By Donald A. Collins | 1 May 2023
Church and State
We have reported before about Leo’s dark money power, which was enhanced by a $1 billion grant to his nonprofit empire and his financial capacity to inflict his far right religious and political views on key parts of our democracy.
Read here the frightening evidence from my September 22, 2022 column.
A Two-Pronged GOP Attack On Women’s Health! And While Catholic Zealots Control Our Supreme Court, The Coup Man Controls The GOP! Are We In Trouble? https://t.co/YJIJbYrfUC via @ChurchAndStateN
— Church and State (@ChurchAndStateN) May 1, 2023
Now we find more disturbing evidence as reported in the page one Sunday April 30 NY Times article entitled “As a Law School Grows So Do Perks for Justices” with its subtitle heading “How George Mason University’s Scalia Law Became a Key Friend of the Court”.
A few revealing quotes:
In the fall of 2017, an administrator at George Mason University’s law school circulated a confidential memo about a prospective hire.
Just months earlier, Neil M. Gorsuch, a federal appeals court judge from Colorado, had won confirmation to the Supreme Court seat left vacant by the death of Antonin Scalia, the conservative icon for whom the school was named. For President Donald J. Trump, bringing Judge Gorsuch to Washington was the first step toward fulfilling a campaign promise to cement the high court unassailably on the right. For the leaders of the law school, bringing the new justice to teach at Scalia Law was a way to advance their own parallel ambition.
“Establishing and building a strong relationship with Justice Gorsuch during his first full term on the bench could be a game-changing opportunity for Scalia Law, as it looks to accelerate its already meteoric rise to the top rank of law schools in the United States,” read the memo, contained in one of thousands of internal university emails obtained by The New York Times.
By the winter of 2019, the law school faculty would include not just Justice Gorsuch but also two other members of the court, Justices Clarence Thomas and Brett M. Kavanaugh — all deployed as strategic assets in a campaign to make Scalia Law, a public school in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, a Yale or Harvard of conservative legal scholarship and influence.
The law school had long stood out for its rightward leanings and ties to conservative benefactors. Its renaming after Justice Scalia in 2016 was the result of a $30 million gift brokered by Leonard Leo, prime architect of a grand project then gathering force to transform the federal judiciary and further the legal imperatives of the right. An ascendant law school at George Mason would be part of that plan.
Read here the full text of the proven dénouement of the Court and the Scalia Law School.
How Scalia Law School Became a Key Friend of the Court. George Mason University’s law school cultivated ties to justices, with generous pay and unusual perks. In turn, it gained prestige, donations and influence.https://t.co/sxRo1q2tE4 @SteveEder @Jo_Becker
— Eric Lipton (@EricLiptonNYT) April 30, 2023
Read here the highlights of this unprincipled corruption which ties in perfectly to Chief Justice Roberts’ refusal to appear before Senator Richard Durbin’s Senate Judiciary Committee to answer questions about the allegations of impropriety by Justice Clarence Thomas’s unreported gifts from Texas real estate Harlin Crow here!
Despite extensive demands for Thomas’ recusal or for his wife Ginni’s active efforts to show fraud was involved in the 2020 election, nothing has been done by Roberts to improve this serious flaw in the Court’s ethical behavior.
King John Roberts rejects the Checks & Balances envisioned by our Founding Fathers.
We fought a revolution to free ourselves from a monarch who thought himself above the law. Now we have a new monarch in a black robe.https://t.co/nlmjRsnNcd
— 🇺🇸 John Anthony Castro (@realJohnACastro) April 26, 2023
Roberts’ refusal inferentially implicates the entire right wing Catholic majority on the Court in a felonious conspiracy to commit to restrict reproductive freedom and other civil rights to all Americans of all religions, ethnic and political beliefs.
Trump’s appointment of these right-wing zealots to the Court will haunt unbiased jurisprudence for years. Worse the efforts from Leo and others to fund such improprieties will continue their efforts to influence improperly other vital rights in our democracy as voting rights as this earlier story shows.
Examples:
The Republican secretaries of state in Ohio, West Virginia and Missouri have promoted their states’ elections as fair and secure. Yet each also is navigating a fine line on how to address election fraud conspiracies as they gear up campaigns for U.S. Senate or governor in 2024.
The split-screen messaging of Ohio’s Frank LaRose, West Virginia’s Mac Warner and Missouri’s Jay Ashcroft shows just how deeply election lies have burrowed into the Republican Party, where more than half of voters believe Democrat Joe Biden was not legitimately elected president. Even election officials who tout running clean elections at home are routinely pushing for more voting restrictions and additional scrutiny on the process as they prepare to face GOP primary voters next year.
All three withdrew their states last month from the Electronic Registration Information Center, a bipartisan, multistate effort to ensure accurate voter lists. LaRose did so less than a month after calling the group “one of the best fraud-fighting tools that we have” and vowing to maintain Ohio’s membership. He defied backlash against the organization stoked by former President Donald Trump before relenting.
The three also have supported increased voter restrictions in their states — part of a national trend for Republicans that they say is intend to boost public confidence. Those bills impose new voter ID requirements, shrink windows for processing ballots or ease the ability to consolidate voting precincts.
Read the full story here.
In Ohio, LaRose spent years assuring public that voter fraud represents tiny fraction of Ohio’s cast ballots. Then during his reelection campaign last year, he said Trump “is right to say that voter fraud is serious problem” & blamed the mainstream media”https://t.co/dSxHbwlI0u
— FairDistrictsOhio (@OhFairDistricts) April 30, 2023
The 2024 election, no doubt to be deeply affected by Leonard Leo’s huge dark money, could be the most important for retaining our democracy in US history.
Former US Navy officer, banker and venture capitalist, Donald A. Collins, a free lance writer living in Washington, DC, has spent over 50 years working for women’s reproductive health as a board member and/or officer of numerous family planning organizations including Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Guttmacher Institute, Family Health International and Ipas. Yale under graduate, NYU MBA. He is the author of “From the Dissident Left: A Collection of Essays 2004-2013”, “Trump Becoming Macbeth: Will our democracy survive?”, “We Humans Overwhelm Our Earth: 11 or 2 Billion by 2100?”, “What Can Be Done Now to Save Habitable Life on Planet Earth?”, “Vote”, “Can Homo Sapiens Survive?”, “Will Choice and Democracy Win?” and “Can Our U.S. Survive 8 Plus Billion of Us”."What Can Be Done Now to Save Habitable Life on Planet Earth?": https://t.co/fHuh0CG6JD
"We Humans Overwhelm Our Earth: 11 or 2 Billion by 2100?": https://t.co/TA4j7cp1tE
"From the Dissident Left: A Collection of Essays 2004-2013": https://t.co/lkC2t3E1A9 pic.twitter.com/bQsL2mLBcO— Church and State (@ChurchAndStateN) November 1, 2021
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Leonard Leo, The Most Powerful Person In America You’ve Never Heard Of
The conservative movement transforming America’s courts
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