Congressional Democrats are now urging the Judicial Conference, which sets judicial policy, to intervene in their continued attempt to impose ethics standards on the federal judiciary. Two legislators who oversee the judiciary, Sen. Hank Johnson and Sheldon Whitehouse, urged the conference to require extreme transparency from special interest groups submitting amicus briefs to the courts.
The extent and sway of the dark money network established by conservative activist Leonard Leo over rulings from lower courts to the Supreme Court can be seen in a recent Politico investigation. According to Politico, “a majority of the amicus briefs filed on behalf of conservative parties in seven of the highest-profile rulings the court has issued over the past two years are either directly or indirectly connected to Leo and his network of nonprofit groups.”
A year before the Supreme Court’s historic decision, Princeton Professor Robert P. George, a prominent figure in the conservative legal movement and a close friend of judicial activist and Donald Trump supporter Leonard Leo, argued in favor of overturning Roe v. Wade in an amicus brief.
For example, George claimed that abortion had been regarded as a crime or “a kind of inchoate felony for felony-murder purposes” for centuries, dating back to English common law, and that Roe had been decided based on “plain historical falsehoods.”
The argument was repeated in numerous amicus briefs in favor of Mississippi’s restrictive abortion law in the 2022 Supreme Court case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned the state’s constitutional right to an abortion. The argument was discussed in an article on the website of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal network that Leo co-chairs, seven months prior to the ruling.
The same passage from medieval English jurist Henry de Bracton, which George had included in his amicus brief, was quoted by Justice Samuel Alito in his majority opinion to support the claim that “English cases dating all the way back to the 13th century corroborate the treatises’ statements that abortion was a crime.”
Whitehouse and Johnson are requesting that the conference mandate that organizations submitting amicus briefs reveal their financial sources. Citing the Politico report, Whitehouse and Johnson stated, “We urge it to take into account the impact that these and other examples have on public confidence in the judiciary.”
A Judicial Conference panel has been considering rules to increase the amount of information that these interest groups must disclose since at least October. The panel has proposed a rule that would force those who file amicus briefs to disclose, in the words of Reuter, “when much of their revenue comes from a party in a case or its lawyers.”
Three years ago, Whitehouse and Johnson initiated this action and have persisted in pressuring the conference to compel transparency. In the first half of the following year, the conference intends to release a new rule.
However, as it works through that, another instance of Leo’s evil influence is making its way through the legal system; this time, it involves an attempt to completely destroy the Voting Rights Act. Late last month, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals’ three-judge panel decided that individual voters, or private plaintiffs, are not permitted to file a lawsuit to enforce Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA), which forbids states from excluding voters on the grounds of race, color, or language minority group.
In 2016, Leo gave Donald Trump a list of possible Supreme Court justices, which included the two judges who decided against the will of the people. However, as Mother Jones’ Ari Berman notes, Leo did more than just select the judges for this decision.
The Honest Elections Project filed a friend-of-the-court brief with the 8th Circuit. The group was founded in 2020 with Leo’s support to promote restrictive voting laws and oppose efforts to make voting easier during the pandemic. The group claimed that “a significant increase in the number of Section 2 cases brought by private litigation groups” had “undermine[d] the States’ efforts to protect election integrity and to discharge their duties to draw electoral maps” and had resulted in a “fast decline in confidence in elections.” The group said that it had a “significant interest in this case, as it implicates the legislature’s preeminent role in setting the rules for elections and election-related litigation.”
And that’s how the court decided, holding that the U.S. attorney general is the only party qualified to bring legal action to uphold Section 2, despite the fact that most of these lawsuits have been brought by individual voters, or the people who have been directly denied the right to vote due to state efforts to suppress voting, on behalf of voting rights organizations. Imagine a Donald Trump attorney general filing a lawsuit to defend the voting rights of individuals of color.
This is yet another example of how Leo selects the justices and judges and then uses his network to supply the arguments those justices and judges need to make their decision. Although exposing the full scope of Leo’s sinister ownership of this won’t remove all of those justices and judges from office, it may limit their choices.
