Was todays Supreme Court built by Dark Money

The Federalist Society has emerged as gatekeeper, of the Supreme Court monitoring Republican-appointed judges for allegiance to right-wing donor interests, while accepting gobs of anonymous donations. Political attack dogs in the confirmation fights for Federalist Society-approved judges, funded by anonymous donations as big as $17 million.

Secretly-funded groups, like The Judicial Crisis Network and Citizens United, also began to lobby the court in orchestrated flotillas — through so-called "friend of the court" briefs — signaling which cases are important to donor interests and advising judges which way the donors want them to rule. They have a perfect winning record.

It's a recognition that the evidence shows a pattern whenever certain interests come before the court. How strong a pattern? During Chief Justice John Roberts' tenure, the Court has issued more than 80 partisan decisions, by either a 5-4 or 6-3 vote, involving big interests important to Republican Party major donors. Republican-appointed justices have handed wins to the donor interests in every single case. Decisions that greenlit rampant voter suppression and bulk gerrymandering (Shelby County v. Holder and Husted v. Randolph Institute)

This pattern did not just happen. It is the fruit of a half-century-long operation by right-wing donors to win through the Supreme Court what they can't win through elected branches of government. In 1971, a corporate attorney from Virginia named Lewis Powell wrote a memo for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce laying out a game plan for corporations and right-wing ideologues to use "an activist-minded Supreme Court" as an "instrument for social, economic, and political change." Powell was then appointed by Richard Nixon to the court to advance the plan from within.

All of this required boatloads of anonymous money; what people who study this clandestine activity call "dark money." The Washington Post, has exposed how the right-wing donor network spent upwards of $250 million in dark money on its judicial influence operation; testimony before my Senate Judiciary Courts Subcommittee has since upped that dark money figure to $400 million. Because the funding is covert, we do not know exactly who contributed that money or what interests they have before the court. But rarely do people spend $400 million for no rewards

The court did not anticipate the rise of “dark money,” a term that refers to anonymous outside spending in our political campaigns. Dark money is hard to study precisely because it is hidden, but here’s what scholars have managed to learn in the past decade. On Citizens United’s 10th anniversary, what do we know about dark money? - The Washington Post