Who do you think founded Cato.
Apparently he doesn't see his spending as needless. His money built ALEC, which, as you know, offers libertarian-to-neocon templates for non-lawyers in state legislatures that have swung their states to the Right -- like WI, MI, AZ and PA.
Democrats have had to fend off his ALEC crap in these battlegrounds for decades.
He was a Mont Pelerin president, and Frank Knight, one of its founders, was the head of the University of Chicago Economics Dept, which boasted itself the most conservative on the planet, regularly validated by friends influencing the awarding of Nobel prizes. James M Buchanan got one of them; he's the guy who wrote the language of economics that systematically covered up southern institutionalized racism. He's the guy who literally wrote Pinochet's constitution for minority rule.
In the last 20 years, Koch has impacted the federal courts.
Between 1997 and 2017, the Koch brothers gave more than $6 million to the Federalist Society, a nonprofit institute that recruits libertarian and conservative judges for the federal judiciary, according to a tally by the activist group Greenpeace.
Mr. Koch’s efforts on the Supreme Court intensified after Donald Trump’s election, when a Republican-controlled Senate opened the way to install judges who could tip the court’s ideological balance. Americans for Prosperity undertook national campaigns to support President Trump’s previous Supreme Court nominees, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. A.F.P. said the Kavanaugh campaign alone — fliers, digital ads and staff for phone banking and door knocking — ran into “seven figures.”
Now, Americans for Prosperity is doing the same for Judge Barrett. A.F.P. activists are pressuring U.S. senators in several states, with a particular eye toward vulnerable Democrats like West Virginia’s Joe Manchin. The group is also working in Alaska, where Republican Lisa Murkowski has given mixed signals about whether she is willing to vote on Judge Barrett’s nomination before the next president is elected.
Now he's near winning an Article V convention to rewrite OUR Constitution. It will likely have the same required 2/3 vote to create ANY federal laws, or to federally fund pandemic help, national parks privatizations, or climate change crises.
Finally, what will be the public's chances of a 2/3 vote to codify any law that his SCOTUS strikes down.
Legislatures in nine states — Arizona, Georgia, Alaska, Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, Indiana, Oklahoma and Louisiana — have signed on to the Convention of States resolution. Texas appears likely to join in, as the state Senate approved a Convention of States bill in February. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott is fiercely campaigning for a convention and has deemed it an “emergency issue.” In 2016, he published a 70-page plan that includes nine proposed amendments aimed at severely limiting federal authority, even allowing a two-thirds majority of the states to override a Supreme Court ruling or a federal law.
https://billmoyers.com/story/kochs-to-rewrite-constitution/
I'll say this: you might minimize his impact, but Jane Mayer and others wouldn't have written books that center on him and his influence across the oligarchic class if he hadn't intended to capture the United States government. Now we on the other side of his network smokescreen ignore him at our peril.
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