It's a massive agenda to destroy democracy, by inventing an ideology that takes away the people's power but masks it in the ideological baggage they create to make it sound legitimate.
Their most popular name for it overall is the phrase 'original intent', which is a propaganda phrase to imply that only their opinions are the correct ones, that sounds 'respectable' and implies that any other opinions are just 'made up'. They invoke it pretty much only when it's convenient and ignore it when it's not.
Their agenda is to take power from the people, under the pretense of protecting the people from their government - but in fact are taking away the people's power to reign in private power by using the only instrument they have, their government.
So the very ability of the government to regulate in the public interest is constantly a target, being constantly eroded over decades.
But even more importantly, this all goes back to the Nixon era, with the Powell memo, when business began to organize politically more than they ever had - recognizing that their huge advantage in wealth could be converted to political power more than it was.
Lewis Powell was put on the Supreme Court to lead the way on reinterpreting the constitution for this agenda, and he did - soon after, the Buckley v. Vallejo decision was issued, beginning the 'money is speech' doctrine - which means, with further rulings strengthening the same doctrine, the people no longer have the power to restrict the use of money in elections. The right to use unlimited money in elections is now protected as a constitutional right.
This is why for decades we've had these 5-4 rulings between the radical right and the mainstream judges on the court, always the same factions. Including the ruling in 2000 that blocked the recount in Florida that would have correctly resulted in Al Gore being president, a ruling using a bizarre legal standard, which they recognized and so said that their logic could not be used in other cases, though that was just a one-off issue, not their core agenda.
That Nixon era is when a lot of things started turning the country in the wrong direction - when the tools started getting set up for that corporatist agenda. It's when right-wing propaganda factories called 'think tanks' were set up or radicalized, such as Heritage, AEI, Cato, and others.
When the 1980 Carter vs. Reagan election took place, it was entirely paid for by the $3 IRS tax checkoff - public financing. There were fewer than 1,000 lobbyists. Today, a winning candidate has to spend billions - and there are 35,000 lobbbyists, with most of Congress and their staffs entering lobbying when they leave public office - legalized corruption.
Here's an interesting interview with legal expert Jeffrey Toobin from when Neil Gorsuch was put on the court.
http://www.npr.org/2017/04/12/52349...oberts-alito-and-gorsuch-to-the-supreme-court
"TERRY GROSS, HOST:... One man is responsible to a considerable extent for choosing a third of the justices on the Supreme Court, including Neil Gorsuch, who was sworn in Monday. That's what Jeffrey Toobin reports in his latest article in The New Yorker called "The Conservative Pipeline To The Supreme Court." The article is about Leonard Leo, who Toobin says served in effect as president Trump's subcontractor on the selection of Gorsuch. Leo also played a crucial part in the nominations of Justices Roberts and Alito. Leo is executive vice president of The Federalist Society, a national group of conservative lawyers, which Toobin also writes about in his article...
GROSS: The way you're describing it, it makes it sound like Trump went to Leonard Leo and said, give me a list of judges that will make the conservatives like me.
TOOBIN: Exactly. You said it shorter.
GROSS: (Laughter) Is that - are you saying that's what happened?
TOOBIN: You said it shorter than I did, Terry, but that's exactly what he did. I mean - and I think if you listened to conservatives throughout the fall, a lot of whom had a great deal of distaste for Trump personally, they you know, his political history was checkered to say the least, his personal history was more than checkered. But you often heard it - I mean, I heard Paul Ryan say it many times - well, you know, I'm confident that Trump will appoint the right people to the Supreme Court. And they made that bet on Trump. Trump got enormous support in the Republican Party - basically the same or better than Mitt Romney got four years earlier. And I think the fact that he was committed to appointing conservatives to the Supreme Court was a big factor in that. So I think it was a very clever strategy on Trump's part and of course on Leonard Leo's part in essentially being the person who made the list that the president drew from.
GROSS: How did Donald Trump know to go to Leonard Leo to make that list?
TOOBIN: Well, that's really the story that I wrote in The New Yorker is how Leonard Leo, this really - this person who has never held government office, who's never been a law professor, who doesn't give speeches, who doesn't, you know, write books, how he of all people in the world became, in effect, the guy who picked Supreme Court justices for Republican presidents. And it's really the story of the growth of The Federalist Society, which is, you know, it's interesting...
And basically what they do, The Federalist Society, they have funding from all the sort of usual suspects of conservative foundations and sources - the Koch brothers, the Bradley and Olin Foundations. And they hold meetings. They bring in speakers to law schools. They have practice groups in bigger cities. Every November, they have a convention at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. And in part, the purpose is to hold panel discussions, often including liberals, or usually one liberal, to give an opposing point of view. But they give an opportunity for conservatives to network with each other and talk to each other and meet each other and check each other out. And it is out of this informal collaboration more than the formal aspects of the meetings that there becomes known a conservative network of lawyers. And Neil Gorsuch is part of it. John Roberts was part of it Samuel Alito was part of it. Whether you're actually a member of the society doesn't really matter that much. There are only about 70,000 members. But you don't have to be a member to speak there. You don't have to be a member to go to the meetings. And this network, this conservative network that The Federalist Society has cultivated - largely through the work of Leonard Leo - has been a remarkable success in transforming American law.
GROSS: So one of Leonard Leo's jobs at The Federalist Society has been to kind of create a pipeline for students to get to the bench and for people on the federal bench to get to the Supreme Court, people who conservatives approve of because The Federalist Society started more as a student organization and then it became something to channel people to judicial appointments, right?
TOOBIN: That's right. And he's very open about that and very proud of that. And, you know - and he says, look, this is what we want to do. We want you, when you're a law student, to go to Federalist Society events, listen to our guest speakers. We want you to then clerk for a judge who had been a Federalist Society member. And then after you've been practicing for a few years, maybe one of your colleagues will get a job in government and he or she will bring you in. And then ultimately, we will, you know, have a president who will be sympathetic, and that president may appoint you to the bench. And, you know, the pipeline is a very evocative metaphor because Leo wants to basically take a young conservative in law school and groom that person throughout his or her career so that they may wind up to be Neil Gorsuch. And if they don't wind up to be Neil Gorsuch, they'll wind up to be some judge on the 10th Circuit or a district court judge or a member of Congress or a member of the city council in their town. They are a full service pipeline of taking conservative law students and turning them into public figures and public servants...
But I think it is certainly on the right of the party overall, and Neil Gorsuch is on the right of the party. And let me give you an example because this is something that was really a revelation to me in writing the story in The New Yorker, which was, you know, I was very familiar with the idea of originalism and the idea that if you follow Justice Scalia's views of the Constitution, James Madison didn't think he was recognizing gay rights, so there shouldn't be any recognition of gay rights, abortion rights. But there's something deeper that Leonard Leo talks about, and Gorsuch talks about it a little bit, albeit in coded ways. And that's when he talks about the structure of the Constitution. This has become a big buzz word in conservative circles in recent years, the structure of the Constitution. And by that, he means that the different branches of government have clearly and narrowly defined roles. And if they stray outside the lines, it's the job of the courts to discipline the other branches of government.
Now, what does this mean in practical terms? What it means is that the courts are going to limit the power of government in efforts to address problems. The most obvious, dramatic were the Obamacare lawsuits. Remember, there was one lawsuit that said Congress did not have the power under the Commerce Clause to establish the individual mandate, the requirement that people buy insurance. There was another lawsuit that said the text of the Obamacare law didn't allow for the marketplaces to - the insurance marketplaces to work. Both of those were very structural arguments that said unless the Constitution specifically authorizes the government to do something, the government can't do it. And unless a law specifically authorizes the government to take a certain action, the government can't do it. All of that, traditionally, the courts had said, look, we want to give the government, Congress, the executive branch, leeway to operate. We want to give them leeway to address the problems in the society.
What the structure arguments mean is that the power of government is limited in a much stricter way than previous judges have seen. So what these lawyers in The Federalist Society are trying to do is use the court to limit not just abortion rights, not just gay rights, not just affirmative action, the traditional issues, but to limit the power of government all together to address problems. And that is potentially the most dramatic change of all. And that's where you might see Neil Gorsuch assert his influence in the most direct way.
GROSS: Give us an example of what kind of laws and decisions we'd be talking about.
TOOBIN: Environmental laws. Congress writes laws - the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act - but they're, necessarily, very broad laws. And they delegate the powers to administrative agencies to enforce those laws, specifically the Environmental Protection Agency.
Neil Gorsuch, his great intellectual interest and judicial interest is what's called the nondelegation doctrine, which is basically saying to administrative agencies, unless the law you operate under specifically authorizes you to limit the following six chemicals, we, the courts, are not going to allow you to limit that. Then Congress has to act very specifically or the administrative agency can't act at all.
Now, of course, Congress is not an administrative agency. They don't have the resources, the knowledge, the time to evaluate each chemical that might be harmful. They simply say, regulate harmful chemicals. This is what - limiting the power of administrative agencies in the environmental area is a classic demonstration of how the nondelegation doctrine, how these structural arguments could work.
As I mentioned before, the Obamacare cases were very much structural arguments. Congress doesn't have the power to issue the individual mandate. The executive branch doesn't have the power under the law to establish the marketplaces. Now, of course, the Obamacare cases were won by the Obama administration in the Supreme Court, albeit narrowly. But if you see the trends of where the court is going, certainly those cases might well have come out the other way."
