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Monday
On this anniversary of the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v Wade, it is becoming increasingly clear that our highest court is in the grip of rightwing billionaires. To describe what has happened, Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D), who keeps a close eye on SCOTUS matters, has invoked an image that he may have borrowed from Sherlock Holmes.
The image was of a spider at the center of a “dark money web.” In a speech before Congress last September, Whitehouse identified the spider as Leonard Leo:
This is the 18th time that I have come to the floor to expose the dark money scheme that has captured and controlled our Supreme Court. Over the last 2 years, I have, over and over, exposed how dark money operatives, working from the shadows, have installed Supreme Court Justices handpicked—handpicked—by the minions of far-right donors. I have exposed the key front groups through which this Court-packing operation is driven and the tactics that the schemers have used to hide the dark money donors who pull its strings. And when you take a close look at the scheme, the little spider that you find at the center of the dark money web behind it is a character named Leonard Leo.
According to Wikipedia, Leo has been vice president and a board member of the Federalist Society, a rightwing legal organization, as well as one who “has been instrumental in building a network of influential conservative legal groups funded mostly by anonymous donors.” He has played a key role in getting the six conservative justices on the Supreme Court. Kate Riga of The Weekend recently seconded Whitehouse’s accusation and his spider metaphor when she commented on the latest reports of Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito hobnobbing with billionaires:
In a perfect encapsulation of today’s right-wing judicial movement, one figure keeps cropping up in these reports: the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo. Like a bespeckled spider, he sits at the center of his web, waiting to dangle a private jet ride or a yacht trip or a ludicrously massive salmon before anyone who has the power and amenability to help craft his world order.
Whitehouse’s speech elaborates on Leo’s machinations:
Leo coordinated the dark money propaganda machine that kept the heat on Senate Republicans to confirm those nominees, and he supported the big donors’ doctrine factories where donor-approved fringe legal doctrines are concocted for the anointed judges to weaponize from the Bench. Look no further than the recent West Virginia v. EPA decision weaponizing the doctrine factory-concocted major questions’ doctrine. And this was no small scheme. The latest estimate from earlier this year is that these big donors put $580 million, more than half a billion dollars, into Leo’s network of Court-capture front groups.
And this:
Last month, ProPublica and the New York Times broke the news that a reclusive, far-right billionaire supercharged Leo’s dark money operation with a $1.6 billion donation to a Leo front group. You heard that right, $1.6 billion into this dark money operation.
The Leonard Leo in the Sherlock Holmes stories is Moriarty. We encounter the spider analogy in the detective’s description of his arch nemesis:
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.
Read in one way, this description sounds like hysterical paranoia. Crazy conspiracy theorists, after all, are noted for attributing everything bad happening in the world to one individual or organization, say, George Soros or “the deep state.” Since, however, this is Sherlock Holmes, who is famous for solving crimes by finding an underlying pattern to seemingly disparate elements, we accept it. Leonard Leo, meanwhile, is nowhere near as invisible as Moriarty as he uses billionaires’ money to achieve the dream of a reactionary society.
Can he be defeated the way Holmes defeats Moritarty? It takes all of Holmes’s powers to vanquish the fiendish math professor:
But the Professor was fenced round with safeguards so cunningly devised that, do what I would, it seemed impossible to get evidence which would convict in a court of law. You know my powers, my dear Watson, and yet at the end of three months I was forced to confess that I had at last met an antagonist who was my intellectual equal. My horror at his crimes was lost in my admiration at his skill. But at last he made a trip—only a little, little trip—but it was more than he could afford when I was so close upon him. I had my chance, and, starting from that point, I have woven my net round him until now it is all ready to close.
The “little, little trip” in Alito’s case was a luxury fishing vacation with rightwing billionaires. Clarence Thomas, meanwhile, has been treated to luxury vacations by billionaire Republican Harlan Crow. The question is whether these trips will be trips in the Holmes sense—which is to say, revelations that lead to serious change, such as expanding the court or applying term limits. Such changes will not happen, of course, unless Democrats control both Congress and the presidency, but the behavior of rightwing justices has been so egregious and the rulings so out of line with the American public that Democrats are more likely to act if they ever get the chance.
It’s either that or Watson taking up his pen with heavy heart to record democracy’s obituary.