As you know, Leonard Leo is the mastermind of the right wing legal assault on democracy. And he and his good buddy Samuel Alito are obviously part of an insurrectionist cabal. Some might even call them traitors.
As Tom discussed this morning, Dahlia Lithwick has a great piece today on this subject over at Slate and I want to highlight the same conclusion he did:
No, I have come to conclude that this is an us problem. Because rather than hurling ourselves headlong into the “Alito Must Recuse” brick wall of “yeah, no,” we need to dedicate the upcoming election cycle, and the attendant election news cycle, to a discussion of the courts. Not just Alito or Thomas, who happen to go to work every day at the court, and not just Dobbs and gun control, which happen to have come out of the very same court, but the connection between those two tales: what it means to have a Supreme Court that is functionally immune from political pressure, from internal norms of behavior, from judicial ethics and disclosure constraints, and from congressional oversight, and why that is deeply dangerous. More so, why justices who were placed on the court to behave as well-compensated partisan politicians would do so in public as well as on paper. Until we do that, Alito will continue to fly around the world, giving speeches about his triumph in Dobbs and Thomas will keep taking gifts and failing to disclose them. That won’t be the end of the Supreme Court story; it will be just the start of it.
I could not agree more. I am more convinced than ever that part of our current MAGA funk is directly due to our inchoate feeling of impotence over what to do about it. We must have this bigger conversation so that we can at least begin to define the problem in order to somehow dredge up the strength to fix it.
The judiciary has been completely corrupted by Leo and the far right billionaires who fund him. And Leo has entered the larger culture war in a big way:
With success has come public attention. Leo’s summer home in Maine has become the site of regular protests. He’s also attracted legal scrutiny. Last summer, Politico reported that the Washington, D.C., attorney general launched an investigation into whether Leo has misused nonprofit laws for personal enrichment, following a watchdog complaint pointing out that nonprofits under Leo’s control have paid tens of millions to his for-profit firms.
In November, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to authorize a subpoena after Leo refused to provide lawmakers with a full accounting of all gifts and payments that he has directed to Supreme Court justices and their spouses. The vote followed reports that Leo steered secret consulting payments to Justice Clarence Thomas’ wife, and arranged Justice Samuel Alito’s seat on a private jet — paid for by a billionaire hedge-fund chief — as part of an undisclosed luxury fishing trip in Alaska in 2008.
Leo has publicly refused to cooperate with the reported D.C. probe, with his lawyer arguing that the district’s attorney general, Brian Schwalb, has “no legal authority to conduct any investigatory steps or take any enforcement measures.” Leo has also refused to comply with the promised Senate subpoena, saying in a statement: “I will not cooperate with this unlawful campaign of political retribution.” (The subpoena has not yet been issued.)
A devout Catholic, Leo is one of the most powerful political operatives in the United States. In 2021, he was gifted an unprecedented $1.6 billion dark money fund, with the purpose of shifting American society further to the right.
He’s way beyond MAGA and Trump. He’s playing a very long game and he has the resources to do it:
In a recent report on the strained relationship between Leo and Trump, The Washington Post wrote that Leo “has told others he no longer talks to Trump’s advisers and is largely focused on spending billions to reshape the country in a more conservative direction with a focus on non-election issues.”
Constant, serious scrutiny of this man would be one way to start. Make him the “George Soros ” of the right wing.