I wonder how many people in the room realize that the Federalist Society was created as a tool by a set of USA plutocrats making a 50 year investment to get their Gilded Age back. It worked, by the way. We're living in it, income inequality, homelessness, and all.
Sheldon Whitehouse's 73/73: real
It took me a decade after Supreme Court decisions which seemed odd started happening, and after reading Jane Mayer's "Dark Money", before the computer gamer in me (always looking for an angle or an edge) finally realized what the exploit (the way to cheat that doesn't break an enforced rule) was.
The game was stacking the Supreme Court, not with people bought and paid for, not with people who were such ideologues they'd just say what the plutocrats wanted.
No.
The game was stacking the Supreme Court with people whose responses to certain legal arguments was entirely predictable
The Federalist Society was a place where someone's legal thinking, the way they'd handle certain arguments, could be seen again and again over decades. It was a bench from which to select the predictable behavior. Then spend whatever it took to get the predictable people seated on the court.
Now look at Citizens United. It was just "a project", the words the dark money folks use for creating Supreme Court case law to get the ground rules they want
An entity (Citizens United) was created solely for the project
A synthetic controversy was created around Citizens United
...
A legal case was created, again synthetically, around the synthetic situation around the entity created specifically for this case.
I'm sure they spent millions of dollars of attorney time creating and tuning the case so when it reached the Supreme Court they knew exactly how 5 justices would rule
Really gotta wonder who signed off on rigging that fast fold screen over peoples’ heads with only safety cables. I wouldn’t walk under or near that if I were you.
