Dahlia Lithwick's article: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/06/justice-alito-fishing-trip-real-prize.html
Sheldon Whitehouse has been on this issue for years now. Love him! More reading:
This member of Congress wants everyone to know about the 'dark money scheme' that's 'captured' the Supreme Court | Nov 20, 2021
https://www.businessinsider.com/sheldon-whitehouse-fighting-to-end-dark-money-at-supreme-court-2021-11
https://archive.ph/QMyIg
The trend is only continuing, according to Whitehouse. What he finds most troubling is an increase in the number of legal briefs, known as amicus briefs, that are filed without any financial disclosure to convince the justices to rule a certain way.
"The rule of the court purports to say that you can't hide behind a front group. There's almost no other situation in court where somebody is allowed to come in and not identify themselves, and yet there is conspicuous non-enforcement of that rule, and it deprives the public of seeing the coordination among the phony front groups," Whitehouse said, adding that he doesn't "understand why the court doesn't clean that up itself."
In the current term, hundreds of briefs tied to a slew of contentious cases have been filed to the Supreme Court. One highly-watched case, concerning a Mississippi law that bans abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, has attracted dozens of briefs that express support for or opposition to the law.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse Wants You to Know Why SCOTUS Is FUBAR | Feb 22, 2022
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/02/sheldon-whitehouse-scheme-scotus-supreme-court-right-wing-conservative-capture-influence/
The thread running through Whitehouse’s spoken essays is that the current 6-3 conservative majority on the court is no accident but the product of special interests and dark money—hundreds of millions of dollars in anonymous hidden spending.
Whitehouse chose his title carefully. “It implies that this is not random,” he says. “This is not just, ‘Oh, we’re conservatives, and so we’re going to appoint conservative thinking judges,’ which is the veneer. They would like to maintain this is just conservatives being conservatives.”
He suggests that the model of “agency capture,” when an administrative agency is co-opted to serve the interests of a minor constituency, was applied to the supreme court. “Once you’re over that threshold of indecency, it actually turned out to be a pretty easy target. The other construct to bear in mind is covert operations, because essentially what’s happened is that a bunch of fossil fuel billionaires have run a massive covert operation in and against their own country. And that’s a scheme.”
Who Is Leonard Leo’s Mysterious Dark Money King? | May 16, 2023
America needs to know who Barre Seid is, what kind of country he wants—and just how massive an impact a gift of that size can have on our political discourse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Leo
https://newrepublic.com/article/172480/barre-seid-leonard-leo-dark-money-king
https://archive.ph/FEdNK
A few months before the midterms, with pollsters spewing red wave predictions and post-Roe conservatives planning to force raped children to give birth, a bit of political news added to progressives’ gloom. A Chicago billionaire had gifted anti-abortion Supreme Court fixer Leonard Leo the largest known tranche of dark money in U.S. history: $1.6 billion. The sum is staggering; it will finance at least a generation of extreme right-wing political proselytizing. And almost no one—except for the conservative cabal that bagged the whale—had heard of him.
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