Alito's Wife, Upside Down Flags, & Madness on The Bench
Alito's Wife, Upside Down Flags, & Madness on The Bench
Top Story: Alito’s Wife, Upside Down Flags, & Madness in Our Courts
Alito blamed his wife for the flag incident. Ginni Thomas tried to obstruct an American election. Her husband Clarence enjoyed lavish presents from generous gift-givers with an interest in SCOTUS rulings.
You don’t need to be an editorial writer to acknowledge the Supreme Court is an ethical mess.
And when these justices aren’t engaged in off-the-bench ethics breaches, they are releasing very unpopular rulings high-fived by one very rich lobbying group: Radicalized Christians with a far-right agenda they want to impose on the rest of America.
Coincidence? We think not.
With hundreds of millions of dollars to donate to judicial campaigns, think tanks pushing their extremist agenda, and hordes of elected officials indebted to them, members of the nation’s very organized Christian Right are holding undue sway over courts in D.C. and beyond.
If you don’t already cover a judge they helped catapult onto a state supreme court — with the expectation that that judge would green-light book-banning, outlaw abortion, or further deregulate military-grade weapons — these guys and gals hope you do, soon.
It’s time to tell your readers about the state courts.
Because if you don’t, who will?
Seven Facts
About The Radical Right and State Courts
State supreme courts are very political and very powerful. These days, justices, by and large, carry water for political entities, with the conservative ones answering to a radical and dangerous element of the GOP. It’s so rare for justices to veer from the party transcript, that if they do, that’s a story.
Rich, Right-wing donors with extremist agendas routinely pump big bucks into state supreme court races. And they want something in return: rulings that push their unpopular agenda.
These bad actors include:
A mysteriously-loaded political consultant named Leonard Leo, sometimes referred to as the “court whisperer” who wants to extend his arch-conservative Catholic agenda to “every facet of life.”
A fierce foe of reproductive rights, named Dick Uihlein, whose shipping supply company produces much of the paper used to ship the goods we receive every day. He founded a right-wing organization whose main goal is to seat judges who want to restrict voting rights onto courts in states he doesn’t even live in.
A Pennsylvania billionaire named Jeff Yass who has spent millions to get judges onto courts, including one who supported Trump’s efforts to dispose of thousands of legally cast ballots in Pennsylvania.
Because these guys and their buddies have been so good at doing this, most Americans now live in states with Republican-controlled state supreme courts.
Many Republican-controlled Supreme Courts seek a Christian-centric vision for America.
A Christian-centric vision is one that seeks to decrease individual rights and increase the overbearing and authoritarian agenda of Radical Christians.
Some of the freedoms Christian-centric Courts have voted against, in recent years, include:
Free Speech Rights
LGBTQ Rights
Teachers’ Rights
Voters’ Rights
BONUS: Covering the nation’s corrupted courts might win you a Pulitzer — like ProPublica did, this year.
Yeah, ProPublica!
WANT BACKGROUND?
Read True North’s recent report on the Radical Republicans who are targeting state supreme courts.
Read how and why this Far Right scheme has been so successful.
Need Sources on the Courts
We Love
Grave Injustice: The Right-Wing Takeover of America’s Highest Court — a heart-stopping exploration of crass corruption inside the American Courts, by True North’s Lisa Graves.
Dahlia Lithwick’s Slate column: Jurisprudence.
Comic Relief
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See You Next Week!
Our Staff
Executive Editor Kyle Spencer
ing Editor Christen Gall
Our Board of Advisors
Alex Aronson, executive director of Court Accountability
David Armiak, research director for the Center for Media and Democracy
Connor Gibson, founder of Grassrootbeer Investigations
Maurice Cunningham, retired associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and author of Dark Money and The Politics of School Privatization.
Isaac Kamola, associate professor of political science at Trinity College, founder of Faculty First Responders and co-author of Free Speech and Koch Money, Manufacturing a Campus Culture War
Nancy MacLean, William H. Chafe distinguished professor of history and public policy at Duke University and author of Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America
Ralph Wilson, founder of the Corporate Genome Project and co-author of Free Speech and Koch Money, Manufacturing a Campus Culture War
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