Uncovering more Supreme Court corruption
These people are everywhere and nobody's doing anything about it
Welcome to a Tuesday edition of Progress Report.
First, thank you to everyone who has sent along kind words and encouragement during this arduous recovery from open-heart surgery. It’s been a longer slog than anticipated and I’ve got a long way to go before feeling anywhere near normal, but the messages really do help.
Tonight we’ve got an assortment of important stories and follow-ups from around the country.
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On Tuesday, the US Supreme Court heard oral arguments in yet another seemingly mundane case that could debilitate federal government and the entire regulatory state.
Corner Post, a convenience store in North Dakota, is suing over the swipe fees that banks charge retailers in exchange for processing debit card payments. Those fees are capped at 21 cents per transaction thanks to a rule passed by the Federal Reserve in 2011. Once that kind of rule is established, there’s a six-year window during which it can be challenged in court. Corner Post, which opened in 2018, is arguing that the statute of limitations should begin once a party is “injured” by the regulation.
It’s a niche subject with enormous implications. If the Supreme Court takes a broad view of the case and sides with Corner Post, the decision would open any and all federal regulations to a potential legal challenge at any given moment. It’s the stuff of dreams for big business, corporate law firms, and conservative dark money groups, which is why they are providing the legal and financial support to the little rural convenience store.
Koch-backed groups such as Americans for Prosperity and CATO, along with conservative stalwarts like the Chamber of Commerce, provided filed amicus briefs with the Court on behalf of Corner Post. The store is being represented by Consovoy McCarthy, a conservative firm that last year convinced the Supreme Court to end affirmative action in college admissions and block President Biden’s initial student debt forgiveness plan.
The incestuous right-wing legal world
Tyler Green, the lead counsel for Consovoy McCarthy in this case, has links all across the constellation of white shoe, dark money firms that make up the conservative legal world. An active member of the Federalist Society, he represented Leonard Leo’s sham Honest Elections Project in a 2020 amicus brief before the Supreme Court. Green has a close and lucrative relationship with Leo, who has been at the center of the right-wing legal movement for the past few decades.
One of Leo’s so-called nonprofits, the Marble Freedom Trust, was given an unprecedented $1.6 billion donation last year by a little-known electronics mogul and conservative donor. Tax documents indicated that Marble Freedom Trust’s headquarters was located at an address in North Salt Lake City that belonged to Tyler Green, who was listed as the group’s administrative trustee.
Green, meanwhile, once served as a clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas, who is indebted to Leo in every possible way. Among other things, the far-right legal kingmaker helped Thomas navigate a contentious confirmation hearing back in the early ‘90s and authorized large secret payments to Thomas’s insurrectionist wife.
As has been reported over the past year or so, Thomas has for the past two decades been showered in gifts, forgiven loans, and luxury vacations from conservative activists and donors. Among the benefactors has been Charles Koch, who takes Thomas to his rich boys sleepaway camp every summer. Koch also has a keen interest in the Corner Post case, as well as the other conservative challenges to the regulatory state heard by the Supreme Court earlier this term.
Because he spent years ignoring all disclosure laws, it has required intrepid reporting for the public to learn about Thomas’s financial ties to these ultra-wealthy creeps and cranks. Such blatant corruption likely extends far beyond what’s been exposed thus far, but for now, we can only speculate, because Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Dick Durbin still has not delivered subpoenas to Leo and billionaire Nazi tchotchke collector Harlan Crow.
Will it even matter?
Last fall, with no cooperation from conservatives forthcoming, Durbin was pushed into holding a vote on subpoenaing both Leo and Crow to learn more about their financial support for conservative justices. When the committee voted to authorize the subpoenas, both men struck defiant tones, with Leo of all people calling the oversight a form of McCarthyism.
They each vowed not to cooperate, and instead of pursuing various legal avenues to compel their testimony, ProPublica reported this week that Durbin has not yet officially issue the subpoenas.
Durbin said that he’s “still working on” issuing the subpoenas, a statement that introduced more questions than it answered. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a more aggressive Judiciary Committee member who has pursued the corruption and needed reforms with far more vigor, suggested that authorizing the subpoenas wasn’t just an empty political exercise.
“The authority to have the chairman issue those subpoenas has put him in a much-improved negotiating position,” Whitehouse told ProPublic. “I’ll just leave it at that.”
What exactly Durbin has been trying to procure over the past three months is unclear, and it’s hard to have much confidence that he’s pulling off some smart coup that will expose any real wrongdoing through voluntary backchannel communications. This is a guy who continues to give Republicans veto power over Biden’s judicial nominees and has frittered away any chance of rebalancing a historically conservative federal judiciary.
For nearly a year now, Durbin has been dragging his heels on investigating a vast corruption scheme that has turned the judiciary into a weapon of far-right extremists and the most noxious billionaires in the country. He’s allowed corrupt justices to hear cases that could cripple American democracy and strip away individual rights, even when those justices have direct personal and financial relationships with the litigants and plaintiffs.
The Supreme Court will begin issuing decisions in about three months, and unless something changes soon, Durbin will have abandoned Americans to a pack of snarling reactionaries, bigots, and oligarchs in the interest of bipartisan comity.
OK, how about a few more positive stories to round out the evening?
🧀 🗳️ Wisconsin’s long gerrymander nightmare is over. On Monday, Gov. Tony Evers signed into law new legislative maps that transform the state from the least democratic in the nation to one of the most competitive.
The 99 Assembly districts proposed by Evers are about evenly split between Republican and Democratic-leaning districts. Forty-five districts are more Democratic than Republican, and 46 districts are more Republican than Democratic.
That leaves eight districts that are more likely to be a toss-up between Democrats and Republicans.
The state Senate districts drawn by Evers are about evenly split between Republican and Democratic-leaning districts. Fourteen districts out of 33 are Democratic-leaning, while 15 districts are Republican-leaning.
The other four districts are competitive, where either party has a fair chance of winning them.
Only four Democrats voted for the maps, which were approved by the Republican-dominated legislature. Many Democrats were angling for Evers to veto the maps and ask the liberal-leaning state Supreme Court to produce new district lines.
These maps make the GOP likely to retain a small lead in the state Senate this year, but for the first time since 2011, control of the Wisconsin legislature will come down to candidate recruitment and campaigning.
☕ ✊ Starbucks Workers United announced that it had organized 21 new stores on Tuesday, blowing away the union’s previous record of 14 new stores in a single day. The announcement is a significant show of strength and a reminder of the upstart labor organization’s relevance as the company tries to bog it down with refusals to bargain and endless appeals of NLRB decisions.
More than 10,000 workers at 500 Starbucks locations across the country have now filed for representation. I’ll be back on this beat when I return from my health leave.
🩺 🏥 Republican lawmakers continue to warm towards Medicaid expansion, including in Kansas and Mississippi. Both states will want to include work requirements in their programs, which other GOP states plan to enact if Trump returns to the White House, but the fact that they’re moving at all is a huge deal. The demise of rural hospitals and deterioration of health infrastructure is finally outweighing the program’s forgotten links to President Obama.
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Be patient with yourself as you recover. One day you will suddenly realize that you’re feeling better; your sternum doesn’t hurt when you laugh; you actually want something to eat and can almost smell food; you can walk across the room; you almost feel like yourself. Trust me…I’ve been there!
Jordan's stories are always informative and add to my views of the world we are currently living in. Thank you for all of it. And good luck on your health progress.