Republican's Covertly spend $250 million to Control the Nation's Courts
to reverse Roe, to reverse Obamacare, and to reverse Obergefell

How the Rich make Laws by paying for Court Decisions

The president's Supreme Court nominee is to terminate healthcare under Obamacare.

That is the president’s statement, so when we react to that, don’t act as if we are making this stuff up. This is what President Trump said.
This is what the Republican platform says: reverse Obamacare.
Senator after senator, including many in this committee, filed briefs saying that the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) should be thrown out by courts.

The National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB) v. Sebelius, has a lot of money behind it.
The National Federation of Independent Businesses, until it filed the NFIB v. Sebelius case, had its biggest donation ever of $21,000.
In the year that it went to work on the Affordable Care Act, ten wealthy donors gave $10 million.

Roe v. Wade. Same thing. The president has said that reversing Roe v. Wade will happen automatically because he is putting pro-life justices on the Court. Why would we not take him at his word? The Republican Party platform says it will reverse Roe.

Senators here, including Senator Hawley, have said I will vote only for nominees who acknowledge that Roe v. Wade is wrongly decided, and their pledge to vote for this nominee.

The Republican brief in June Medical said Roe should be overruled.

Judge Barrett, the Susan B Anthony Foundation is running advertisements right now saying that you are set to give our pro-life country a Court that it deserves.

National Organization for Marriage, the big group that opposes same-sex marriage, and the Republican platform says it wants to reverse Obergefell.
And the Republican brief filed in the case said same-sex relationships don’t fall within any constitutional protection.

In all cases, there’s big anonymous money behind various lanes of activity.

One lane of activity is through the conduit of the Federalist Society. It is was managed by Leonard Leo, and it has taken over the selection of judicial nominees.
How do we know that? Because Trump has said so over and over again. His White House counsel said so.
So we have an anonymously funded group controlling judicial selection run by this guy Leonard Leo.

Then in another lane, we have again anonymous funders running through something called the Judicial Crisis Network, which is run by Carrie Severino, and it is doing PR and campaign ads for Republican judicial nominees.
It got a $17 million donation in the Garland-Gorsuch contest.
It got another single $17 million donation to support Kavanaugh.
Somebody, perhaps the same person, spent $35 million to influence the United States Supreme Court.

And then over here you have a whole array of legal groups, also funded by dark money, which have a different role.
They bring cases to the Court. They don’t wind their way to the Court, they get shoved to the Court by these legal groups, many of which ask to lose in Lower Courts so they can get quickly to the Well Stocked Supreme Court !

In the Consumer Financial Protection Board case there were 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 amicus briefs filed, and every single one of them was a group funded by something called DonorsTrust.

DonorsTrust is a gigantic device for the Republican Rich. It’s just a way of anonymizing donors.

And the Bradley Foundation, funded eight out of the 11 briefs.

Center for Media and Democracy say which foundations funded the brief writers in that Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) case:-

The Bradley Foundation gave $5.6 million to those groups.

DonorsTrust, gave $23 million to those brief writing groups.

The grand total was $69 million to the groups that were filing amicus briefs, pretending that they were different groups.

Sixteen right-wing foundations gave $69 million since 2014 to get the
Supreme Court to abolish the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

Donor	Amount
Adolph Coors Foundation	$1,155,000
Bradley Impact Fund	$1,363,000
Charles Koch Foundation	$12,986,462
Charles Koch Institute	$517,134
Donors Capital Fund	$2,522,680
DonorsTrust	$23,460,705
Dunn Foundation	$4,450,000
Ed Uihlein Family Foundation	$408,000
F.M. Kirby Foundation	$672,500
John William Pope Foundation	$1,895,175
Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation	$5,579,500
Mercer Family Foundation	$1,200,000
Pierre F. and Enid Goodrich Foundation	$395,000
Sarah Scaife Foundation	$7,550,000
Searle Freedom Trust	$4,550,000
William H. Donner Foundation	$167,000
TOTAL	$68,872,156

80 cases under Chief Justice Roberts that were decided 5 to 4 ! Republican donors funded those cases!
It was an 80 to zero, 5 to 4 Republican Rout, - a Ransacking.

Those cases are about controlling Government and the Law. (The EXECUTIVE BRANCH is already controlled by the rich)

And if you look at those 80 decisions, they fall into four categories over and over again.

Unlimited Dark Money in Politics. Citizens United is the famous one, but it’s continued since with McCutcheon and we’ve got one coming up now.
Always the five for unlimited money in politics. Never protecting against money dark money in politics, despite the fact that they said it was going to be transparent.

And who wins when you allow unlimited dark money in politics? A very small group who have unlimited money to spend and a motive to spend it. They win. Everybody else loses.
Knock the Civil Jury down. Whittle it down to a nub. The civil jury was in the Constitution, in the Bill of Rights, in our darn Declaration of Independence, but it’s annoying to big corporate powers because you can swagger your way as a big corporate power through Congress.
You can go and tell the president (who you paid to be elected) what to do. He will put your stooges into the EPA.
It’s all great until you get to the civil jury, because they have an obligation, under the law to be fair to both parties irrespective of their size.

You can’t bribe them. You’re not allowed to. It’s a crime to tamper with the jury.
It’s standard practice to tamper with Congress. You don’t want to be answerable before a jury.

And so one after another, these 80 5-to-4 decisions have knocked down, whittled away at, the civil jury, a great American institution.
Weaken Regulatory Agencies.
A lot of this money is polluter money. The Koch Industries is a polluter, the fossil fuel industry is a polluter. Who else would be putting buckets of money into this and wanting to hide who they are behind DonorsTrust or other schemes?

Polluters want weak regulatory agencies. You want ones that you can box up and run over to Congress and get your friends to fix things for you in Congress.
Over and over and over again, these decisions are targeted at regulatory agencies to weaken their independence and weaken their strength.
Voting. Why on earth the Court made the decision, a factual decision – not something appellate courts are ordinarily supposed to make, -- that nobody needed to worry about minority voters being discriminated against, or that legislators would try to knock back their ability to vote.
These five made that finding in Shelby County against bipartisan legislation from both houses of Congress, hugely passed, on no factual record.

What followed? State after state passed Voter Suppression laws. One so badly targeting African Americans that two courts said it was surgically tailored against minority voters.

And Gerrymandering, the other great control. Bulk gerrymandering where you go into a state, like the Red Map project did in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and you pack Democrats so tightly into a few districts that all the others become Republican majority districts. And those states send a delegation to Congress that has a huge majority of Republican members, like 13 to 5, where the Democratic five actually won the popular vote.

You’ve sent a delegation to Congress that is out of step with the popular vote of that state and court after court figured out how to solve that, and the Supreme Court said nope. 5 to 4 again. Nope. We’re not going to take an interest in that question.

In all these areas where it’s about political power for big special interests, and people who want to fund campaigns, and people who want to get their way through politics without actually showing up, doing it behind DonorsTrust and other groups, doing it through these schemes over and over again.

If someone wanted to make a Bias case against the Supreme Court and show an 80-to-0 pattern.
Making a Bias argument to a jury. Saying 80-to-0 is just a bunch of flukes - would be laughed out of court !

All five-four -- all Republican. So something is not right with this Court. And dark money has a lot to do with it.
Special interests have a lot to do with it. Whoever is hiding behind DonorsTrust has a lot to do with it, and the Bradley Foundation orchestrating its amici over at the Court has a lot to do with it.

And it’s not just in the Consumer Financial Protection Board case. You might say well that was just a one-off.
Here’s Janus, the anti-labor case that had a long trail through the Court, through Friedrichs, and through Knox, and through other decisions.

And SourceWatch and ProPublica (on the Bradley Foundation) did some work about this. Here’s DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund.
And here’s the Bradley Foundation. And they totaled giving $45 million to the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 groups that filed amicus briefs, pretending to be different groups, and both of the lawyer groups in the case, funded by DonorsTrust, funded by Bradley Foundation in Janus. (

State Policy Network, SPN,
is a web of right-wing “think tanks” and tax-exempt organizations in 49 states, Washington, D.C., Canada, and the United Kingdom.
As of March 2019, SPN's membership totals 162.
Today's SPN is the tip of the spear of far-right, nationally funded policy agenda in the states that supports extremists in the Republican Party.

Has a technology platform to get union members to leave their union and offer competitive benefits.”
( “discounts to major retailers, from Target to Microsoft.” )
see SPN EXPOSED

This is happening over and over and over again, and it goes beyond just the briefs. It goes beyond just the amicus presentations.
The Federalist Society – remember this group that is acting as the conduit and that Donald Trump has said is doing his judicial selection?
They’re getting money from the same foundations, from DonorsTrust, $16.7 million and the Bradley Foundation, $1.37 million. From the same group of foundations total, $33 million.

Donors to the Federalist Society, 2014-present
The same 16 foundations that fund the amicus brief filers all give to the Federalist Society.

Donor	Amount
DonorsTrust	$16,733,100
Mercer Family Foundation	$4,850,000
Donors Capital Fund	$4,231,120
Charles Koch Foundation	$2,419,264
Searle Freedom Trust	$1,551,000
Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation	$1,375,000
Ed Uihlein Family Foundation	$1,000,000
John William Pope Foundation	$250,000
Adolph Coors Foundation	$230,000
Pierre F. and Enid Goodrich Foundation	$210,000
Dunn Foundation	$150,000
F.M. Kirby Foundation	$120,000
William H. Donner Foundation	$45,000
Bradley Impact Fund	$15,250
Charles Koch Institute	$6,400
TOTAL	$33,286,134
Table: Center for Media and Democracy Source: Internal Revenue Service, Sourcewatch Get the CSV data Created with Datawrapper

Carrie Severino

Leonard Leo

So you can start to look at these, and you can start to tie them together. The legal groups, all the same funders over and over again, bringing the cases and providing us orchestrated chorus of amici.
Then the same group also funds the Federalist Society over here.
The Washington Post wrote a big expose about this, and that made Leonard Leo a little hot, a little bit like a burned agent. So he had to jump out. And he went off to go do anonymously-funded voter suppression work. Guess who jumped in to take over the selection process in this case for Judge Barrett? Carrie Severino made the hop. So once again, ties right in together.

So, Center for Media and Democracy did a little bit more research. Here’s a Bradley Foundation memo that they’ve published. The Bradley Foundation is reviewing a grant application asking for money for this orchestrated amicus process, and what do they say in the staff recommendation? It is important to orchestrate – their word, not mine – important to orchestrate high-caliber amicus efforts before the Court.

Page 3 of 2015 Bradley Summary Judicial Education Project Proposal 150K

The plaintiff teachers are asking the Court to overrule its precedents allowing states to mandate any
union fees.

Various amici in Friedrichs likely will include current and former governors, state attorneys general,
First Amendment scholars, and leading Bradley-supported education-reform entities including PRl.

At this writing, two or three others may be commissioned.

Some of the briefs are being put together by attorneys with Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher and Jones Day.
The additional ones may be done by Bancroft & Associates, Boyden Gray & Associates, and
Kirkland & Ellis - again, with former clerks of justices on most of them.

Budget information: JEP's annual overall expense budget in its fiscal-year 2015 is $2,060,000.
Each of the two amicus-brief efforts costs approximately $250,000, for a total of $500,000.

STAFF RECOMMENDATION: At this highest of legal levels, it is often very important to orchestrate
high-caliber amicus efforts that showcase respected, high-profile parties who are represented by the very
best lawyers with strong ties to the Court.
Such is the case here, with King and Friedrichs, even given Bradley's previous philanthropic investments in the actual, underlying legal actions.
Therefore, staff recommends a $150,000 grant to JEP for the amicus representation.

They also note that Bradley has done previous philanthropic investments in the actual underlying legal actions. So Bradley is funding – what do they call – philanthropically investing in, the underlying legal action and then giving money to groups to show up in the orchestrated chorus of amici. That can’t be good.

And it goes on, because they also found this email. This email comes from an individual at the Bradley Foundation, and it asks our friend, Leonard Leo, who used to run the selection process, is there a 501(c)(3) nonprofit to which Bradley could direct any support of the two Supreme Court amicus projects other than DonorsTrust? I don’t know why they wanted to avoid the reliable identity-scrubber DonorsTrust, but for some reason they did.

Page 6 of 2014 Bradley, Leonard Leo, Neil Corkery, Carrie Severino Judicial+Education+Project

Can you get us a contact person there, or have someone send us a letter with their tax-exempt status, board, and budget? ...
Thanks .... -MH

From: Leonard Leo [mailto:leonard.leo@fed-soc.org ]
Sent: Tuesday, December 16, 2014 6:00 PM
To: Michael Hartmann
Ce: Daniel Schmidt; Leonard Leo
Subject: Re: Quick question

Yes, Judicial Education Project could take and allocate.

On Dec 16, 2014 1:51 PM, "Michael Hartmann" <mhartmann@bradleyfdn.org > wrote:

Leonard,

Is there a 501(c)(3) nonprofit to which Bradley could direct any support of
the two Supreme Court amicus projects other than Donors Trust? ....

-MH

So Leonard Leo writes back on Federalist Society address – so don’t tell me that it isn’t Federal Society business – on Federalist Society, on his address, he writes back, yes, send it to the Judicial Education Project, which could take and allocate the money.
And guess who works for the Judicial Education Project? Carrie Severino, who also helped select this nominee, running the Trump Federalist Society selection process.

So the connections abound. In the Washington Post article, they point out that the Judicial Crisis Network’s office is on the same hallway in the same building as the Federalist Society, and when they sent their reporter to talk to somebody at the Judicial Crisis Network, somebody from the Federalist Society came down to let them up.

This more and more looks like it’s not three schemes, but it’s one scheme with the same funders selecting judges, funding campaigns for the judges, and then showing up in court in these orchestrated amicus flotillas to tell the judges what to do.

On the Judicial Crisis Network, you’ve got the Leonard Leo connection, obviously. She hopped in to take over for him with the Federalist Society. You’ve got the campaigns that I’ve talked about, where they take $17 million contributions. That’s a big check to write, $17 million, to campaign for Supreme Court nominees. No idea who that is or what they got for it. You’ve got briefs that she wrote. The Republican senators filed briefs in that NFIB case signed by Ms. Severino.

The woman who helped choose this nominee has written briefs for Republican senators attacking the ACA. Don’t say the ACA is not an issue here.
And by the way, the Judicial Crisis Network funds RAGA, the Republican Attorneys General Association, and it funds individual Republican attorneys general.
And guess who the plaintiffs are in the Affordable Care Act case? Republican attorneys general.

Trump joined them because he didn’t want to defend, so he’s in with the Republican attorneys general. But here’s the Judicial Crisis Network campaigning for Supreme Court nominees, writing briefs for senators against the Affordable Care Act, supporting the Republicans who are bringing this case, and leading the selection process for this nominee.

Here is the page off the brief. Here is where they are. Mitch McConnell, and on through the list, Senator Collins, Senator Cornyn, Senator Hoeven, Senator — who’s still here? Marco Rubio. It’s a huge assortment of Republican senators who Carrie Severino wrote a brief for against the Affordable Care Act. So this is a, to me, pretty big deal. I’ve never seen this around any court that I’ve ever been involved with, where there’s this much dark money and this much influence being used.

Here’s how the Washington Post summed it up. This is “a conservative activist behind-the-scenes campaign to remake the nation’s courts,” and it’s a $250 million dark money operation. $250 million is a lot of money to spend if you’re not getting anything for it. So that raises the question, what are they getting for it?

Well, I showed the slide earlier on the Affordable Care Act. And on Obergefell and on Roe v. Wade, that’s where they lost. But with another judge, that could change. That’s where the contest is. That’s where The Republican Party platform tells us to look at how they want judges to rule, to reverse Roe, to reverse the Obamacare cases, and to reverse Obergefell and take away gay marriage. That is their stated objective and plan.

===============================================================

REPUBLICAN SENATOR HYPOCRITES include Mitch McConnell, Grassley , Cruz , Graham
They stalled the election to the Supreme Court of Garland with the opposite arguments they are making today

We have some very hypocritical 180 turnarounds. Back when it was Garland versus Gorsuch :-

And Graham made his famous hold-the-tape promise "if an opening comes in the last year of President Trump’s term we’ll wait until the next election". That’s 180 reversal.
Senator Cruz said "you don’t do this in an election year". That’s 180 reversal.
"the American people should have a say in the Court’s direction". Of course, of course, said Mitch McConnell. That’s 180 reversal.
Senator Grassley said "the American people shouldn’t be denied a voice". That’s 180 reversal too.

When you find hypocrisy in the daylight, look for power in the shadows.

There are some pretty high stakes here's three of them:-

Roe v. Wade,
Obergefell, and the
Obamacare cases.

The Republican platform, say that a Republican president will appoint judges who will reverse Roe, Obergefell, and Obamacare .

SOURCE Senator Whitehouse and ExposedByCMD

Lindsey Graham
Hypocrite
"if an opening comes in the last year of President Trump’s term we’ll wait until the next election".

Republican's Covertly spend $250 million to Control the Nation's Courts to reverse Roe, to reverse Obamacare, and to reverse Obergefell

How the Rich make Laws by paying for Court Decisions

Sixteen right-wing foundations gave $69 million since 2014 to get the Supreme Court to abolish the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

80 cases under Chief Justice Roberts that were decided 5 to 4 ! Republican donors funded those cases! It was an 80 to zero, 5 to 4 Republican Rout, - a Ransacking. Those cases are about controlling Government and the Law. (The EXECUTIVE BRANCH is already controlled by the rich)

Donors to the Federalist Society, 2014-present The same 16 foundations that fund the amicus brief filers all give to the Federalist Society.

REPUBLICAN SENATOR HYPOCRITES include Mitch McConnell, Grassley , Cruz , Graham They stalled the election to the Supreme Court of Garland with the opposite arguments they are making today

Republican's Covertly spend $250 million to Control the Nation's Courts
to reverse Roe, to reverse Obamacare, and to reverse Obergefell

Sixteen right-wing foundations gave $69 million since 2014 to get the
Supreme Court to abolish the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

80 cases under Chief Justice Roberts that were decided 5 to 4 ! Republican donors funded those cases!
It was an 80 to zero, 5 to 4 Republican Rout, - a Ransacking.

Those cases are about controlling Government and the Law. (The EXECUTIVE BRANCH is already controlled by the rich)

Donors to the Federalist Society, 2014-present
The same 16 foundations that fund the amicus brief filers all give to the Federalist Society.

REPUBLICAN SENATOR HYPOCRITES include Mitch McConnell, Grassley , Cruz , Graham
They stalled the election to the Supreme Court of Garland with the opposite arguments they are making today