Guest blog: Larry Ottinger
Alan Davis is on sabbatical, returning to work on April 1, 2024. During this time, his monthly letters will be written by three distinguished colleagues: Gabriela Sandoval, Executive Director of the Excessive Wealth Disorder Institute; Larry Ottinger, civil rights attorney and WhyNot Initiative senior advisor; and Ellen Dorsey, Executive Director of the Wallace Global Fund.
I am Larry Ottinger, or as some have called me “Sancho Panza.” This month we are tilting at the windmill that is the broken and extreme MAGA Supreme Court, created over decades through an unholy alliance of the religious right (which is neither) and their billionaire partisans.
In 2000, as a senior lawyer at People For the American Way, I worked on a report called Courting Disaster: How a Scalia-Thomas Supreme Court Would Endanger Our Rights and Freedoms. The report warned that more justices sharing the views of Justices Scalia and Thomas “would reverse decades of Supreme Court precedents in civil rights, reproductive rights, privacy, separation of church and state, worker and consumer rights, environmental protection, campaign finance reform and more.”
And here we are, living in this dystopian reality where doctors face punishment and patients must flee their states to seek essential reproductive health care while the rights of frozen blastocyst cells used for IVF are assiduously protected…and more.
None of this has happened by accident.
Let’s fly to visit billionaire real estate developer and Republican megadonor Harlan Crow, just as Clarence Thomas has…a lot. Thanks to excellent reporting by Pro Publica, we know that Crow met and befriended Thomas after he already was a justice. And that for more than 20 years thereafter, Crow treated Thomas to luxury vacations consisting of private jets, yachts and more. Thomas “didn’t report any of these trips” as required by law. In total, Crow, along with three more billionaires, “footed the bills for at least 38 destination vacations, 26 private jet flights and eight helicopter flights.”
In addition, Crow bought the home in which Thomas had a 1/3 financial interest and his mother still lives. And Crow paid private school tuition of up to $150,000 for a close Thomas relative. Again, Thomas did not disclose these direct financial relationships and payments.
Why would someone do all of this? Well, if you were a billionaire with no ethical compass would you be willing to pay less than .2 percent of your assets to a justice on the Supreme Court who would remake law and policy in your financial and ideological interest? In early 2000 when he was in personal financial debt, Thomas told a Republican Congressman at a conservative confab that if Congress didn’t act to raise Supreme Court salaries that “one or more justices will leave soon.” A confidential memo documents this warning, described by a top judicial official as a “delicate matter.” To the rescue, enter Crow and other billionaires ponying up to make sure that Thomas would remain on the Court – for more than 32 years in total and counting.
Pro Publica also reported that Justice Alito accepted but did not disclose a luxury Alaskan fishing vacation in 2008, gifted to him by Paul Singer, “a hedge fund billionaire who has repeatedly asked the Supreme Court to rule in his favor in high-stakes business disputes.” Despite these concerning ethics violations, the MAGA Court majority say there’s no problem and act as if they are above the law and not subject to the checks and balances of the other two branches. Last year, Alito told the Wall Street Journal, “No provision in the Constitution gives them [Congress] the authority to regulate the Supreme Court.” That is flatly wrong but there it is, for now.
There’s not enough time or space here to go into how billionaires like Charles and David Koch, Richard Mellon Scaife and the Adolph Coors family funded over decades a network of interlocking think tanks, legal centers and media outlets to take over our courts. Nor how these billionaires funded political operative and longtime Federalist Society leader, Leonard Leo, to serve as a central architect of this takeover, including his longtime partnership with Ginni Thomas to whom he secretly paid up to $100,000 through Kellyanne Conway saying “No mention of Ginni, of course.” In 2021-22, billionaire Barre Seid gave Leo an astounding $1.6 billion (in ways to avoid taxes) to solidify the MAGA takeover of the courts in perpetuity.
Hopefully, these examples help to illustrate how excessive wealth is harming our society and our most important democratic institutions. Working to expose and counter these harmful actions and narratives is a core aim of the Excessive Wealth Disorder Institute (EWDi). In last month’s letter, EWDi’s talented new executive director, Gabriela Sandoval, wrote that EWDi is in the process of adopting CCC as a project.
Consistent with CCC’s focus on encouraging the wealthiest Americans to give at a much higher rate to address ongoing social crises, I would call on pro-democracy donors to give more now to groups promoting Supreme Court reform, which are vastly under-resourced. The Federalist Society alone spends more in one year than all of the pro-democracy Court reform groups combined.
In addition to a current efforts for ethics reform by Democrats in Congress, including to subpoena both Crow and Leo about these matters, Alan and I are supporting an important structural reform proposal for 18-year Supreme Court term limits applied to current and new justices, which has been introduced in Congress by Representative Hank Johnson and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. Stand Up America with the Brennan Center for Justice are leading a coalition comprising more than 40 democracy, organizing and issue-based groups, all recognizing a shared need to rebalance and fix the current dangerous and dysfunctional Court. We believe this proposal can garner broad support from advocates and policy makers alike such that, in furtherance of the Thunderbolt vision, this reform can be ready to go first thing in 2025 for a pro-democracy federal trifecta to enact.
Please join us with your last ounce of courage on this glorious quest!