Have you ever heard of the Judicial Crisis Network? I hadn't at least not until today when I came across an article at Maplight, a site that bills itself as being dedicated to revealing money's influence on politics.
The JCN is a conservative 501(c)4 organization which means it doesn't have to disclose it's donors. It's what we commonly call a dark money org. It dedicates its money to attempt to swing judicial appointments in favor of extreme conservative viewpoints (and it also works on promoting conservative attorney generals).
The JCN spent $7 million dollars to keep President Obama from his Constitutional authority of appointing a Supreme Court Justice.
According to Maplight the JCN only received three donations between 2015 and 2016 but one of those donations was for $17.9 million dollars from a single donor.
The organization’s most recent tax return, covering July 2015 to June 2016, shows JCN’s anti-Garland spending spree was fueled by three contributions. The $17.9 million donation accounted for 96.6 percent of its revenue. Before the donation, the organization had never reported more than $6 million in revenue since its 2005 creation.
The article goes onto to discuss many concerning things that this dark money org is doing to subvert the judicial system from one that is supposed to be blind to one that is glaringly and harshly conservative.
It has its hands not only in SCOTUS appoitments, where it spent $10 million dollars promoting Gorsuch’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, but also in state races.
The network donated $1.4 million to the Wisconsin Alliance for Reform, a dark money organization that spent $1.5 million to re-elect Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Bradley. The justice, who once described former President Bill Clinton as a “tree-hugging, baby-killing, pot-smoking, flag-burning, queer-loving, bull-spouting, ‘60s radical socialist adulterer,” was appointed to the court in 2015 by Gov. Scott Walker.
In the race for chief justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court, JCN ran more than $600,000 worth of ads attacking Courtney Goodson, an associate justice. The network also contributed $300,000 to a Nebraska campaign attempting to stop the state from repealing the death penalty, and it gave $200,000 to the North Carolina Chamber of Commerce. The North Carolina donation was used to support conservative Robert Edmunds in a state supreme court race.
Maybe I'm the one who is out of the loop and this is a wider known group than I realized but I found it disturbing nonetheless.
Buying our democracy is becoming far too easy and severely conservative groups like the JCN are attempting a stranglehold on our judiciary system.