The double show of support comes after Biden faced criticism for saying he would skip an upcoming Ukrainian peace summit in #Switzerland to attend an election fundraiser featuring Hollywood stars George #Clooney and Julia #Roberts instead.
“Chief Justice John #Roberts on Thursday declined an invitation to meet with Democratic senators to talk about Supreme Court ethics and the controversy over flags that flew outside homes owned by Justice Samuel #Alito.” #SCOTUS
"Alito’s misconduct also brings Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who heads an entire branch of government, to an inflection point. If he does nothing, Roberts is complicit in the destruction of the court’s reputation. Such spinelessness might even snatch from Roger B. Taney, the author of the majority opinion in Dred Scott, the title of “worst chief justice ever.”" https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/05/26/alito-durbin-supreme-court/
@br00t4c
I don't know if #ChiefJustice#Roberts has any power to regulate the High Court, but someone needs to impress upon him the fact The Roberts Court is in danger of going down in history as "the most #corrupt, regressive #SCotUS in American history."
The fascists believed that you have to destroy to create,
and this is what a second Trump administration would do.
Project 2025 is a plan for an authoritarian takeover of the United States that goes by a deceptively neutral name.
It preserves Trumpism’s original radical intent in its goals to “[d]ismantle the administrative state” and “decentralize and privatize as much as possible,” allowing the American people to “live freely.”
“[T]he Trump administration, with the best of intentions, simply got a slow start,” Heritage Foundation head #Kevin#Roberts told The New York Times in January. “And Heritage and our allies in Project 2025 believe that must never be repeated.”
The solution to this “slow start”
—code for the restraints imposed by operating in a democracy
—is counterrevolution.
The plan promises the abolition of the Department of Education and other federal agencies.
The intent here is to destroy the legal and governance cultures of liberal democracy and create new bureaucratic structures,
staffed by new politically vetted cadres,
to support autocratic rule.
So new agencies could appear to manage parents’ and family rights, Christian affairs, and other pillars of the new order.
🔥The Department of Health and Human Services is poised to have a central role in governance, 👉😱given the priorities Trumpism places on policing sexuality, weaponizing motherhood, persecuting transgender people and LGBTQ communities, and criminalizing abortion.
Organizations within his network have reportedly funded at least 40 groups advising Project 2025, per NBC News.
Leo is also linked to Project 2025 co-author #Roger#Severino
—VP of Domestic Policy at Heritage
—who served as the Director of the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under Trump.
Severino began his career at the “Becket Fund for Religious Liberty” where Leo sits on the board of directors.
Severino is one half of a “Catholic Right” power couple.
The other half is Leonard Leo protégé Carrie Severino, who previously clerked for Becket and Clarence Thomas.
It was Roger Severino who wrote the section of Project 2025 outlining a plan to withdraw the FDA’s approval of the abortion pill (mifepristone),
which is also under attack in a case pending before the Supreme Court.
If the religious right fails to convince the Supreme Court, Project 2025 is their “Plan B” (pun intended).
Leo and his network are also linked to #Kevin#Roberts,
a rabidly partisan fundamentalist Catholic activist,
who has served as president of Heritage since 2021.
In 2020, Roberts had been featured on the Resources page of “WhereYouAre,” which calls itself a “collaboration of people in touch with … centers of Opus Dei in Texas.”
#Opus#Dei is a “small but powerful” group “within the Catholic Church” whose members “abide by strict conservative teachings''
and “believe they are called to serve God” not only in their personal lives, but also in their professions, per the Australian Broadcasing Center.
Many of Opus Deis’ members keep their membership a secret.
Leo reportedly belongs to Opus Dei.
Leo also sits on the Napa Legal Institute’s board of directors,
a faith based organization whose chairman of the board is #Timothy#Busch,
one of Leo’s closest allies.
Bush co-founded Napa Legal’s sister organization, the Napa Institute, whose annual conference in July 2022 included Kevin Roberts as a speaker. Leo is a Napa Institute donor.
In December that year, Busch announced that the Napa Institute would open an office near the U.S. Capitol within the headquarters of the Eternal World Television Network (EWTN),
a global Catholic-themed television and radio network.
The month before, Kevin Roberts had been interviewed during an EWTN broadcast where he called himself an abortion “purist”
and said that he wanted “not a single abortion happening in this country.”
Roberts reconnected with Leo’s network in 2023 when he spoke during “A Duty to God and Country,”
an event organized by the Catholic Information Center (CIC) and Napa Institute.
As noted, Leo sits on CIC’s board of directors.
Meanwhile, Project 2025 (Heritage) Director #Paul#Dans belongs to the New York chapter of the Federalist Society, which is co-chaired by Leo at the national level,
while #Steve#Bannon, Project 2025’s unofficial media partner, has served with Leo on the board of directors of Reclaim New York (founded by #Rebekah#Mercer).
Bannon, you may recall, has closely aligned himself with proponents of the so-called “rad trad” (radical traditional) Catholicism movement
and specifically said that he wants to destroy the administrative state,
an express goal of Project 2025.
As observed by Media Matters, Bannon has repeatedly used his War Room perch to normalize Project 2025’s radical agenda.
How Leonard Leo Weaponized the Courts Against Democracy | The Nation
The Federalist Society, formed in 1982, was the perfect vehicle for forging a right-wing legal cadre and funneling it into the legal system.
Leonard Leo joined the Federalist Society in 1986, forming a chapter of the group at Cornell where he was studying law.
As he rose in the ranks, Leo was an important player in the political campaigns to win Senate approval for Supreme Court justices such as Clarence #Thomas, John #Roberts, and Samuel #Alito.
During the Bush administration, when the Department of Justice wanted to “launder and distribute” a white paper in support of a contentious nominee, they turned to Leo.
Viet Dinh, a Department of Justice official who was also a prominent member of the Federalist Society, e-mailed, ”Tell len leo [sic] I need this distributed asap.”
The Federalist Society was thus organically tied to the Republican Party:
When nominees ran into headwinds, Leo would lead the charge with media campaigns to rally support.
By 2016, the role of the Federalist Society as the essential gatekeeper of Republican judicial nominees was recognized by presidential candidate #Trump, who promised the right-wing base, “We’re going to have great judges, conservative, all picked by the Federalist Society.”
The network Leo brought together comprises three cords:
♦️the GOP (which needed conservative judges),
♦️the legal profession (where young lawyers were hungry for a pathway to judges),
♦️and plutocratic donors (eager for judges that supported plutocracy and right-wing politics).
💰Money was a crucial component of this network.
George Conway, a former Republican who had been active in the Federalist Society, told ProPublica,
“There was always a concern that Scalia or Thomas would say, ‘Fuck it,’ and quit the job and go make way more money at Jones Day [a big law firm] or somewhere else.
Part of what Leonard does is he tries to keep them happy so they stay on the job.”
This explains the luxurious lifestyle enjoyed by right-wing judges as they vacation and cavort with robber barons such as Harlan #Crow and Paul #Singer.
The judges get to enjoy the lifestyle of the 1 percent despite earning a government salary.
While the Supreme Court is the big prize, the conservative legal movement that Leo forged worked to reshape lower courts as well as state courts, helping to promote not just right-wing judges but also district attorneys.
Sometimes the lobbying was demagogic. Politico reports,
Leo became interested in Wisconsin in 2008.
An incumbent state Supreme Court justice, Louis #Butler, had angered the state’s largest business group with his ruling in a lead paint case.
The ensuing ad campaign was contentious and expensive, featuring commercials showing Butler, who is Black, next to the picture of a sex offender who was also Black.
The #racist demagoguery of that judicial race is of a piece with the way Republican jurists have so often worked to curtail voting rights.
The whole claim that #originalism was meant to enhance democracy has been revealed as a fraud.
The same #antidemocratic tendency can be seen in the way the court is working to limit president Biden’s agenda, as in the recent decision in
👉Biden v. Nebraska overturning student debt relief—a measure that was in the Democratic Party platform when Biden won the election.
The goal was to create an ideologically committed faction that could dominate the courts and advance its agenda without democratic check.
With the stroke of their pens, six unelected Supreme Court justices blocked student debt relief, ended affirmative action, and made it easier to discriminate against LGBTQ+ people
What happened to the belief that the Supreme Court had no role in legislating?
This, you might say, is the Roberts two-step. He takes racism, a system of subjugation and social control, and removes the racists. What’s left is the mark of racism, that is, race.
To remove racism and racists from the equation is to pretend that there’s no social force to push against — no inequality to rectify. Instead, there is only a quality, race, that Roberts says the Constitution cannot recognize.
Article- Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez raised the possibility that Congress should consider subpoenaing Chief Justice John Roberts if he stands by his refusal to testify about ethical questions hanging over the high court....
This case should have been thrown out immediately. The web designer never had any gay potential clients. She literally imagined herself being victimized in order to allow this illegitimate SCOTUS to codify discrimination.
It all boils down to the fact that the SCOTUS views people who are LGBTQ as a group for whom it is legally acceptable to discriminate against.
@TonyStark#Roberts, always spiffily groomed in proper airs of integrity just so, didn’t think anyone would spot the irregularities so close to Independence Day. Afterall, the web designer would gladly do work for anyone, except those she disagrees with of course. Colombo, wasn’t around in his bedraggled raincoat turning back, with a puzzled downward pause to look up apologetically say: One more thing.
We've all had a day or two to process what the Supreme Court just did.
The battle for our country and for the rule of law, not of oligarchs, lies ahead of us. Let us recommit to it now, and with grave determination resolve to turn this tide back in 2024.
AOC urges Congress to consider 'subpoenas' if Chief Justice Roberts won't testify about SCOTUS gift scandal (www.businessinsider.com)
Article- Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez raised the possibility that Congress should consider subpoenaing Chief Justice John Roberts if he stands by his refusal to testify about ethical questions hanging over the high court....