Leonard Leo, best known as the architect of the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority, is not happy about President Joe Biden belatedly proposing reforms to rein in an increasingly lawless, right-wing policy factory.
“No conservative justice has made any decision in any big case that surprised anyone, so let’s stop pretending this is about undue influence,” Leo wrote in a statement blasted out to reporters. “It’s about Democrats destroying a court they don’t agree with.”
Alex Aronson, executive director at the watchdog Court Accountability, says: “Leo’s mindset goes a long way toward explaining why Americans have lost so much faith in our Supreme Court. Rather than fulfill their oaths to the Constitution and serve as neutral ‘umpires’ as they pledged to do, Leo all but admits that the justices he and Trump installed have been reliable servants of the far-right agenda.”
Throughout Biden’s presidency, the nation’s highest court has been on a rampage — ending Roe v. Wade so that states can ban abortion; rolling back climate rules; limiting protections for LGBTQ Americans; ending college affirmative action policies; invalidating common gun regulations; allowing companies to provide thank-you payments to corrupt politicians; and providing Donald Trump sweeping immunity from prosecution.
The Supreme Court has continued on this path amid an unprecedented ethics crisis, as reporters have exposed some of the justices for accepting and failing to disclose luxury gifts — private jet flights, superyacht trips, and more — from conservative donors.
Leo, who helped Trump pick and install three justices — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett — leads a dark money network that ran PR campaigns to promote the confirmation of those justices as well as John Roberts and Samuel Alito. His network, which received a historic $1.6 billion donation in 2021, also finances politicians and nonprofits that bring cases to the high court and urge justices to issue conservative, precedent-shattering rulings in those cases.
Leo has also played a key role in some of the court’s biggest scandals: He reportedly arranged Alito’s seat on a private jet flight to Alaska paid for by a billionaire with business before the court, and he also reportedly steered secret consulting payments to Justice Clarence Thomas’ wife. Leo has refused to comply with a Senate subpoena demanding he detail gifts and payments he has directed to justices and their spouses.
The slate of reforms that Biden proposed Monday is a relatively modest answer to the justices’ conduct and the dark money sloshing around the high court: term limits for justices, a constitutional amendment to overturn the court’s dangerous immunity ruling, and the creation of a binding, enforceable ethics code.
In his statement, Leo characterized Biden’s proposal as “a campaign to destroy a court that [Democrats] disagree with.” He suggested that if Biden “were truly serious about ethics reform, then they would ban all gifts and hospitality of any kind to any public official in any branch of government, starting with Congress, where the real corruption is.” (Gifts to lawmakers are already tightly restricted.) Leo also suggests barring lawmakers from accepting payments for speeches, which Congress did three decades ago.
Responding to Leo’s statement, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) noted that “Congress can’t take those sorts of secret freebies.”
Some of Leo’s suggestions to Democrats for how to crack down on corruption read like a tacit admission: “With respect to judges,” he wrote, “they would include the things where influence peddling is most present and dangerous — and that’s when the liberal justices rub shoulders with influencers at places like law schools, bar associations, progressive think tanks and their conferences, and other groups and events funded by left-wing billionaires, where they support real vested interests in the work of the [Supreme] Court.”
If you substitute the terms “left-wing” and “progressive” for “right-wing,” Leo’s statement suddenly describes exactly how he and conservative billionaires have swarmed the judiciary with dark money, and how they managed to establish a lucrative incentive system that rewards judges for being — and remaining — arch conservative ideologues.
Leo is a co-chair of the Federalist Society, the conservative lawyers organization, and his network donates millions annually to the group. Leo also has a close affiliation with George Mason University, having brokered a $20 million anonymous gift to rename the GMU law school after the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016.
As this reporter previously documented at The Lever, GMU and the Federalist Society routinely pay to send judges to conferences and seminars at ritzy locations around the country and the globe — and they do so far more than any other group. There is no competition from liberals or even nonpartisan sources.
GMU and the Federalist Society sent more than 100 federal judges on 251 trips from 2021-2022. These organizations have no competition whatsoever from liberal groups or even nonpartisan sources.
The story doesn’t stop there: GMU has also paid three Supreme Court justices to teach classes in recent years. As The New York Times reported, these classes can look and sound like free vacations, but they come with paychecks approaching $30,000, or the maximum amount of outside income that justices are permitted to accept.
In closing out his statement, Leo again tells Biden and lawmakers what to do. “Let me clear: If Democrats want to adopt an across the board ethics ban for all branches, I am in favor of that: no jets, no meals, no speaking honorariums, no gifts for anyone from anyone for any reason in any branch, starting with Congress,” he writes.
You might be wondering… Did anyone ask this unelected political operative what types of ethics reforms he would or would not be OK with? Unclear.
But if Leo wants to dish on where the real corruption lurks in the judiciary, and says law schools are where influence peddling is most present and dangerous, we should listen — closely. He knows what he’s talking about.
More from Rolling Stone
Best of Rolling Stone
Source Agencies
