Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I rise today for now the ninth time to unmask the rightwing, dark money scheme to capture our Supreme Court. I say ``capture'' in the sense of regulatory capture, an Agency capture-- a well-known phenomenon. Today, I turn to an important tool of the scheme's apparatus: the orchestrated amicus curiae brief. So, first things first, amicus--or friend of the court--briefs are an important instrument in our judicial system. They help those who aren't parties to a case to share their expertise, insight, or advocacy with the Court. I file them myself. ``Friend of the court'' briefs are necessary and useful, usually. However, in recent years, the Court has had a lot more friends than it used to. Amici filed 781 briefs in the 2014 Supreme Court term--a more than 800-percent increase from the 1950s and a 95-percent increase just from 1995. In the 2010 term, 715 amicus briefs were filed in 78 cases. By 2019, that number had swelled to 911 briefs in just 57 cases. The average number of briefs per argued case almost doubled--from 9 in 2010 to 16 in 2019. There is another odd feature to this uptick of amicus briefs. Most of the time, you file an amicus brief when the Justices have taken a case and are poised to actually decide the outcome of that case, at the so- called merits stage of the case, which makes sense because this is when the rulings actually become law.…”