Neil M. Gorsuch joins Supreme Court scandal parade

Politics and Social Issues
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The unholy mess at USA’s Billionaires’ Supreme Court, more details keep trickling out, but shame, sense of integrity, fidelity to our Constitution and a pluralist society, don’t exist within that crowd, so guess it’s just the same as it ever was. Although, the American people could make a difference if they got a little bit more engaged with politics, filthy sausage making thought it may be.

Our Democracy depends on an informed and engaged electorate.

By HEIDI PRZYBYLA

04/25/2023 04:30 AM EDT

For nearly two years beginning in 2015, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch sought a buyer for a 40-acre tract of property he co-owned in rural Granby, Colo.

On April 16 of 2017, Greenberg’s Brian Duffy put under contract the 3,000-square foot log home on the Colorado River and nestled in the mountains northwest of Denver, according to real estate records.

He and his wife closed on the house a month later, paying $1.825 million, according to a deed in the county’s record system. Gorsuch, who held a 20 percent stake, reported making between $250,001 and $500,000 from the sale on his federal disclosure forms.

Gorsuch did not disclose the identity of the purchaser. That box was left blank.

Since then, Greenberg Traurig has been involved in at least 22 cases before or presented to the court, according to a POLITICO review of the court’s docket. …

By Charlie Savage and Julie Turkewitz

  • March 14, 2017

WASHINGTON — The publicity-shy billionaire Philip F. Anschutz inherited an oil and gas firm and built it into an empire that has sprawled into telecommunications, railroads, real estate, resorts, sports teams, stadiums, movies and conservative publications like The Weekly Standard and The Washington Examiner.

Mr. Anschutz’s influence is especially felt in his home state of Colorado, where years ago Judge Neil M. Gorsuch, a Denver native, the son of a well-known Colorado Republican and now President Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court, was drawn into his orbit.

As a lawyer at a Washington law firm in the early 2000s, Judge Gorsuch represented Mr. Anschutz, his companies and lower-ranking business executives as an outside counsel. In 2006, Mr. Anschutz successfully lobbied Colorado’s lone Republican senator and the Bush administration to nominate Judge Gorsuch to the federal appeals court. …

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That’s the in the first week Gorsuch started serving

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How Leonard Leo and the extreme Right Wing learned to tailor their Supreme Court justices,
fascinating story.

May 5, 2023 #msnbc #supremecourt #clarencethomas

Leonard Leo and the right had a problem: they were putting people on the court, and then couldn’t control how they ruled. So they came up with a two-fold solution to create a captured court—one that explains Clarence Thomas’ benefactors.

Sep 13, 2022

September 13 | Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Chair of the Senate Judiciary Courts Subcommittee, delivers the eighteenth in a series of speeches titled “The Scheme,” exposing the machinations by right-wing donor interests to capture the U.S. Supreme Court and achieve through the Court what they cannot through the elected branches of government.

Whitehouse sheds light on the $1.6 billion donation from reclusive far-right billionaire Barre Seid to Leonard Leo’s dark-money network. Leo’s operation is at the center of the dark-money takeover of the Supreme Court. Whitehouse exposes Seid and Leo as key cogs in the right-wing dark-money ecosystem that now has at least $1.6 billion at hand to corrupt democracy.

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Brilliant analysis there. I have bumped into this with every conspiratorial person I’ve ever met. They see a cabal of elites behind everything that they don’t like, but they can’t quite explain how it works or even exactly why they don’t like it. Most of the time it looks to me like they are bothered by someone inconveniencing them with regulations or having to think about their impact on something around the world. Meanwhile, people actually smoking cigars in private meetings are planning how to make themselves richer at everyone else’s expense. The trail of money can be traced, their ideologies are clearly laid out, and their logic and facts can be checked.

I admit, I had been lulled into a sense that there was justice in the world as two of Reagan’s appointees made progressive decisions. Haye’s hypothetical, ‘what if Sotomayor voted for Dobbs’, is a perfect example for explaining how it must feel to the conservatives who have witnessed that same history. It’s hard for me to think that way though, as he lays out around 3 minutes, that is, they wanted to control the justices that they got appointed, they want the “true believers” who would stick to the conservative plan. I would prefer that judges are selected on their ability to judge and provide us with reasons for how they judge.

He follows with his personal opinion that the moderate votes from the conservatives of the past are the result of the “realities of judging” and “the insufficiency of the right-wing dogma”. The system the billionaires then created to counter these realities sounds conspiratorial, if for no other reason, it’s pushing against what I consider real and somehow succeeding. At 5:40, Hayes acknowledges the conservative mindset, that it’s Liberals that are conspiratorial. He offhandedly says he thinks change comes from a “complicated emergent phenomenon of an open society”, and to me, that’s the crux of it.

Daily news is about how actors are acting, who’s meeting with whom, and following the money. The cultural questions, the ones us voters think about, are those “emergent phenomena”. I’ve changed my views as I moved out of a small town and learned more about the world and continued to check science when something new came up. I use the label “Conservative” when I see someone forming an opinion based on tradition, including economic models that have been tried and failed. But I know they don’t see it that way, to them, the “phenomena” emerged a long time ago, and there’s evidence that it’s right and everything is fine how it is.

I don’t know, kind of a long post. It’s cold and rainy again here. But I see a different framing here, something better than whose conspiracy theory is more accurate.

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