A Newsletter With An Eye On Political Media from The American Prospect
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A NEWSLETTER WITH AN EYE ON POLITICAL MEDIA

The Billion-Dollar Campaign for Right-Wing Extremist Judges

The man who reshaped the Supreme Court has just been handed $1.6 billion
to degrade every other court.

It's easy to be nostalgic for the days before the GOP went
collectively insane, though we shouldn't ignore the early signs for
the onset of the mass political dementia that has since resulted. A
number of books have recently been published making the "plus ça
change, plus c'est la même chose
"
argument in search of Trumpism's antecedents. The most substantive of
these appears to be Nicole Hemmer's Partisans
,
which places Pat Buchanan as the one present at the creation with his
"better in the original German" (credit: Molly Ivins) 1992
Republican National Convention speech. Dana Milbank's The
Destructionists

begins with Newt Gingrich's takeover of the House in 1994. I've only
seen an excerpt from David Corn's American Psychosis
,
and that piece began with Dwight Eisenhower's decision not to renounce
Joe McCarthy. Corn includes dialogue on that point that I could not
locate for my 2020 book, Lying in State
,
and I've not received the book yet-Mother Jones does not have
footnotes-so I must reserve judgment.

That said, even leaving aside the peculiarly nutty nature of the Trump
movement's beliefs, one problem that has always been with us-I'm
guessing since the beginning of time-and always will be is the power
of money in politics. It's a problem everywhere and impossible to
eliminate in its entirety. But as with so many such phenomena, we've
allowed powerful forces in our politics to do virtually everything
possible to make it worse.

The most important culprit in this story is the Supreme Court majority,
led by Anthony Kennedy, whose decision in the 2010 Citizens United

case opened the door to literally limitless spending by corporations and
the super-wealthy to bend the body politic to their collective whim and
will.

The catastrophic consequences of that decision are literally everywhere
around us but nowhere more evident than-wait for it-on the Supreme
Court. With approximately $250 million spent on injecting far-right
legal notions into both the legal and political worlds between 2014 and
2017 alone, Leonard Leo's Federalist Society has remade the Court into
a reactionary force that will almost certainly be successful in
stymieing the will of the vast majority of the American people in almost
all important respects. (Clarence Thomas once joked [observed?
celebrated?] about Leo as the "number three most powerful person in
the world .") Now, Leo
appears to be preparing to destroy the foundations of democracy itself,
and he has the money to do it.

Leo has left the day-to-day management of the Federalist Society with
its relatively meager budgets to set up something he is calling the
"Marble Freedom Trust," buoyed by an incredible $1.6 billion
donation from the secretive right-wing billionaire Barre Seid (who
managed to avoid all taxes on his earnings by another complicated
maneuver that bespeaks the power of the wealthy and corporate elite to
write laws that serve them and screw the rest of us). The details in
this deep dive by ProPublica and The Lever

into Leo's new gig are eye-popping in every respect. They report that
the trust is a "dark money group that is not required to publicly
disclose its donors. It has wide latitude to spend directly on elections
as well as on ideological projects such as funding issue-advocacy
groups, think tanks, universities, religious institutions and organizing
efforts."

You've probably never heard of Seid before this. I hadn't. But he
appears to be the donor
(listed
as "Barry Seid") who gave $17 million to fund the distribution
during the 2008 presidential campaign of millions of copies of a DVD of
the deeply Islamophobic film Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against
the West. He is also a prime candidate to be the anonymous donor

who supplied Leo and company with $28 million

in 2016 to block Obama Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland's
confirmation, among countless other nefarious causes and false claims.

[link removed]

Leo and the Federalists received free rein from Trump to choose his
judges, whereupon he picked not only a third of the U.S. Supreme Court,
but also 54 members of the circuit appeals courts and 174 district court
judges (or about 30 percent). He's done so, no surprise, with people
like his latest BFF, the profoundly unqualified Judge Aileen Cannon
,
who would be better placed in a home for the (I'm being polite here)
dangerously delusional rather than a court of law. Politico, deploying
language designed to be extra-nice and nonjudgmental, noted some of the,
um, strange decisions

reached by Trump's team of underqualified, ideologically obsessed
Senate-approved nominees. They included:

* A Trump appointee in Arkansas ruled in February that the Voting Rights
Act can't be enforced by private individuals or groups
,
despite more than five decades of such litigation.

* Another Trump appointee in Florida canceled scheduled arguments in a
challenge to the federal mandate for mask use in transportation, then
rushed out a decision striking down the requirement

just days before it was set to expire.

* Yet another Trump-appointed federal judge in Texas blocked the Biden
administration from lifting pandemic-related immigration restrictions

Trump imposed in 2020.

Chief Justice Roberts claims, "That independent judiciary is something
we should all be thankful for." This is nonsense. Roberts has lost
control of the crazies on his Court and is trying to save face by
playing its pitchman
.

Now, with his unprecedented stash of political cash, Leo has indicated
what would only recently have been an unimaginably ambitious agenda. The
Roberts Court has already ruled that federal courts cannot do anything
about partisan gerrymandering
.
Now, the Supreme Court accepted a case for review

in which it may give Republican state legislatures the power to overturn
the votes of their citizens in order to hand the election to their
losing candidate. (That's an almost unforgivably simplistic-yet
accurate-description. Read Judd Legum's post on "the radical legal
theory that could upend the 2024 election
" for a
précis of all that is at stake.)

Axios reported back in January on Leo's plans to "funnel tens of
millions of dollars into conservative fights around the country
."
That number sounds quaint in light of Seid's gift of $1.6 billion.
Having succeeded so far with a relatively meager investment in remaking
the federal courts-there are 870 such positions-he now appears to be
readying his massive war chest to go after the more than 30,000 state
court judgeships. Whether appointed or elected, it does not matter.
Money does its magic in both arenas.

There is only one solution to this problem and it's simple and
obvious, though "responsible" Democrats and pundits continue to rule
it out: Abolish the filibuster, expand the Senate (to the District of
Columbia and Puerto Rico), and most importantly, expand the Supreme
Court and the rest of the federal courts. Remember, one-third of each
were appointed by a madman criminal traitor conspiracy nut who, if there
is any justice at all in this world, will be serving in federal prison
by the time this crucial work to save democracy is done.

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I've been listening to the massive CD box set recently released to
celebrate the history of Blondie, Against the Odds: 1974-1982. It
contains all six of their albums and another four more of outtakes and
rarities (which you can buy separately if you don't want or already
have the albums), along with a book of liner notes featuring new
interviews with every band member, a 120-page annotated discography, and
some other stuff.

It's not easy to recall the excitement inspired by the weird and
wonderful hybrid that was Blondie when I was a teenager: Imagine a band
with a punk sensibility-schooled at CBGB-but writing classic pop
hits and fronted (and named for) a singer with almost impossible Marilyn
Monroe looks and sensuality. Their prescient forays into reggae, disco
beats, and rap, and "heavy rotation" on MTV, helped to make all
three kosher for white, mainstream audiences.

Back in the day, the band handed out promotional badges that read,
"BLONDIE IS A GROUP!" but that proved pretty pointless. Blondie, at
least as far as its millions of fans were concerned, was Debbie Harry.
Madonna has called Harry a role model
,
while Harry looked to David Bowie-actually "David Jones"-as
someone who successfully created a complete persona on stage separate
from real life. It's no accident that pre-Blondie Debbie worked as a
model, a secretary for the BBC, a Playboy bunny, a waitress at Max's
Kansas City, and a clerk at a head shop; all those incarnations were up
there on stage and in the videos at the same time. (A 1979 New York
Times profile of Blondie

noted Harry's "disregard for underwear.")

Here they are at their glorious peak in a live performance of "One Way
or Another
"
and state-of-the-art videos for "Hanging on the Telephone
,"
"Heart of Glass
,"
"The Tide Is High
,"
and the barrier-breaking "Rapture
,"
for a taste of what's on this box set, a veritable cornucopia.

Finally, finally, someone unearthed some videos from The Band's
historic 1971 shows at the Academy of Music, where they were joined by
Bob Dylan and formed the basis of "Rock of Ages." They're here
.

See you next week.

~ ERIC ALTERMAN

Become A Member of The American Prospect Today!

Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn
College, an award-winning journalist, and the author of 11 books, most
recently Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie-and Why Trump Is Worse
(Basic, 2020). Previously, he wrote The Nation's "Liberal Media"
column for 25 years. Follow him on Twitter @eric_alterman

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