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Thursday
How to describe Leonard Leo, arguably the man most responsible for the rightwing tilt of the current Supreme Court? Perhaps by comparing him to Professor Moriarty.
It is with Moriarty imagery that Greg Olear of the blog Prevail uses to describe Leo. But first, let’s look what Leo has done. Here’s Olear:
Leonard Leo, 56, has made himself one of the most powerful figures in the United States. He’s put five—count ‘em, five!—justices on the Supreme Court: Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, Sam Alito, and John Roberts. A sixth, Clarence Thomas, is one of his closest friends. And, perhaps most impressively, he quietly led the 2016 crusade to deny Merrick Garland a hearing, when Barack Obama nominated the highly-regarded jurist to replace the late Antonin Scalia (another of Leo’s pals). In the lower courts, he’s been even busier. He’s installed so many judges on so many courts, it makes you wonder if he really is the instrument of God’s will he believes himself to be. I mean, there are only three branches of government. One of those three—arguably the most important one—is Leonard Leo’s domain.
How does Leo wield so much power? Olear explains that his secret lies in networking:
Like an invasive cancer, Leonard Leo has metastasized from the Federalist Society to the broader conservative legal community. He knows anyone and everyone, from John Roberts to Mick Mulvaney to Ed Whelan to Seamus Hasson to Nina Shea to the sommelier at Morton’s who pours out the vino. Despite being a generation younger, he was good friends with the late Antonin Scalia and remains tight with Clarence Thomas…. He delights in pulling the marionette strings.
And now for the Moriarty imagery:
But it’s the financial networking that moves the needle. Leo sits like a giant spider at the center of a complicated web of non-profits and PACs and 501-whatevers: The Federalist Society, which identifies, develops, and grooms future conservative judges. The Judicial Crisis Network, the PR arm of the operation. The Becket Fund, a legal outfit that does pro bono work for religious freedom cases. The Freedom and Opportunity Fund, which helped bankroll the Brett Kavanaugh nomination hoo-ha. Reclaim New York, a charity Leo set up in 2013 with Rebekah Mercer and Steve Bannon The Council for National Policy, the Christian coalition group. And God knows how many others.
Olear notes that “for non-profits, these entities sure do rake in the cash.” In the case of his association with Mercer and Bannon, according to a Washington Post article, they pulled in a quarter of a billion dollars in dark money.
Holmes too compares his archnemesis to a giant spider:
He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. He sits motionless, like a spider in the center of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them. He does little himself. He only plans. But his agents are numerous and splendidly organized. Is there a crime to be done, a paper to be abstracted, we will say, a house to be rifled, a man to be removed—the word is passed to the Professor, the matter is organized and carried out. The agent may be caught. In that case money is found for his bail or his defense. But the central power which uses the agent is never caught—never so much as suspected. This was the organization which I deduced, Watson, and which I devoted my whole energy to exposing and breaking up.
Like Leo, few people have heard of Moriarty. Certainly Watson hasn’t, prompting Holmes to exclaim,
Aye, there’s the genius and the wonder of the thing! The man pervades London, and no one has heard of him. That’s what puts him on a pinnacle in the records of crime.
And in fact Leo, like Moriarty, is fairly unassuming. Olear describes him as “a short, foppish, pear-shaped man, in wire-rimmed glasses and pricey suits. Think a dandier George Constanza.” Meanwhile, we have the following description of Moriarty from Holmes:
He is extremely tall and thin, his forehead domes out in a white curve, and his two eyes are deeply sunken in his head. He is clean-shaven, pale, and ascetic-looking, retaining something of the professor in his features. His shoulders are rounded from much study, and his face protrudes forward, and is forever slowly oscillating from side to side in a curiously reptilian fashion.
Leo is as much a threat to social order as Moriarty. In a Daily Beast article, Jay Michaelson notes that Leo believes that
most of the New Deal and administrative state are unconstitutional, that corporations have free speech and free religion rights, that women and LGBT people are not ‘protected classes’ under constitutional law, and that there is no right to privacy implied by the due process clause of the Constitution (i.e., banning abortion, contraception, and gay marriage are entirely constitutional).
Whether we see Joe Biden as our Sherlock Holmes or whether we see ourselves, the voters, as the bulwark against a Moriarty victory, the occasion calls for the steadfastness and smarts of Doyle’s great detective. The 2024 election is shaping up to be our Reichenbach Falls moment.