Uh-oh

 

A conservative advocacy organization funded in part by billionaire Republican mega-donor Charles Koch is representing a Florida company that is suing President Donald Trump for imposing tariffs on all imports from China, describing Trump's move as an unlawful power grab.

"A tariff is a tax on Americans’ commerce with other countries," the New Civil Liberties Alliance wrote in its legal complaint, filed on behalf of Simplified, a Florida-based business that sells organizational tools such as paper-made planners. "The Constitution assigns Congress exclusive power to impose tariffs and regulate foreign commerce."

The New Civil Liberties Alliance, which is affiliated with prominent right-wing legal activist Leonard Leo's network, describes its mission as combatting "unlawful administrative power."

  MSN

Leo didn't think the leopards would eat HIS face.

It's Sunday

In an excerpt from his new book OPUS: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy inside the Catholic Church, author Gareth Gore examines the ties binding Supreme Court kingmaker Leonard Leo and Opus Dei, a radical organization on the fringes of the Catholic Church that is accused of serious abuses and dedicated to the complete “re-Christianization” of the world.

[...]

Leo clerked for a judge on the court of appeals and became close with another appellate judge who had recently been appointed to the D.C. circuit — a man from Georgia called Clarence Thomas, who had toyed with becoming a Catholic priest. [...] Leo was asked by the Federalist Society to become its first employee — although he delayed his start date so that he could help his good friend Thomas through his contentious confirmation process for the Supreme Court. Despite accusations of sexual harassment hanging over him, Thomas won Senate confirmation by a slim margin. It would be the first in a series of fights in which Leo would have to put aside the teachings of his Christian faith as he focused on the greater goal of pushing through a conservative revolution of the courts and of society at large.

  Rolling Stone

Putting aside teachings of their faith never seems to be a problem.

In 2005, the Federalist Society began openly advocating for John Roberts — a former member — to be nominated to fill a vacant seat at the Supreme Court, the first time it had campaigned publicly for a particular candidate. A few months later, its sway had grown so much that it torpedoed President George W. Bush’s own preferred candidate for another vacant seat on the Supreme Court — Harriet Miers, a judge and close friend of the president who wasn’t a member of the Federalist Society — and pressured him to nominate Samuel Alito, one of its members, in her place.

[...]

In 2011, Leo teamed up with Clarence Thomas’s wife Ginni to co-found another nonprofit that successfully opposed an Islamic center being built near the site of the 9 ⁄11 attacks in New York, denigrated as the “Ground Zero Mosque.” A year later, he joined the board of the Catholic Association, another non-profit linked to the Corkerys, that funded campaigns to oppose same-sex marriage. For its part, the Catholic Information Center — despite in theory being apolitical — had also joined a suit against the Obama administration, challenging the requirement that employers provide and pay for contraception, sterilization, and abortion-causing drugs as part of employee health insurance plans.

[...]

The makeup of the [Catholic Information Center (CIC)] board was decidedly unpolitical — a mix of academics, lawyers, and volunteers who helped run the bookshop. Pat Cipollone, a lawyer who had been an assistant to Attorney General Bill Barr in the early nineties but who had since returned to the private sector, was the only board member who was remotely connected to the Washington political scene. But in 2014, all that changed. Alongside Leo, Bill Barr, the former attorney general, was also appointed.

Leo and his ilk would soon become a bridge connecting the prelature with important people on Capitol Hill — and the world of dark money populated by secretive billionaires with a deeply conservative agenda. Together, they would form a coalition — unified by their political connections, religious fervor, and money — that would reshape American society and destroy many hard-won civil rights.

[...]

The recruitment of Leonard Leo would cement ties between Opus Dei and the U.S. Supreme Court that had been developing for decades. [...] But with Leo and his network of dark money, Opus Dei’s penetration of Washington’s political and judicial worlds would now reach unprecedented levels.

[...]

As Leo’s access to the world of dark money grew, his Opus Dei friends the Corkerys became critical as a front for the tens of millions of dollars streaming through Leo’s hidden network of nonprofits. Neil and Ann had provided crucial cover for him during the campaign to secure the confirmations of John Roberts and Samuel Alito in 2005, hiding the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent to influence public opinion. As more dark money poured in starting in 2010, they began to do the same again through various nonprofits such as the Wellspring Committee and the Judicial Crisis Network. Their importance only grew following Scalia’s death, as Leo pumped his network for ever larger sums. In the weeks after Scalia’s death, the Corkerys began opening the purse strings in what would eventually become a $17 million campaign to stop Obama from replacing Scalia and instead ensure a reliable conservative filled the vacancy. It was just the start. Over the next five years, Leo and the Corkerys would oversee the transfer of almost $600 million of dark money to right-wing causes. Their hidden ecosystem would eventually enable a conservative takeover of the Supreme Court that would disassemble hard-won civil rights and turn back the clock on issues close to their hearts — on abortion, on affirmative action, and on vast swathes of what they saw as a progressive agenda.

They also used the network to line their own pockets.

Continue reading.

It's Sunday

We don't talk about Leo.

If you don't know much about Leonard Leo, you can start here, with this thread.

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

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

Corrupt Thomases again in the news

And I keep thinking that even if the Democrats retake the House and keep the Senate, they STILL won't investigate.  The party is scared of its own shadow.

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

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.

Corruption at SCOTUS

And they both saw Scalia skate.

Late Tuesday, ProPublica, the same nonprofit news organization that broke the story about Justice Clarence Thomas accepting stuff he shouldn’t have from a billionaire he became friends with only after he became a Supreme Court justice, put the spotlight on Justice Samuel Alito. If you were shocked by the Thomas story, you’ll be outraged by the report on Alito.

[...]

Sam Alito, like the other associate justices on the Supreme Court, makes $285,400 a year. That would be a gracious plenty for most people to live and vacation on. But Justice Alito took a little assist [from GOP megadonor Paul Singer to] a luxury fishing lodge in Alaska that cost about $1,000 per day. Singer, a hedge fund billionaire, has had cases in front of the Supreme Court and been involved in filing amicus briefs in the years since 2008, when this photo was taken.

[...]

Singer gave Alito a lift to Alaska on a private jet that, ProPublica reports, could have cost more than $100,000 each way if Alito had paid for the charter himself. But he didn’t. Instead, he accepted the favor and later participated in deciding the cases. Alito and Singer do not appear to have known each other before the trip.

[...]

wJustice Alito has never recused.

  Joyce Vance

And, in fact, I believe Alito said Singer was never a named party to anything before the court.

Alito didn’t report the trip as a gift on his annual financial disclosures, one of the only ethics requirements imposed on Supreme Court justices, who are largely left to decide what’s ethical and what isn’t on their own, with no accountability.

[...]

[Singer] has chaired the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, since 2008 and has given millions of dollars to support its work. Here’s where it gets interesting: The institute files amicus briefs with the Court regularly, including 15 this term, on issues that matter to its conservative agenda.

[...]

Justice Alito also accepted a complimentary stay at the lodge from its owner, Robin Arkley II. Arkley is a wealthy businessman in his own right, the owner of a mortgage company. Multiple sources confirmed to ProPublica that Alito was Arkley’s guest at the lodge, and that he didn’t pay for anything during his stay.

Leonard Leo, the founder of the conservative Federalist Society, organized the trip and arranged for Alito’s flight on Singer’s plane. There was a web of interconnection among the men: Leo had recently played a role in Alito’s confirmation, by a 58–42 vote, in January 2006; both Singer and Arkley were contributors to Leo’s political groups.

Leonard Leo seems to be in all of these stories about the court.

In a statement, Leonard Leo declined to comment on the trip but said he “would never presume to tell” Alito and Justice Antonin Scalia, whose trips he’d also been involved in, “what to do.” And isn’t that the whole point? He didn’t have to.

[...]

Alito’s claims [...] include:

He was unaware of Singer’s connection to cases where his companies came before the court.

He recalled speaking to Singer on “no more than a handful of occasions.” Also, he says they never discussed Singer’s business or issues before the court.

He also suggests the trip was okay because the seat on the flight “would have otherwise been vacant.”

[...]

My friend and colleague Barb McQuade put it best: “Pro tip: If you’re a Supreme Court justice, don’t take free trips, even when the seat on the billionaire’s private plane would ‘otherwise go unoccupied.’ Normal people don’t get free fishing trips to Alaska. It is not your winning personality that makes you different.”

[...]

Alito’s defense comes down to hard-to-believe disclaimers about the relationship (pretty sure you’d remember someone who took you on this splendid trip and know where they worked), and also the insinuation that he never ruled in favor of the friend who provided him with “personal hospitality”—the dodge justices use when they don’t want to report trips. And that begs the real question: Why not just include the gifts in your financial disclosures? If there’s nothing wrong with taking the trip, there should be nothing wrong with disclosing who paid for it.

[...]

Alito also deemed his failure to report acceptable because the justices “commonly interpreted” the disclosure rules in a way that meant they didn’t have to include payment for “accommodations and transportation for social events.” I guess that means all of the Biden-appointed judges are free to fly to Rome for a fancy trip on someone else’s nickel. Oh wait, no. That was Alito, too, last summer. Not sure whether he reported that one, but it was to give a keynote address to a group put together by Yale Law School at an event on religious liberty, so at least it wasn’t personal pleasure travel. As Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Stern noted at the time, “For starters, there is the breathtaking conflict of interest at work when a justice gives faith-based speeches at faith-based events sponsored by faith-based parties who file briefs before the court.” No word on why the conference had to be held in Rome.

[...]

The justices are so removed that they are unaware, or perhaps simply don’t care, that it damages not only their individual reputations but the reputation of the court and public confidence in the rule of law. It is a sick irony that the people who tell others how to resolve their most difficult disputes fail to see how serious their own issues have become. They have done nothing to rectify past errors, take responsibility for them, and move forward on a better path.

[...]

ProPublica says Scalia did not report the one pictured above, which was to Alaska. “Scalia’s travels briefly drew scrutiny in 2016 after he died while staying at the hunting ranch of a Texas businessman. Scalia had a pattern of disclosing trips to deliver lectures while not mentioning hunting excursions he took to nearby locales hosted by local attorneys and businessmen, according to a research paper published after his death.” There seems to be a pattern here.

Well, this story doesn't make me any more outraged than the stories about Thomas, but it's a good match.

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

Digging in SCOTUS dirt

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito late Tuesday defended himself against a new ProPublica report that raised questions about his ethical conduct and financial disclosures, arguing it is misleading.

“ProPublica has leveled two charges against me: first, that I should have recused in matters in which an entity connected with Paul Singer was a party and, second, that I was obligated to list certain items as gifts on my 2008 Financial Disclose Report. Neither charge is valid,” Alito wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed before the report was published.

[...]

Alito said in the op-ed that he had “no obligation to recuse” in the cases cited by ProPublica, adding that he’s spoken to Singer “on no more than a handful of occasions, all of which (with the exception of small talk during a fishing trip 15 years ago) consisted of brief and casual comments at events attended by large groups. ”

[...]

“Because his name did not appear in these filings, I was unaware of his connection with any of the listed entities, and I had no good reason to be aware of that,” Alito added.

  The Hill

Sure.

Times have changed when Supreme Court justices are defending themselves in op-eds.

ProPublica reported that Alito was flown to Alaska on a private jet to take a pricey fishing trip in 2008 with hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer and that he did not report the trip on his financial disclosures.

[...]

In the years following, a subsidiary of Singer’s hedge fund, NML Capital, came before the Supreme Court several times, court documents show.

[...]

The trip was organized by Leonard Leo, a conservative judicial activist who helped move the Supreme Court to the right in recent years.

[...]

The federal judiciary’s policy-making arm clarified the exception earlier this year to make explicit that it does not apply to stays at commercial properties or transportation.

Alito pushed back on some experts’ notion, cited by ProPublica, that private flights should have been disclosed even before the new guidance. Alito wrote that “justices commonly interpreted” a line on “hospitality” to mean “that accommodations and transportation for social events were not reportable gifts.”

Alito and Thomas seem to have been advising each other on reporting requirements.  Or maybe taking their advice from Antonin Scalia.

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

UPDATE 10:02 am:

Also, as it turns out, Alito pre-empted the story, which came out after his op-ed.

Good God, do the Thomases do anything above the board?

And Kellyanne Conway is right in the middle of this stinking pile.

Conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo arranged for the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to be paid tens of thousands of dollars for consulting work just over a decade ago, specifying that her name be left off billing paperwork.

[...]

In January 2012, Leo instructed the GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway to bill a nonprofit group he advises and use that money to pay Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the documents show. The same year, the nonprofit, the Judicial Education Project, filed a brief to the Supreme Court in a landmark voting rights case.

  WaPo

JFC.

Leo, a key figure in a network of nonprofits that has worked to support the nominations of conservative judges, told Conway that he wanted her to “give” Ginni Thomas “another $25K,” the documents show. He emphasized that the paperwork should have “No mention of Ginni, of course.”

Of course.

The arrangement reveals that Leo, a longtime Federalist Society leader and friend of the Thomases, has functioned not only as an ideological ally of Clarence Thomas’s but also has worked to provide financial remuneration to his family. And it shows Leo arranging for the money to be drawn from a nonprofit that soon would have an interest before the court.

Impeach Clarence Thomas. How much corruption do you need to make the case?

Of the effort to keep Thomas’s name off paperwork, Leo said: “Knowing how disrespectful, malicious and gossipy people can be, I have always tried to protect the privacy of Justice Thomas and Ginni.”

[...]

[A]lthough justices must report the name of companies that pay their spouses, they are not required to report the names of the companies’ clients. In this case, even if there were such a requirement, it is not clear that the Judicial Education Project would have been listed as a client, because the fees intended for Ginni Thomas were to go through Conway.

With instructions not to name Ginni. Nothing suspicious there?

“The idea that Leonard Leo, who has a passionate ideological interest in how the court rules and who has worked hard for years to advance that interest, could pick up the phone and generate substantial compensation to Virginia Thomas, which also benefits Clarence Thomas — that idea is bad for the country, the court and the rule of law,” Gillers said. “It’s not the way the Supreme Court should do its business or allow its business to be done.”

No it is not.

As the Judicial Education Project pushed for a conservative court, the group grew into a financial juggernaut and was rebranded as the 85 Fund. Between 2020 and 2021, its revenue nearly doubled from about $66 million to more than $117 million, tax forms show.

Even so, the group has never had more than a handful of employees, tax filings show. It has listed its main office address as a UPS Store situated amid rowhouses and retail stores in the Georgetown neighborhood of D.C.

Could you get any more suspicious than using a UPS Store as your main office address? And money is going through that company to Ginni Thomas without naming her. I smell Tide.

But wait!  That's not all we learned about the Thomases today.

In 2008, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas decided to send his teenage grandnephew to Hidden Lake Academy, a private boarding school in the foothills of northern Georgia. The boy, Mark Martin, was far from home. For the previous decade, he had lived with the justice and his wife in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Thomas had taken legal custody of Martin when he was 6 years old and had recently told an interviewer he was “raising him as a son.”

Tuition at the boarding school ran more than $6,000 a month. But Thomas did not cover the bill. A bank statement for the school from July 2009, buried in unrelated court filings, shows the source of Martin’s tuition payment for that month: the company of billionaire real estate magnate Harlan Crow.

[...]

Crow paid Martin’s tuition the entire time he was a student there, which was about a year.

[...]

Before and after his time at Hidden Lake, Martin attended a second boarding school, Randolph-Macon Academy in Virginia. “Harlan said he was paying for the tuition at Randolph-Macon Academy as well.”

[...]

Thomas did not report the tuition payments from Crow on his annual financial disclosures. Several years earlier, Thomas disclosed a gift of $5,000 for Martin’s education from another friend. It is not clear why he reported that payment but not Crow’s.

  ProPublica

He managed to avoid reporting anything about the millions of dollars worth of gifts he got from Crow.

“This is way outside the norm. This is way in excess of anything I’ve seen,” said Richard Painter, former chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, referring to the cascade of gifts over the years.

[...]

Martin, now in his 30s, told ProPublica he was not aware that Crow paid his tuition. But he defended Thomas and Crow, saying he believed there was no ulterior motive behind the real estate magnate’s largesse over the decades. “I think his intentions behind everything is just a friend and just a good person,” Martin said.

Oh, you sweet summer child.

Painter said that when he was at the White House, an official who’d taken what Thomas had would have been fired: “This amount of undisclosed gifts? You’d want to get them out of the government.”

Yes! Impeach the bastard.

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

UPDATE 09:57 pm:

UPDATE 05/05/2023: