The corruption of the U.S. Supreme Court can be traced in part to the rise and influence of the Federalist Society, an American conservative legal organization that promotes textualist and originalist interpretations of the U.S. Constitution. The organization maintains chapters at more than 200 law schools and is structured into student, lawyer, and faculty divisions. Its lawyers’ division alone includes more than 70,000 practicing attorneys across ninety cities, making it one of the most powerful and influential legal networks in the United States.
Founded in 1982 by a group of law students from Yale Law School, Harvard Law School, and the University of Chicago Law School, the Federalist Society was created explicitly to challenge what its founders viewed as liberal or left-leaning dominance within elite legal education. Over time, it evolved into a central pipeline for conservative judicial appointments and legal policy development.
The organization’s stated objectives are to limit federal power, protect individual liberty, and interpret the Constitution according to its original meaning. In practice, however, its influence has profoundly shaped the ideological composition of the federal judiciary, including the Supreme Court, raising serious concerns about judicial independence, democratic accountability, and the politicization of constitutional interpretation.
All of this sounds great from an idealist standpoint until you look at it from a greedy capitalistic point of view of oligarchs who want to get richer by controlling our government through “Dark Moneyâ€. And overturning the hard-fought Civil Rights that many people fought for many years to obtain.
Under the leadership of Leonard Leo, the architect of “The Federalist Society†and his promotion of Clarence Thomas to be a Supreme Court Justice was the beginning of the corruption of the SCOTUS. Clarence Thomas was an ideal candidate because he was a young, ambitious black lawyer entering the lawyer workforce with no blue blood background to get into a prestigious law firm. He had conservative ideas expressed to follow law students, so he was looked at to be a possible ally with the Federalist Society, which was being founded at this time under Leonard Leo. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall was going to retire so from the Supreme Court and a Black replacement was needed to replace him.
In comes Clarence Thomas from the Monsanto Company as a young, ambiguous lawyer. He was looked at as a reliable Black conservative Republican and picked up by John Danforth as a Legislative Assistant. Then, he served as Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the United States Department of Education. He later became chair of the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in 1990. Thomas divorced his first wife, who was Black and had a child by her, and then married his current white wife Virginia Lamp, who was a Republican. Then he served on the United States Court of Appeals as a judge for the District of Columbia Circuit, when he was nominated by George H. W. Bush to the Supreme Court to replace Thurgood Marshall.
This was the first Texas connection for Clarence Thomas to be in the pocket of Republicans to promote their agenda. From Dallas, Texas, comes Harlan Crow, a Real Estate millionaire who takes a curious liking to Clarence Thomas to becomes his good friend. That funnels millions of dollars of bribes to Clarence Thomas and his wife, Virginia.
“The Corruption of Clarence Thomas Beginsâ€.
This is the genesis of the influence campaign of big money or Dark money (PAC’s and Super PAC’s) to sway the outcomes from the (Supreme Court to State and Federal government), the benefactors of The Federalist Society. The pinnacle of this corruption comes to a head with the election of Donald Trump.
The Federalist Society vetted President Donald Trump’s list of potential U.S. Court nominees; in March 2020, 43 out of 51 of Trump’s appellate court nominees were current or former members of the Federalist Society. Of the current nine members of the Supreme Court of the United States, at least five are current or former members of the Federalist Society – Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Amy Coney Barrett. Plus, John Roberts previously served as a member of the steering committee of the Washington, D.C., chapter.
(All of this was facilitated by Old Mitch McConnell to get these nominees through in record time by the Senate!)
All of this was put in place to ensure that any Republication legislation that came to the Supreme Court was passed by the Super majority of (6) members of the Conservate Court.
On landmark legislation that was passed by prior Supreme Courts that were overturned, e.g., Civil Rights, Voting Rights, Abortion Rights, EPA legislation, Gun Rights, EEOC legislation, you need to have a unanimous 9 votes by all justices with no dissent to override years of precedence. Also, for major changes to our Constitution, like making the President not accountable for any of his actions, while he’s in office, to be charged, you need all 9 votes to make changes.
