We're watching a coup unfold, the fruition of decades of time and investment from the super-rich far-right in recreating the Gilded Age in which white men ruled with abandon. They are finally in a position where a Republican president chosen by a minority of voters is aided by a Republican Senate, again elected by a minority of voters, to restructure the entire federal judiciary with the cherry on top—the Supreme Court. They have spared no expense to get there.
Just one arm of that vast right-wing cabal, the secretive Judicial Crisis Network, will have invested at least $53 million in this project. They backed up Mitch McConnell's Republican Senate with $27 million in dark money keeping President Obama's nominee, Merrick Garland, off the court in 2016. They spent millions more on getting Trump's nominees Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh on the court—with an injection of $15.9 million from a single donor in the year between June 2018 and June 2019 for Kavanaugh. They are expected to put at least $10 million into the Amy Coney Barrett nomination, and with it, will have bought the Supreme Court. At least for the time being, until a Democratic president and Senate majority takes it back with a countervailing expansion.
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So who's the JCN? We know it's led by Trump adviser Leonard Leo, a Federalist Society bigwig. We don't know who funds the Federalist Society or the JCN. Donors are not listed in the Center for Political Accountability database and they can't be found in an Internal Revenue Service database.
We do know some of the Republican senators Leo and team have bought in order to help them achieve this coup. Like, of course, Susan Collins, who has received the maximum in personal contributions from Leo as well as having been the beneficiary of fundraisers at Leo’s $4 million mansion in Maine. That was her reward on Brett Kavanaugh. She's not needed on Barrett, so gets a pass on this one, with Leo's checks in her war chest.
A quick look at Leo's contribution history on the part of the Federalist Society shows he's given the maximum to plenty of the class of 2020, beyond Collins. There's Colorado's Cory Gardner, Georgia's David Perdue (more than the maximum to Perdue, in fact, forcing him to claw back $2,800), Iowa's Joni Ernst, Alaska's Dan Sullivan, and North Carolina's Thom Tillis. He really wants that Supreme Court. It worked. He got the promise of all of their votes, even at the possible expense of their seats.
They've bought the Senate to buy the Supreme Court, the likely outcome of which is the end of free and fair elections in the U.S. for at least a generation, if not forever. That is, unless we use this last one to retake the Senate and White House and then force the new leadership to make the deep structural changes necessary to the courts and, well, everything else that democracy demands.