Over a period of many years, an interlocking agglomeration of interest groups, largely funded by a small number of hugely wealthy right-wing businesspersons, devoted millions of dollars to systematically pack the federal courts with like-minded ideologues.
In order to reach their goal, the court packers were willing to discard any and all existing norms. For example, then Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell refused even to give Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland a hearing so as to leave the slot open to be filled by a potential future GOP president.
After Trump was elected, the court packing scheme moved into overdrive. Trump invited Leonard Leo, the longtime head of the Federalist Society (and likewise longtime engineer of the right-wing court packing scheme), into the White House to assist his operatives in picking the most reactionary candidates possible to populate key positions in the federal judiciary.
By the time Trump was forced to leave office in the wake of his failed coup attempt, he had installed no fewer than three far-right ideologues on the Supreme Court and added a huge number of similarly extreme right-wing jurists to federal courts across the country. [...] McConnell installed Barrett on the court eight days before Trump lost the 2020 election — in direct contravention of the rationale McConnell had used to prevent Garland from even being considered.
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The Thomases offer the most blatant example of malfeasance on the contemporary Supreme Court. Clarence Thomas long ago gave up on even attempting to comply with the very limited disclosures that justices are legally obligated to provide, even as he and his wife raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of luxury travel, real estate income, and tuition payments from billionaire Harlan Crow. And let’s not forget the streams of income Ginni has taken in from Crow and other right-wing billionaires via various for-profit and supposed “non-profit” enterprises she has created over the years.
Yet the Thomases’ haul is actually dwarfed by that of the Roberts family. The chief justice’s wife made millions of dollars (wholly “legitimately”) by recruiting partners for law firms, some of which have business before the Supreme Court. From 2007 to 2014, Jane Roberts reportedly made about $10 million from this work. Her overall income very likely dwarfs this sum.
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And then there is Justice Neil Gorsuch, who managed to unload a property he owned with two other partners for nearly $2 million after he became the Leonard Leo/Donald Trump consortium’s first appointee to the Supreme Court. The buyer was the managing partner of a law firm that regularly appears before the Supreme Court. [...] Gorsuch — who indicated that be made between $250,001 and $500,000 on the deal — somehow forgot to include the identity of the buyer in his publicly filed disclosure forms.
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Several weeks ago, the court announced that, after a lengthy inquiry, investigators had been “been unable to identify a person responsible [for the leak of the Dobbs draft opinion] by a preponderance of the evidence.” But, in the wake of the report, Justice Alito announced that he has “a pretty good idea who is responsible” for the leak. He went on to assert that the leaker was not a member of the court’s right-wing flank, necessarily implying that it was one of the three Democratic appointees remaining on the court, or someone who worked for them.
Alito thereby managed to taint a broad swath of individuals solely by innuendo, employing a technique that reeked of the red-baiting Joe McCarthy, who notoriously claimed he had lists of communists embedded in the federal government that he did not name.
Public Notice
And, in line with the saying that with Republicans, "every accusation is a confession", many of us believe it's Alito himself who is responsible for that leak.
Alito suggested that his own colleagues might be out to get him murdered. This level of paranoid victimology was new even for a justice whose opinions and speeches often seem to have been written by members of Tucker Carlson’s former Fox News staff.
And may well be.
[T]oday’s Supreme Court majority clearly couldn’t care less about the opinions of most Americans. Given the extreme anger and resentment from both Thomas and Alito over public reaction to the Dobbs decision, it’s more than reasonable to expect that the Trump Court’s supermajority will continue forward with ever greater urgency to continue the reactionary project that Leonard Leo, the Kochs, the Crow family and others installed them to pursue.
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Chief Justice Roberts, putatively the most “moderate” among the court’s six extremists, has long advocated the principle underlying goal of the right-wing court packers: to dismantle the so-called “administrative state.”
The term “administrative state” is something of a code word for virtually the entire regulatory and associated governmental structure. [...] The most ideologically pure right-wing legal scholars would have the court return to its pre-1936 jurisprudence, during which it issued rulings that would make large swaths of the federal government presumptively unconstitutional.
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Simply declaring most of the federal government to be unconstitutional would risk defiance not only by the public, but also by the president, thereby potentially making the court into a virtually powerless branch of the government — as it became during the Civil War, when Lincoln openly defied its efforts to read slavery into the Constitution.
But that does not mean that Roberts and his colleagues are unwilling to go forward with a battle against the administrative state. To the contrary, in cases that (not by happenstance) have received relatively little public attention, the court’s right-wing justices have begun systematically assuming ever broader power to void executive branch actions.
For example, in its 2022 decision in West Virginia v. EPA, the court’s right-wing justices, in an opinion authored by Roberts, adopted a new purported rule of statutory interpretation called the “major questions doctrine.” Under this new judicially created rule, regulatory agencies lack power to issue rules on matters of major economic and political significance without clear and specific authorizing statutory language. [...] In the West Virginia case, the court used its newly invented rule to uphold a challenge to climate-related rules issued by the EPA.
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It is entirely up to the court to decide whether a given regulation concerns a “major question,” and is thereby subject to being judicially nullified.
That, of course, also means that the court’s right-wing majority can uphold regulatory actions it favors on policy grounds, while voiding those that the businesspersons who have long funded the packing of the federal courts oppose.
And, the "money quote"...
Just days ago, the court announced that it will decide another case that could pave the way for the right-wing supermajority, even more audaciously and cavalierly, to supersede the actions of regulatory agencies. The issue in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo is whether the court will dispense with the so-called Chevron doctrine, which stands for the common sense proposition that courts should defer to a reasonable agency interpretation of a statute when the matter at issue is not squarely addressed in the underlying law.
The court’s right-wing has been steadily chipping away at the Chevron rule for some time. But if the principle is entirely discarded next year, it will allow the court to wholly dispense with any pretense of providing deference to agency interpretations of often quite technical statutory provisions. In substance, the court will be appointing itself to be a super-regulatory agency — one that will almost certainly be hospitable to interpretations favored by Harlan Crow and Charles Koch.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
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