THE HEAVY HAND OF THE FEDERALIST SOCIETY ON OUR COURTS

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• Ideas with Consequences: The Federalist Society and the Conservative Counterrevolution (Studies in Postwar American Political Development): Drawing from a trove of documents, transcripts, and interviews, Professor Amanda Hollis-Brusky explains how the Federalist Society managed to revolutionize the jurisprudence for a wide variety of important legal issues. Many of these issues — including the extent of federal government power, the scope of the right to bear arms, and the parameters of corporate political speech — had long been considered settled.
  Read more: https://www.acslaw.org/acsblog/ideas-with-consequences-the-federalist-society-and-the-conservative-counterrevolution/
• How the Trump Administration is Remaking the Courts: “Trump . . . had made McGahn’s wildest dreams come true. Now, McGahn told the Federalist Society, Trump was going to make their wildest dreams come true, too.” In an interview with Breitbart in June 2016, Trump pledged, “We’re going to have great judges, conservative, all picked by Federalist Society.”
  Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/22/magazine/trump-remaking-courts-judiciary.html
• The Secrets of Leonard Leo, the Man Behind Trump’s Supreme Court Pick: Leonard Leo, a fundamentalist who controls a network of right-wing groups funded by dark money, is responsible for placing Alito, Roberts, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh on the Court. Directly or through surrogates, Leo has placed dozens of life-tenure judges on the federal bench and effectively controls the Judicial Crisis Network, a dark money outfit which led the opposition to President Obama’s high court nominee, Judge Merrick Garland
  Read More: https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-secrets-of-leonard-leo-the-man-behind-trumps-supreme-court-pick
• Backed by $10 million in ‘Dark Money,’ Gorsuch Claims He’s Apolitical: Helping lead the effort to confirm Gorsuch was a little-known group, the Judicial Crisis Network, which pledged to spend at least $10 million to back Gorsuch’s nomination. This ‘dark money’ group doesn’t list its donors, but appears to be tied into the network led by oil barons Charles and David Koch.
  Read More: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/backed-by-10-million-in-dark-money-gorsuch-claims_us_58d6b3cce4b0c0980ac0e6b5
• The Dark-Money ATM of the Conservative Movement: Bankrolled by the Koch Brothers, the DeVoses and the Bradleys, Donors Trust, has funded the right’s fights against unions, public schools, climate scientists, and more.
  Read More: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/02/donors-trust-donor-capital-fund-dark-money-koch-bradley-devos/
• How the Federalist Society Changed American Politics: The Federalist Society has become one of the most influential legal organizations in history — not only shaping law students’ thinking but changing American society itself by deliberately, diligently shifting the country’s judiciary to the right. Its members filtered into presidential administrations and federal courts.
  Read More: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/08/27/federalist-society-yale-history-conservative-law-court-219608
• Slouching Towards Extremism: The Federalist Society and the Transformation of American Jurisprudence: “Targeting the courts, the law schools, and the American Bar Association, the Federalist Society has emerged as an increasingly powerful coalition of conservative and libertarian legal activists that is developing comprehensive challenges to the fundamental principles of constitutional law.”
  Read more: https://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?collection=journals&handle=hein.journals/nex7&id=49&men_tab=srchresults
• $1 Million Mystery Gift to Trump Inauguration Traced to Conservative Legal Activists: One of the largest contributions to President Donald Trump’s inaugural committee in 2016 appears to have been orchestrated by a set of powerful conservative legal activists who have since been put in the driver’s seat of the administration’s push to select and nominate federal judges. The $1 million inaugural gift came from a shadowy company called BH Fund. While the source of the money used to make the gift was masked from the public, a trail of clues puts the contribution at the doorstep of some of the same actors — most notably Leonard Leo, an executive vice president at the conservative Federalist Society.
  Read More: https://www.mcclatchydc.com/latest-news/article210176219.html
• DonorsTrust Bankrolled Right-Wing Judicial Appointments, Trump’s Acting AG, and Lobbying Front Groups in 2017: The largest amount of DonorsTrust cash in 2017 was funneled to right-wing legal advocacy groups involved in the campaign to get Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Neil Gorsuch confirmed. Tax returns now show that the ATM for the Koch brothers’ massive donor network, DonorsTrust, gave Judicial Education Project, a non-profit sister organization of JCN, $8.8 million or 93% of its total revenue for 2017. The money not only paid for “significant education and media efforts” to get Gorsuch confirmed, but also a large number of Supreme Court amicus briefs, including in Janus v. AFSCME and Gil v. Whitford.
  Read More: https://www.prwatch.org/news/2019/02/13449/donorstrust-bankrolled-right-wing-judicial-appointments-trumps-acting-ag-and
• Tax Returns Identify Dark Money Organization As Source of GOP Supreme Court Attacks: A dark money organization that has spent millions to finance conservative causes was the source of the $17 million spent to keep Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s seat in Republican hands. The Wellspring Committee, a Virginia-based nonprofit, donated more than $23 million last year to the Judicial Crisis Network, which spent $7 million on advertisements pushing Republican senators to block President Barack Obama’s court pick, Merrick Garland. After the election, the network spent another $10 million to boost President Donald Trump’s pick, Justice Neil Gorsuch.
  Read More: https://maplight.org/story/tax-returns-identify-dark-money-organization-as-source-of-gop-supreme-court-attacks/
• Gorsuch Takes Victory Lap at Federalist Society Dinner: At the Federalist Society’s annual conference, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch heralded the goals of the organization and poked fun at its critics.
  Read more: https://www.politico.com/story/2017/11/16/neil-gorsuch-federalist-society-speech-scotus-246538

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