Where Is the Effort To Fight RightWing Abuse of U.S. Court System?
The Legal Answer to RightWing Court-Packing Machine is a Laugh
A vote against a law-and-order national surveillance law nightmare or the Patriot Act propelled U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold to national stardom among elite “progressives” in Washington, D.C., but led to his demise at the hands of Republican Ron Johnson, now an ensconced Trumpist in the U.S.
Senate.
Once a socialist bastion, Wisconsin has been hammered by white supremacists and Christian-nation lunatics, and Feingold’s “bold” move against the Sept. 11 draconian surveillance law cost him his U.S. Senate, and you might think his clout. Because at the end of the day Russ Feingold is no progressive. His Patriot Act vote aside, when Feingold attempted to recapture his senate seat, he chucked his loud support of campaign finance reform laws to rake in large sums of cash from the DNC, neoliberals, and centrists. Folks in Wisconsin did not buy Feingold’s schtick, and the Trumpist Ron Johnson retained his U.S. Senate seat in easy manner.
As the U. S. Supreme Court now in the clutches of right-wing, Christian-nation crazed justices, and the federal courts packed with right-wing, capitalist-loving, law-and-order judges, the former Senator Feingold finds himself helming the Washington, D.C organization American Constitution Society, which touts itself as the answer to the powerhouse right-wing lobbying group, the Federalist Society.
The Federalist Society for those not in the weeds of who runs D.C., is the group that provided Republican presidents, including Trump, with judges and justices to fill the U.S. federal courts. The Federalist Society, 40 years old now, gave the nation, for example, Supreme Court Justices, John G. Roberts, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, and the long-dead but still infamous Antonin Scalia.
The Federalist Society is the pipeline that prepares, grooms, nourishes, right-wing judicial theory along with judges for the courts and increasingly state courts. The organization’s budget is at least five times the size of Feingold’s American Constitution Society. Federalist Society or FedSoc, as it is lovingly called in D.C., remade the federal judicial system, with big help from Christian-nation loons and the so-called moral majority. This right-wing movement grabbed the nation’s courts before ACS could gather its thoughts let alone raise its first million dollars.
ACS, where Feingold is hanging out and looking for a press secretary, because he imagines himself still in the U.S. Senate, remains hapless.
As I wrote here, I worked for ACS’s communications shop many years preceding Feingold’s arrival. I was a minor player in an organization consumed with carrying water for the DNC and putting on stagecraft for “progressive” judges, attorneys, law professors, students and other neoliberal and centrist blowhards who enjoyed gathering and listening to each other speak. The group’s main attraction is a June convention that brings all these neoliberal factions together to do nothing but talk, talk, talk, and then talk some more.
Today we have a neoliberal president in Joe Biden, and as The Guardian notes he was preparing to put an anti-abortion judge on the federal bench. That is how much sway the Federalist Society has, it ensures the names of regressive judges find their way to the desks of Democratic presidents, albeit centrist or neoliberal ones.
Like he did in Wisconsin, Feingold is proving a disappointment, a lot like the organization he attempts to lead. ACS was never an answer to the Federalist Society. Instead ACS aided and abetted in the right-wing takeover of the courts with its stagecraft foolishness. Feingold, like ACS, seems to exist all for the show.
