Barrett's close ties to the extremist rightwing Federalist Society

 Paul Begala, CNN -Barrett was a member [of the Federalist Society] from 2005-06 and 2014-17. She ended her membership when she joined the appeals court, but she continues to be a panelist and speaker at Federalist Society events.

As Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) has said (and I have written in my book), The Federalist Society is more than a group of right-wing lawyers sucking up for clerkships and judicial jobs (though it is that). It is also, Whitehouse alleges, a "vehicle for powerful interests, which seek not to simply 'reorder' the judiciary, but to acquire control of the judiciary to benefit their interests." 

 

Having studied the group, Whitehouse has concluded, "The evidence is that the Federalist Society is funded by massive, secret contributions from corporate right-wing groups that have big agendas before the courts." Citing reporting by the Washington Post, Whitehouse and fellow Senate Democrats Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) claim Federalist co-chair Leonard Leo, "is at the heart of a network of more than two dozen right-wing nonprofit entities -- groups that raised over $250 million between 2014 and 2017 alone...to promote far-right policies and legal doctrines and the judicial nominees who advance them."

The Senate Democrats' study cites Koch Industries and the Charles & David Koch foundations, the Scaife Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, and the US Chamber of Commerce as among the organizations funding The Federalist Society.

The analysis suggests that more than a quarter of all Federalist funding flows through a group called Donors Trust, whose "structure hides the real identities of politically motivated megadonors." 

 

... The Federalist Society, according to former Trump White House Counsel Don McGahn, plays an outsize role in choosing the judges Trump nominates. McGahn told the pressure group as much in 2017, boasting that rather than outsourcing judicial selection to the group, Trump had brought them inside the White House.

"Our opponents of judicial nominees frequently claim the president has outsourced his selection of judges. That is completely false," McGahn said. "I've been a member of the Federalist Society since law school — still am. So, frankly, it seems like it's been insourced."

The Federalists, lawyers that they are, baffle us with BS about being "originalists," "textualists," and judges who "won't legislate from the bench." Baloney. They seek nothing less than a fundamental reordering of American life. On the economy, for example, Federalist member Justice Neal Gorsuch has ruled that a corporation had the right to fire a truck driver who refused to stay with his trailer, even though remaining with the trailer may have meant freezing to death. Corporations should have the power of life and death over their employees -- in Federalist Society America.

In our personal lives, Federalist Society members seek to give government power over whether a woman can choose to have an abortion. Federalist hero Justice Clarence Thomas has written that Roe v. Wade is "without a shred of support" in the Constitution. After Roe, I fear the Federalist group on the court will come after contraception, marriage equality, and privacy itself. 

 

Think I'm overreaching? All four of the dissenters in the marriage equality case (Obergefell v. Hodges) were Federalist heroes: Scalia, Roberts, Alito, Thomas. And Justice Thomas has bitterly denounced the very notion of a constitutional right to privacy, excoriating the 1965 case guaranteeing married couples access to contraception as "a free-floating constitutional right to privacy." Thomas argues that "this general 'right of privacy' was never before considered a constitutional guarantee protecting citizens from governmental intrusion."

In our civic life, our nation's most powerful Federalist role model, Chief Justice John Roberts, manipulated a fairly small case about an anti-Hillary movie into a wholesale rewrite of the nation's campaign finance laws to benefit big money corporate interests in Citizens United. He also gutted the Voting Rights Act, which Congress had reauthorized in 2006 by a vote of 98-0 in the Senate and 390-33 in the House.

So much for not legislating from the bench. 

 

Washington Post - The Federalist Society, an influential conservative legal group, paid for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett to take six trips in her first year as a federal appeals court judge, according to her 2018 financial disclosure report.

The Federalist Society paid for her to go to Columbia Law School, Hillsdale College in Michigan, Stanford Law School, Yale Law School, a law student symposium in Washington and the society’s conve