Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – October 27 2024
by Tony Wikrent
Strategic Political Economy
The Right Believes It Has the Supreme Court Votes to Overturn Labor Law
[In These Times, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 10-22-2024]
“The foundational 1935 labor law protecting workers is unconstitutional, according to major corporations and right-wing zealots who believe they have enough votes on the Supreme Court to overturn it. In the latest sign that anti-union forces will doggedly press the matter, a federal judge for the Northern District of Texas enjoined the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) from processing any allegations of employer violations of workers’ rights. The National Review hailed the decision as ’A Welcome Blow to the NLRB.’ This is after Elon Musk’s SpaceX won a similar injunction against the NLRB before the Western District of Texas in July. Both cases will work their way up to the Fifth Circuit Court, which has served as an expressway to steer anti-regulatory legal appeals to the Supreme Court ever since Trump packed it with right-wing ideologues. ‘I don’t think a lot of labor folks are focused on this right now,’ says Stephen Lerner, a fellow at Georgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor. … ‘This is the culmination of a 50-year anti-union agenda.’… But, in trying to repeal all the rights and protections workers gained during the New Deal, including the limited protections that workers currently enjoy for organizing and engaging in collective bargaining, killing the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (also known as the Wagner Act) would also mean the lifting of a host of restrictions on unions’ ability to carry out solidarity activism and effective economic sanctions. Are unions prepared for a return to ’the law of the jungle?'”
MASTER PLAN Bonus: How Democrats Lost The Courts
[The Lever, October 22, 2024]
In this exclusive Master Plan bonus episode, David Sirota interviews former Senate Leader Tom Daschle, who led Democrats’ fight against George W. Bush’s plan to pack the federal courts with conservative judges — and paid the ultimate political price.
Daschle’s success stalling Republicans’ judicial picks in the Senate made him a prime target of the master planners — so they had him ousted from Congress and filled his South Dakota Senate seat with their own corporate candidate.
Sirota and Daschle discuss the Federalist Society’s influence in transforming the judicial nomination process into an ideological purity test. They also weigh in on the last major campaign finance legislation — the McCain-Feingold Act of 2002 — and whether similar reforms could even be possible in post-Citizens United America.
MASTER PLAN Bonus: The Federalist Society’s “Pipeline For Power”
[The Lever, October 22, 2024]
DAVID SIROTA: ...To understand the roots of the Federalist Society, we spoke with Lisa Graves. She worked in the Department of Justice and on the Senate Judiciary committee and is now the founder of True North Research, a dark money watchdog organization. We heard from Graves briefly in Episode 7, but wanted to share the extended interview she did with producer Laura Krantz. Their conversation began with an overview of the four men who have been integral to the success of the Federalist Society: Ed Meese, C. Boyden Gray, Jay Sekulow, and Leonard Leo.
LISA GRAVES: Ed Meese was there near the beginning of the Federalist Society when it was created in 1981 as I mentioned, and Meese had served as Attorney General under Ronald Reagan. And he is certainly considered one of the fathers, or, you know, godfathers, in essence, of The Federalist Society from that period, and has been active in it throughout this, you know, these past 40 years, in a variety of ways. C. Boyden Gray, the highest role that he had in government was as White House Counsel for George Herbert Walker Bush. He helped select Clarence Thomas for the Supreme Court to replace the great civil rights leader, Thurgood Marshall — he was someone who had an active opposition to civil rights or, you know, core civil rights laws.
Thomas had served in the Reagan administration in the EEOC in a way that many people in civil rights community consider to be destructive, not supportive of that institution. And C. Boyden Gray had a had a key role in that as White House Counsel, but he also had a role in the selection of David Souter to go to the U.S. Supreme Court, and that is the nomination and confirmation of a judge who, you know, is considered to be a Republican or having Republican roots, but he was not sufficiently doctrinaire.
When George W. Bush became president, C. Boyden Gray was not White House Counsel during that period, but he was operating on the outside, and he was seemingly determined to help make sure that, you know, ideologues were put on the bench. And so from the outside of the administration, he launched a thing called the Committee for Justice, CFJ, which was an attack machine to attack the Democrats for opposing any of these Bush nominees who were at the circuit court level, largely drawn from the ranks of The Federalist Society….
... in many ways, this so-called movement that The Federalist Society has been at the helm of was in part in reaction to Brown v. Board of Education, and whether they were going to try to justify it or not, along with opposition to the Roe v. Wade decision, which was built on a really important case called Griswold v. Connecticut, which recognized a right to autonomy in reproductive decisions that states could not limit, for example, women from accessing contraception. And so there's a whole host of decisions by the court in the 20th century, including decisions affirming major public policies like social security and programs to, you know, protect labor rights and more, and the Federalist Society and Leo and these men have you know worked for years to try to undo those precedents by, in part, by this appointment process of personnel being policy….
LISA GRAVES: The Powell Memo expressly targets the courts as a lever of power… Lewis Powell [was] a lawyer for the tobacco industry, he had been instrumental in trying to prevent the federal government from regulating tobacco, despite the fact that the tobacco industry knew full well that its products caused cancer... He also had been a lawyer advising the city of Richmond, as it was contending with Brown v. Board of Education. And though he wasn't the most outspoken of the white segregationists at that time, he helped put forward policies to pave the way for white kids to attend, you know, private institutions in order to not be subject to racial integration.
And in Powell's memo, of the things he wrote was that businesses needed to play a more active role in influencing Congress, in influencing universities and influencing the courts. And he singled out the courts as a particularly important lever of power. And then just 10 years later, The Federalist Society was created. A number of institutions or entities were created in the aftermath of the Powell Memo — the Pacific Legal Foundation, the Heritage Foundation, ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council … there was a concerted effort over the next 10 years to implement the Powell Memo through creating these entities ... and infusing them with cash from sort of proto-billionaires ... to advance an alternate vision for our constitution….
... one of the things that happened was that Leonard Leo became actively involved in trying to destroy the role of the American Bar Association in evaluating potential judicial nominees for the federal bench….
...the Bush administration basically outsourced the pre-selection process to the Federalist Society to Leonard Leo, and they were involved. I know for a fact that they were involved in 2001 in contacting potential circuit court nominees and asking them how they voted. Did they vote for George W. Bush or not? As a precondition, for the Federalist Society recommending them for circuit judgeship….