attacks weren't done there. On Wednesday, as the Senate moved toward a vote on Gupta's nomination, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell painted Gupta as having "a record of astoundingly radical positions." The notoriously dishonest McConnell also assailed Gupta's honesty, charging: "She's levied attacks on members of this body, and during the confirmation process, she employed the loosest possible interpretation of her oath to deliver honest testimony." The attacks on Gupta's truthfulness come essentially because she said that she would represent the Biden administration's positions, as she has in the past represented other organizations, be it the Obama Justice Department or the ACLU. This is a standard position for a nominee to take, but when it comes from a woman of color, it's portrayed as a character issue.

Gupta is far from the only woman of color whose confirmation has run into ferocious Republican attacks in recent months. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first American Indian Cabinet member ever, was likewise described as a "radical" during her confirmation process, of which former Sens. Tom Udall and Mark Udall noted, "Were either of us the nominee to lead the Interior Department, we doubt that anyone would be threatening to hold up the nomination or wage a scorched earth campaign warning about 'radical' ideas."

Many of the same Republicans who managed not to hear about any of Donald Trump's most outrageous tweets for four years were extremely well-informed about every strongly worded tweet ever to come from former Office of Management and Budget nominee Neera Tanden. Her nomination was ultimately sunk by Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, ostensibly over those tweets, though Manchin had voted to confirm full-on misogynist Twitter troll Richard Grenell as ambassador to Germany under Trump.

Most recently, Republicans pulled out pretty much the same playbook on Kristen Clarke, Biden's nominee to head the Justice Department Civil Rights Division, that they tried on Gupta: She's a radical who cares about civil rights—how dare she! In fact, she's the real racist, whether because she wrote a satire of The Bell Curve as a college student or has called for accountability in police killings of civilians.

If Republicans were distributing their venom equally across Biden's nominees, you'd say, well, they just hate all Democrats. But that's not what's happening here. There's a very clear pattern of especially fierce, personal opposition to women of color, and it doesn't seem like Senate Republicans mind how obvious it is, either.

Sen. Sheldon WhiteHouse

At Hearing, Sen. Whitehouse Blasts Barrett Nomination As Dark-Money Maneuver To Rig Courts

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

During her Senate confirmation hearings this week, Judge Amy Coney Barrett — President Donald Trump's far-right nominee to replace the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the U.S. Supreme Court — has been questioned by Democratic senators who include Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island. Whitehouse, during his questioning, focused heavily on some of the conservative groups and judicial activists that are pushing aggressively for Barrett's confirmation — and Whitehouse laid out, in detail, the right-wing scheme to "rig" the federal courts.

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supreme court

For Truly Grotesque Hypocrisy, Meet The Judicial Crisis Network

Reprinted with permission from MediaMatters

Judicial Crisis Network, the primary right-wing group involved in supporting or opposing judicial nominees, has released a hypocritical ad that calls for a nomination to be made to fill the Supreme Court seat left vacant by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and for the Republican Senate to quickly confirm the nominee.

In February 2016, following the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, JCN launched an ad campaign under the banner "Let the People Decide" that argued that the vacancy's proximity to the presidential election meant that it should be filled by that election's winner, rather than by then-President Barack Obama.

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