Alabama all out of tries to rig the district map

The Supreme Court refused to reinstate Alabama’s Republican-drawn congressional map, enabling a court-appointed official to draw the lines for the 2024 election instead.

The justices in June struck down Alabama’s previous map for likely diluting the power of Black voters, and the current dispute concerned a new version that still did not add a second majority-Black district.

[...]

Rather than using the Republican-drawn lines for the 2024 election cycle, the order paves the way for an independent expert appointed by a panel of federal judges to design the boundaries instead.

That court-appointed expert is set to submit the final map in the coming days.

  The Hill

Let us hear no more of this bullshit. The court already allowed a rigged map for the 2022 elections.

When Alabama brought its redistricting fight to the high court the first time, the justices ruled 5-4 in February 2022 to temporarily revive the state’s map, allowing it to be used for that year’s midterms.

Conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who voted to revive the map, at the time cited a legal doctrine that federal courts should not intervene to alter state election rules in the lead-up to an election.

But in the final decision months later, Kavanaugh went the other way, giving Chief Justice John Roberts and the court’s three liberals a majority to toss Alabama’s map for likely violating the Voting Rights Act.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 10:41 am:

APR has now identified connections between Alabama officials who led the 2023 redistricting process — which disregarded the U.S. Supreme Court’s order — with far-right power broker Leonard Leo’s dark money network, described this past week by Politico as “a billion-dollar force that has helped remake the judiciary and overturn longstanding legal precedents on abortion, affirmative action and many other issues.”

APR’s reporting shows the extent to which Alabama’s calculation to defy the Supreme Court was made not simply by state legislators in Alabama but has been driven by nationally connected political operatives at the center of the well-documented right-wing effort to reshape the composition and jurisprudence of the Supreme Court and to overturn the remaining key protections established by the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

[...]

[F]ormer President Donald Trump famously stated that Leo’s Federalist Society had “picked” his judges, and all six Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices “were seated with major help from Leonard Leo,” who has come to be known as the “hidden architect of the Supreme Court.” With few exceptions, the justices Leo has ushered to the bench have reliably voted to permit the partisan gerrymanders and strict restrictions on voting access that have proliferated in recent years from red-state legislatures, which themselves work in tandem with — and sometimes under the direction of — Leo’s dark money groups.

  Alabama Political Reporter

Do Clarence Thomas next

Washington D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb is investigating judicial activist Leonard Leo and his network of nonprofit groups.

[...]

The scope of the investigation is unclear. But it comes after POLITICO reported in March that one of Leo’s nonprofits — registered as a charity — paid his for-profit company tens of millions of dollars in the two years since he joined the company. A few weeks later, a progressive watchdog group filed a complaint with the D.C. attorney general and the IRS requesting a probe into what services were provided and whether Leo was in violation of laws against using charities for personal enrichment.

[...]

The watchdog complaint alleges the total amount of money that flowed from Leo-aligned nonprofits to his for-profit firms was $73 million over six years beginning in 2016.

[...]

Best known as Donald Trump’s White House “court whisperer,” Leo played a behind-the-scenes role in the nominations of all three of the former president’s Supreme Court justices and promoted them through his multi-billion-dollar network of nonprofits. Trump chose his three Supreme Court picks, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, from a list drawn up by Leo. More recently, Leo was the beneficiary of a $1.6 billion contribution, believed to be the biggest political donation in U.S. history.

He is also the co-chair of the Federalist Society, the academic arm of the conservative legal movement, for which he worked in various capacities for decades while building his donor base.

[...]

The news of the investigation comes as the nonprofit that was a subject of the complaint quietly relocated in recent weeks from the capital area to Texas, according to paperwork filed in Virginia and Texas. For nearly 20 years the nonprofit, now known as The 85 Fund, had been incorporated in Virginia.

[...]

Further complicating the picture: in Texas, a new registration for “The 85 Fund” was filed on June 27 under yet a different address in a different city than the one listed on the Virginia paperwork. It is also registered in Texas as a for-profit entity.

[...]

In discontinuing the group in the state of Virginia, the new address Severino listed is a virtual office suite in Fort Worth, Texas, shared by a “Two Men and a Truck” franchise.

  Politico

A virtual office.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The Federalist Society's court

Launched by Yale and University of Chicago law students in 1982, the Federalist Society was founded to showcase conservative legal scholarship and organize, recruit, educate and mobilize conservative law students. Students and lawyers attended meetings with conservative judges and justices. Connections were made that led to clerkships and judgeships. By 1987, a co-chairman of a Federalist Society convention proclaimed its work would eventually lead to the placement of Republicans in high-ranking positions across all three branches of government. Corporate donations came flowing in. Today, the group boasts a deep network of billionaire donors cultivated by Leo, who is best known for selecting all three of former President Trump’s Supreme Court nominees, as well as more than 200 lower court judges — many of whom are far-right extremists. Leo also made headlines after receiving a highly questionable $1.6 billion donation from a friendly billionaire — perhaps the largest political donation in U.S. history.

For decades Leo and the Federalist Society hosted events allowing Federalist Society judges, corporate executives, corporate lawyers and billionaires to mingle. The Supreme Court’s Republican justices are frequent guests, while reporters and members of the public are barred from attending. Given several Republican justices’ relaxed attitudes about capitalizing off of their connections to the ultra-wealthy, the stench of impropriety from these soireés has become inescapable.

[...]

Even after the court’s Republican justices’ self-interested gutting of U.S. anti-corruption laws, no other government employee could get away with such blatant profiteering. And, based on what has come out, it’s reasonable to assume that these ethical violations are just the tip of the iceberg.

  The Hill

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Above (and around) the law

Many of the lawyers who are not implicated in the indictment—including those in Trump’s own White House and Justice Department—are dyed-in-the-wool conservatives who believe wholeheartedly in the movement’s goals and objectives, yet balked at the proposition of a straight-up coup. Former Attorney General Bill Barr, Vice President Mike Pence, and former White House counsel Don McGahn fall into that category. The lawyers who star prominently in the indictment fall into another camp: those willing to break democracy for Trump and Trumpism. Those are the unnamed but publicly identified co-conspirators: John Eastman, Clark, Sidney Powell, Kenneth Chesebro, Boris Epshteyn (reportedly), and Rudy Giuliani. It’s also the crew of lawyers who signed their names to the flurry of bogus complaints attempting to overturn the election by nullifying millions of votes and legitimizing fake electors—people like Harry MacDougald, Emily P. Newman, Julia Z. Haller, Lin Wood, and Howard Kleinhendler.

Pay attention, because that will be the cohort that determines the future of American democracy. We need to name that camp and understand it, because the right flank of the legal profession has adamantly refused to police itself, and the legal profession as a whole has hardly raced to hold its most destructive and dangerous members to account. Leading players in the Jan. 6 indictment, including Eastman and Clark, were once luminaries of the Federalist Society, a network of conservative lawyers who hoist one another into positions of power. Yet the Federalist Society has consistently refused to denounce their complicity, or revoke their membership, or even condemn the coup itself. Instead, the conservative legal movement has welcomed these men—who have expressed no remorse for their actions—back into the fold. Lawyers on the right appear uninterested in exploring how colleagues who were once deemed most likely to succeed have overnight become most likely to be indicted.

[...]

Anyone who was shocked by the details of Smith’s latest indictment might also be surprised to learn just how much worse it could have been—because rogue lawyers, including movement judges, just barely lost a series of pivotal battles. The Wisconsin Supreme Court, for example, came one vote away from nullifying thousands of ballots, thus overturning Joe Biden’s victory in the state and setting the stage for the Legislature to assign fake electors to Trump. It failed only because a single member of the conservative majority, Justice Brian Hagedorn, refused to go along with his hard-right Trumpist colleagues. We are lucky that Hagedorn was principled enough to reject this plot under immense pressure and criticism from his own party. But the fate of free and fair elections should not rely on sheer luck. (Wisconsin voters this spring elevated the liberal Justice Janet Protasiewicz to their state Supreme Court, sending a signal that they generally prefer jurists who do not facilitate coups; Protasiewicz was sworn in on Tuesday, shortly before the indictment was unsealed.)

[...]

[C]onsider moves taking place right now, from efforts to unseat democratically elected officials in Tennessee, to ending majority rule for ballot initiatives in Ohio, to Alabama’s refusal to enact racially representative maps as required by the Supreme Court. The line between antidemocratic lawyers and movement lawyers as demarcated in the Trump indictment grows blurrier by the day as lawyers who claim to be Republicans work to undermine the popular vote.

  Slate

Nobody likes him

It won't happen, but it's a good idea.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

They're not into details in MAGAland

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The conspiracy theory about the complaint form discussed

From Donald Trump on down, prominent Republicans used part of their weekend to falsely accuse Trump’s hand-picked intelligence community inspector general (IC IG) of secretly changing the requirements for intelligence workers to submit whistleblower tips as part of a “deep state” plot to clear the way for the Aug. 12 complaint about Trump’s phone call to the president of Ukraine.

The smoking gun in the putative conspiracy is an obscure government form, IC IG ICWSP Form 401, also known as the Disclosure of Urgent Concern Form.

[...]

According to the GOP and an army of conservative commentators, the old version of the form prohibited workers from submitting urgent complaints based on secondhand information. [...] That changed in early August, the false claim goes, when ICIG Michael Atkinson snuck through a hasty revision to the complaint form that reversed longstanding policy.

[...]

“It seems like they are jumping to a lot of conclusions based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the law, the regulatory framework, and the language on one form,” said Julian Sanchez, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute.

The kernel of fact near the center of the conspiracy theory is that there is, indeed, a new version of Form 401 dated August 2019.

A question on the form explicitly anticipates tips based on secondhand information, and asks the whistleblower to check a box: “I have direct and personal knowledge,” or, “I heard about it from others.” The Federalist used a screenshot of that field to illustrate its story.

What the article didn’t mention or screenshot is a nearly identical field gracing Form 401 since at least May 2018, making it impossible that it was added as an easement for Trump’s whistleblower. The major difference in the fields is that the old form includes three options instead of two, subdividing secondhand sources into outside source and “other employees.”

[...]

The requirement for firsthand whistleblowing only is completely made up.

[...]

The Federalist and supporters of the Atkinson smear also point to a two-page information sheet distributed as part of the May 2018 version of the form but not the August 2019 version. It’s unclear when it was dropped, but a paragraph in that now-excised preamble was headed, “First-Hand Information Required,” seemingly contradicting the form itself. “In order to find an ‘urgent’ concern credible, the IC IG must be in possession of reliable, first-hand information,” the text read in part. “The IC IG cannot transmit information via the ICWPA based on an employee’s second-hand knowledge of wrongdoing.”

Though the text is confusingly drafted—which may be why the entire preamble was canned—a careful reading shows it’s not erecting a new hurdle for filing a whistleblower complaint, but rather describing the type of evidence the IC IG has to gather to judge the complaint “credible” at the end of its 14-day investigation.

“It’s an explanation of the IG’s standard for assessing credibility,” said Sanchez in an interview with The Daily Beast. “The IG isn’t going to forward it to the DNI if it can’t corroborate secondhand or indirect information. The whistleblower’s job is not to investigate. That is the job of the IG.”

[...]

“Complainant was not a direct witness to President’s telephone call with the Ukrainian President on July 25, 2019,” the IC IG wrote on Aug. 26. “Other information obtained during the preliminary review, however, supports the Complainant’s allegation."

[...]

In other words, Trump’s whistleblower didn’t go through some shady “deep state” backdoor. He or she followed the process, and government investigators found the firsthand evidence themselves.

On September 27, The Federalist's Sean Davis falsely claimed that until recently, intelligence community whistleblowers were required to have “first-hand knowledge” of wrongdoing in order to have a complaint investigated. This claim, which has since been debunked as untrue, is based on an obscure government form that conservatives are claiming was recently changed when Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson reversed policy to allow secondhand information as the basis of a complaint. In fact, the statute that governs the process for intelligence community members to file whistleblower complaints has never included a firsthand knowledge requirement.

[...]

The debunked  claim has been pushed on Fox News at least five times since September 27.

  Media Matters

And, look who's pushing it:



Nice response to Trump's tweet:

The conspiracy theory was promoted by the president, Republican members of Congress, and a slew of right-wing media personalities. On Monday, Fox News continued to push the claim as a primary talking point.

On the September 27 edition of Hannity, Trump attorney Jay Sekulow claimed that “the form that so-called whistleblowers fill out” used to require firsthand information and “that was on the form literally until apparently very recently.”

Of course, it's Hannity and the Fox & Friends people who are pushing this angle heavily. And those are the Fox shows Trumpalos tune in to.

In his [Federalist] article, Davis wrote that “between May 2018 and August 2019, the intelligence community secretly eliminated a requirement that whistleblowers provide direct, first-hand knowledge of alleged wrongdoings” and that said action “raises questions about the intelligence community’s behavior” surrounding the complaint. Davis attempted to support his claim by citing forms available to the intelligence community to assist potential whistleblowers in filing complaints.

According to Davis, a form available in May contains language suggesting complainants must have firsthand knowledge of wrongdoing to file an “urgent concern” complaint -- the type of complaint filed by the Ukraine whistleblower -- but that the form was revised at some point to remove that language. (But according to a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, the likely explanation for the change was that the information in the previous form was inaccurate on the issue of firsthand knowledge and was therefore updated.)

To be clear, Davis’ claim that there was a firsthand knowledge requirement for filing a complaint is false. It simply does not exist in the statute that lays out the requirements of a successful “urgent concern” report. The controlling statute is 50 U.S. Code § 3033(k)(5)(G).

[...]

It is also important to keep in mind that despite numerous attempts by right-wing media to discredit the complaint because it is “hearsay,” that argument has been largely rendered moot as the central allegation of complaint -- that Trump asked Ukraine to investigate Biden -- has been corroborated. The fact that the “transcript” of the call released by the White House lines up with the central allegation of the complaint makes it immaterial how exactly the whistleblower learned of Trump’s actions, because the whistleblower accurately described them. The credibility of the complaint, which also alleged that the Trump administration moved the Ukraine call transcript into a highly classified computer system, is also bolstered by the White House’s acknowledgement that it did take that action.

  Media Matters

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:  He's still at it.

Undeterred - or spurred on - Mr. Kellyanne is marching forward with Trump criticism

The annual convention of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group, has long been a glittering and bustling affair. In the Trump era, though, the group has become more powerful than ever, supplying intellectual energy and judicial candidates to an assertive administration eager to reshape the legal landscape.

But as the group prepares to gather on Thursday for the start of this year’s convention, more than a dozen prominent conservative lawyers have joined together to sound a note of caution.

[...]

The group, called Checks and Balances, was organized by George T. Conway III, a conservative lawyer and the husband of President Trump’s counselor, Kellyanne Conway.

[...]

The new group also includes Tom Ridge, a former governor of Pennsylvania and secretary of homeland security in the Bush administration; Peter D. Keisler, a former acting attorney general in the Bush administration; two prominent conservative law professors, Jonathan H. Adler and Orin S. Kerr; and Lori S. Meyer, a lawyer who is married to Eugene B. Meyer, the president of the Federalist Society.

[...]

Mr. Conway, who has long been a member of and contributor to the Federalist Society, said he had nothing but admiration for its work. But he added that some conservative lawyers, pleased with Mr. Trump’s record on judicial nominations and deregulation, have been wary of criticizing him in other areas, as when he attacks the Justice Department and the news media.

“There’s a perception out there that conservative lawyers have essentially sold their souls for judges and regulatory reform,” Mr. Conway said. “We just want to be a voice speaking out, and to encourage others to speak out.”

The new group’s members say their goal is not to criticize the Federalist Society but to encourage debate about some of the Trump administration’s policies and actions.

[...]

But the timing of the announcement of the group’s formation, just before the Federalist Society convention, was not a coincidence, Professor Adler added. “This convention has become the most important meeting place for conservative and libertarian lawyers with an interest in politics,” he said. “You go fishing where the fish are.”

Mr. Keisler said it was urgent to have an open debate about the administration’s actions.

“It’s important that people from across the political spectrum speak out about the country’s commitment to the rule of law and the core values underlying it — that the criminal justice system should be nonpartisan and independent, that a free press and public criticism should be encouraged and not attacked,” he said.

  NYT

Surely he means "across the conservative political spectrum." There are no liberals at the Federalist Society.

Conservative critics of the Trump administration have been reluctant to speak out, Professor Kerr said, adding that the new group hopes to change that. “There are a lot of people who are concerned who are keeping quiet,” he said.

That silence may be rooted in careerism and fear of retaliation, Professor Adler said.

[...]

“There is a belief that there is an element of vindictiveness in the administration that casts a shadow.”

No shit. They can see that everyone who criticizes Trump and comes to his attention gets a public smearing from him.

How do Kellyanne and George stay married? Or maybe the question is, why?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

More Kavanaugh documents find their way to the light

Emails obtained by the Guardian show that Kavanaugh, who was narrowly confirmed to the supreme court earlier this month, participated in monthly evening cocktails and dinners from 2001 to 2003 with a group of men that included Noel Francisco, who now serves as the Trump administration’s solicitor general. It is not clear whether the dinners continued after Kavanaugh became a federal judge in 2006.

Other attendees included a lawyer who is now a top strategic adviser to Rupert Murdoch; the author of the George W Bush-era “torture memos” that were used to justify illegal interrogation techniques; and two lawyers who now frequently appear before the supreme court on behalf of corporate clients.

The so-called “Eureka” dinners – named after the college that Ronald Reagan attended – were briefly raised in a written question that was submitted to Kavanaugh by senators following his initial confirmation hearing. Asked what the Eureka Club was, Kavanaugh said in a written response: “A group of friends sometimes gathered for dinner. The scheduling emails for those dinners would sometimes be titled ‘Eureka’.”

What Kavanaugh’s answer did not fully explain was that the dinners were attended by an elite group of men closely associated with the Federalist Society, the rightwing organization that has played a major role in vetting and choosing judicial appointments for Republican presidents since its founding in 1982.

[...]

Richard Painter, a critic of Donald Trump who served as the Bush administration’s ethics lawyer from 2005-2007, said senators should have sought more information about the Eureka dinners before Kavanaugh’s confirmation, especially if he continued to attend the regular dinners as a judge on the DC circuit court of appeals.

  Guardian

Do we know that they didn't? They were denied thousands and thousands of documents by Grassley.

The Eureka emails seen by the Guardian cover a limited period while Kavanaugh worked for the White House under George W Bush.

They show that the dinner companions who Kavanaugh described as “friends” include Viet Dinh, who now serves as a senior legal adviser to Rupert Murdoch and is a godfather to Lachlan Murdoch’s child; John Yoo, who wrote the so-called “torture memos”; and Robert Coughlin, the former deputy chief of staff at the Department of Justice who pleaded guilty to a conflict of interest crime related to the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal. Coughlin was disbarred but reinstated as a lawyer in 2016.

Paul Clement, a lawyer at the firm of Kirkland & Ellis who frequently appears before the supreme court, also attended.

Don't look for Kavanaugh to recuse himself from anything that comes before the court.

The dinners were often arranged by Adam Ciongoli, who served as an adviser to then-attorney general John Ashcroft and now works as general counsel of Campbell Soup. Ciongoli is also a member of the Federalist Society.

[...]

Emails show that the events sometimes included unspecified “special guests”. Several attendees who were approached by the Guardian declined to comment. They did not dispute that judges were among the special guests who were invited. Eugene Scalia, the conservative lawyer and son of the late Antonin Scalia, the supreme court justice who is considered the ideological father of the Federalist Society, was also included on the Eureka emails. Scalia is a lawyer at Gibson Dunn in Washington whose specialty is labor law.

[...]

Alex Azar, who now serves as the secretary of health and human services, also attended the dinners. Azar has oversight of the Trump administration’s claimed effort to reunite parents with children who were separated from them under the White House’s “zero-tolerance” immigration policies. Azar also has oversight of the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, the healthcare law known as Obamacare. Both issues could come before the court.

[...]

Another attendee, according to emails, was Gregory Garre, who served as an assistant to the solicitor general during Bush’s first term and is now a partner at Latham & Watkins. Garre has argued 43 cases before the supreme court. In 2010, Kavanaugh ruled in favour of Garre’s client, an e-cigarrette maker called Sottera, in a case Garre argued before the DC court of appeals.

Speaking of Campbell's Soup...

The Campbell Soup Co. is distancing itself from incendiary comments made by one of its executives, former Senate secretary Kelly Johnston, on Twitter Tuesday about the large group of migrants making its way toward the Mexican border.

In the tweet, Johnston suggested that George Soros’s Open Society Foundations had orchestrated the migration of thousands of people and was even controlling “where they defecate.” Johnston accused the group of having “an army of American immigration lawyers waiting at the border.”

The tweet and Johnston’s account have since been deleted.

[...]

Although it was deleted, images of Johnston’s comments circulated on Twitter, prompting outrage. Many called for his firing and threatened to boycott Campbell’s products.

[...]

In an email to The Post, Campbell’s said it does not support the views Johnston expressed in the tweet. “The opinions Mr. Johnston expresses on Twitter are his individual views and do not represent the position of Campbell Soup Company,” the company said.

[...]

Johnston, who served as secretary of the Senate under then-Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole (R), has been with Campbell’s since 2002. He oversees the soupmaker’s trade associations and lobbies the U.S. government on trade and agricultural dealings. Johnston also held several administrative positions with the Republican Party and also was a communications executive for the National Food Processors Association, according to his Bloomberg biography.

[...]

Other images of deleted tweets showed that Johnston’s comments were not the first he had made about the migrant caravan or Soros. In one tweet earlier this month, Johnston seemed to mock the idea of a hurricane endangering the lives of migrants.

  WaPo

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.