Political Quotes

“I am here once again to shed a little light on the dark money scheme to capture and control our Supreme Court. As folks may recall, my first two speeches covered the early foundation of this scheme--a prominent conservative lawyer Lewis Powell's detailed strategy memo for the corporate U.S. Chamber of Commerce and then Justice Lewis Powell's work on the Court to assure his corporate power strategy's success. From there, I turned to what historian Richard Hofstetter called the paranoid style in American politics and how extreme anti-government megadonors like the Kochs harness that rightwing fringe and how, at the same time, they had at their disposal the polished mercenaries of corporate administrative agency warfare. Then I discussed the scheme's two big recent dark money wins at the Supreme Court--the AFPF dark money case and the Brnovich voter suppression case. The nutshell overview of all of this is that it is a short jump for big donors from regulatory capture, which is a well-understood and broadly observed phenomenon, to applying known techniques of regulatory capture to capture a court. As the big donors had this realization and made this jump, one of their most important players in applying capture techniques to the judiciary has been the Federalist Society. I will start with some very straightforward observations. Every member of the Court's six-Justice Republican majority is a current or former member of the Federalist Society.…”