Democrats have a golden chance to expose this far-right kingpin

Will they step up to the plate?

Welcome to a late Friday night edition of Progress Report.

Tonight, we’re talking heroes and villains, and the legends they can leave behind. Dick Durbin is also heavily involved.

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GOP judicial Svengali Leonard Leo said that he would not comply with a long-awaited subpoena issued to him by the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday. The committee summoned the dark money rainmaker to testify about the prominent role he has played in two decades’ worth of rampant corruption on and around the Supreme Court.

“I am not capitulating to his lawless support of Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and the left’s dark money effort to silence and cancel political opposition,” Leo said, alleging that Durbin, one of the most timid figures at the Capitol, had suddenly adopted the more aggressive posture of his Judiciary Committee vice chair.

Though Leo comes from a legal tradition that seeks to obliterate any part of government that doesn’t operate on behalf of wealthy white Christian conservative men, it’s unlikely that even he believes that the subpoena issued to him is illegal.

Instead, Leo is clearly betting that Durbin will shrink from the moment and ultimately drop the matter, which is unfortunately not a terrible bet right now given the pace and reticence of this investigation as well as the political caution of the person leading it.

The subpoena, for example, was authorized by the Judiciary Committee at the end of November, but it took Durbin four and a half months to actually issue the summons. The inexplicable delay — his office wouldn’t comment on why he sat on it for so long — has already made it more difficult to complete a substantial investigation, and things will only get more complicated as lawmakers start shifting into campaign mode.

Add in some scathing attacks from Republicans like Lindsey Graham and you can see why Leo would be comfortable rolling the dice. But the facts more than justify an investigation, now more than ever, with the survival of American democracy hanging in the balance. Here’s why Dick Durbin must push forward, how he’d be able to pull it off, and what kind of political advantages it could produce.

1. Leonard Leo is guilty as hell

This whole affair began with a series of bombshell stories published last year by ProPublica and the New York Times, which revealed that conservative donors have for years showered right-wing Supreme Court justices with extravagant gifts and favors.

Leo earned several mentions in the various stories, including one that detailed how in 2012, he’d quietly arranged for Ginni Thomas, the insurrectionist wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, to be paid $80,000 as a little treat for her hard work in advocating for reactionary policies. That payment was never reported on Clarence Thomas’s self-disclosure forms, even though it’s as close to a bribe as you can possibly get.

He also worked with Ginni Thomas in 2009 to work on exploiting the Citizens United ruling before the court had even issued it. A year earlier, he arranged a luxury fishing trip for Justice Samuel Alito via billionaire mega-donor Paul Singer.

Durbin’s investigation would actually be the second into Leo’s financial improprieties, as the district attorney of Washington, DC is leading the charge on a new investigation into how Leo has used his gigantic network of shell corporation non-profits and donors to score a cool $100 million for CRC Advisors, the for-profit media and PR company he co-owns and joined in 2020.

2. He is at the center of the storm

Once the vice president of the Federalist Society, Leo is at the nexus of the far-right’s increasingly sophisticated web of special interests, billionaire donors, dark money, and tax-exempt organizations.

His influence touches all levels of government, including the courts, and he now has unlimited resources thanks to an influx of nearly $2 billion in dark money through the Marble Trust, a fund created he created for the inheritance of a dying industrialist billionaire whose family must be really angry at him.

Leo’s groups fund racist dipshits like Stephen Miller and his Disney World lawsuit brigade as well as think tanks and law firms aimed at dismantling the federal government through the judiciary.

“There are many more of those cases that are going to be brought over the next three to five years,” Leo told Joe Lonsdale, the co-founder of Palantir and insufferable rich guy, a few weeks ago on Lonsdale’s insufferable podcast. “It's really, really important that we flood the zone with cases that challenge misuse of the Constitution by the administrative state and by Congress.”

3. He can be the villain of the story

I doubt many Americans could tell you what the administrative state is, but as much as they distrust government, most people are in favor of environmental regulations, safety laws at work, and the oversight that ensures food and medications are not poisonous.

Leo is behind the various lawsuits seeking to gut those agencies and is a major influence on Project 2025, the diabolical and meticulous game plan for the next Republican government, which also calls for those agencies’ dismantling.

The guy is also is a religious extremist, which today puts him in opposition to reproductive freedom, same-sex marriage, and public education, all of which put him out of step with the American public. A few weeks ago, I unearthed this video of his scary zealotry:

Here’s what he said:

“The barbarians are determined to threaten and delegitimize individuals and institutions who refuse to pledge fealty to the woke idols of our age,” Leo boomed. “The secularists are fine with Catholics in the public square so long as we don't, you know, practice our faith. They want us to draw the curtains at home and keep it in the pews, and it remains to be seen how long they'll accept even that.”

Freaky!

While screaming at the less devout, ending regulation, public services, and personal freedoms aren’t directly connected to the Judiciary Committee’s investigation per se, they’re relevant because those are the issues that Leo has sought to use the courts to influence. It wouldn’t be hard to make that leap during public questioning, which would no doubt receive plenty of coverage.

You may be thinking that all that information is too complicated and likely to go over voters’ heads, but I actually think the opposite is true. People have always best comprehended information in narrative form, with cause and effects, heroes and villains, lessons learned and victories earned.

Conservatives know this well and weaponize it every single day. They’ve landed on a set of values, lifestyles, and identifiers — the importance of family, a biblical worldview, patriotism, and rugged independence — and continue to spend much of their time reinforcing them as bedrock principles. Anything can be identified as an enemy of those principles, even political policies that would seem very helpful, once peoples’ minds go elsewhere.

Leonard Leo is off-putting, wealthy, and powerful enough to be an easy target. Conspiracies are stories they’re told to keep them wondering and then slowly digging, ready to defend their way of life. We have to make sure they understand that there are really strong forces plotting against them — just not the ones they have been warned about to this point.

4. Time is running out

There are now seven months until Election Day, and even if President Biden wins reelection, the sheer reality of the Senate map is that it’s going to be a very tough for Democrats to retain their majority. And should that happen, any chance to subpoena Leo or anybody else is gone.

Without oversight, the billionaires and right-wing lunatics will either embrace public impunity or disappear into the firmament, slip into the cracks of government, spill their owners’ wastewater into the ocean. Trump has changed the court and will continue to do so to our legal system. Leo is already acting as if he has impunity, because he thinks the judges who he put in office can bend or break any other rule . It’s bad enough that Trump already feels entitled to everything in life.

Democrats need to show backbone right now, before it’s too late.

5. It’s doable!

While a lot of the coverage of the situation with Leo says that Durbin would have to do the impossible and get 60 votes to hold Figo etc. to honor the subpoena. This is entirely doable, if they choose to do it.

Democrats on the committee have two options: civil contempt, which would see them ask the judicial branch to enforce a subpoena, or inherent contempt, when they ask the sergeant-at-arms detain the person who did not recognize the subpoena. Even threatening this would be a huge step for Democrats.

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