The Supreme Court is many things. But it is not a court.
It’s now an “arm of a deeply entrenched, incredibly well-funded and extreme network of activists.” That’s what Alex Aronson of Court Accountability told me.
And you may have noticed the same yourself. If you have, you probably can’t stop seeing it.
It can be depressing to think about what the right has won with their 6-3 anti-democratic Supreme Court majority. And the depression can quickly incite into anxiety when you think about what an unchecked Trump regime armed with the playbook and personnel of Project 2025 could do with absolute immunity.
But that despair must give way to our hopeful mantra: The people will decide.
Court Accountability is taking a multi-pronged approach to overcoming the occupation of 1 First St. It starts with exposing every drip of the corruption that helps make this “prestige coup,” as Aronson calls it, possible.
And that could keep you busy for a while.
It’s time to rethink our strategy for the third branch of government. That begins with identifying the problem, recognizing the tools at our disposal, and orchestrating a mass movement that unequivocally represents the will of the people. Aronson guides us through the initial steps, but we are responsible for the rest.
Catch up on all the episodes of “How are you feeling about democracy?” here.
If you want to be a supporter of this podcast, please join us here at the earlyworm society – free or paid, your support matters.
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ROUGH TRANSCRIPT
Jason Sattler: Can you explain for an extraterrestrial who just landed in a swing state and knows nothing about politics, what's going on with America's Supreme Court?
Alex Aronson: Welcome, first of all, alien has landed here in a swing state.
Our Supreme Court was a court once upon a time, but it's not that anymore.
This is a court that has all the trappings of a court. It has a big marble building the judges show up wearing black robes. And they put out opinions that have the veneer of law, but it's a court that's acting as an arm of a deeply entrenched, incredibly well funded and extreme network of activists, special interest activists that have installed allies on this, venerated body to enact an agenda that they are using to cripple American democracy, which, of course, has never really manifested in the past promise that it sets forth, but has, through the decades made serious progress to make our country what we dream for it to be: a diverse, multicultural pluralistic democracy where the will of the people is reflected in our laws and in our lived experience.
And so these interests saw the power of the courts. And they realized they could use the courts and weaponize it to stop that progress and to stand in the way of our democratic future. So that's what's happening at our court at a very high level.
Jason: I've always wondered, how come Democrats didn't figure this out?
Alex Aronson: In a way, Democrats did figure it out. They figured out that Through litigation through bringing creative lawsuits, you could change policy outcomes through the courts and that's of course what happened for a lot of the 20th century.
Of course, the Democrats also did a lot of the hard work of democracy past big signature, progressive legislation under, for example, President Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society, big, huge signature bills that were very difficult to pass things like the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act. But then beyond that. Interest groups and activists, folks like Ralph Nader at public citizen and environmental groups realized that by bringing cases strategically through the courts, you could shape the law to see a vision of the world reflected in our Constitutional law and in our in our society.
And so they did, they made real headway. It was actually in response to that success that the, you know, Republicans, the corporate interests in particular started taking seriously the power of the courts and trying to capture them for their own ends. I think one really important distinction, though, is that, to the extent liberals were using the courts to advance their aims. And to the extent the justices in the, the 20th century the famous Warren Court endorsed those theories. They did it on a different sort of basis. They were honest about what they were doing on some level. They viewed the constitution, which of course is this sort of ancient document. As as a living document, right? That it wasn't fixed in time. And that, looking at the kind of broad and vague terms of the constitution, you needed to you need to have them adapt to the way the world was changing. So things like, due process due process that has to, that has to adapt to developing circumstances to living circumstances. And so you see in decisions like Roe v. Wade and Brown v. Board of Education, certainly outcomes that were consistent with what the majority of the people wanted to see, but also that reflected that sort of living Constitutional approach to Constitutional interpretation. And in the pushback to that, the conservative legal movement, which really started in its modern form as a tool of the massive resistance to Brown v. Board of Education and to racial integration in the country, a different approach, right? They said they are going to be Originalist judges, go back to the original meaning the original understanding of those terms, which, of course, bakes in the values and ideas of the white male patriarchy that founded the country. But then, if you watch an application, how they actually advance Originalism, as they call it, it's not Originalist at all. And it's not, it doesn't have any intellectual honesty because they are this, these justices, and particularly in recent years, have been willing to throw that methodology, throw those principles out whenever they don't suit their ends. And so what we've got is something very different.
Jason Sattler: You worked in the DOJ, you worked in the Senate and now you're working in activism. Can you just give us a background of why you decided to launch court accountability?
Alex Aronson: I actually got my start in this stuff as a youth organizer. I was trying to get young people in Oregon. We were working at the state level to get more young people, marginalized communities, minority communities engaged in the political process, registering voters, and then, when it was an election year, we would advocate for voter access policies like election day registration ultimately the first automatic voter registration in the country was passed out of Oregon. What I found in that organizing work was that the, for the forces that are, now very strong and. Weaponized against democracy that are pushing myths like voter fraud and election integrity were already at work, they were telling us we couldn't have election day registration because it would lead to massive voter fraud based on zero evidence. I ended up going to law school and having a whole career in laws.
You mentioned at the Justice Department, working at the Civil Rights Division, trying to use the law to protect civil rights to protect access to the franchise. Because I believe that the law was, a place to to go for justice in that sort of old world conception of what the court could be. And then when I went to the Senate, I went to the Senate at the beginning of the Trump administration, as the Senate was really becoming a conveyor belt for extremist judges, because, of course, during Trump, judicial selection, which was basically the only game in town at the Senate, right? Mitch McConnell didn't pass any legislation except a massive. tax cut for billionaires. And then he used all the rest of his time and, efforts in the Senate to, really reshape our judiciary, not just at the Supreme Court, but in the lower federal courts where selection of these judges had been outsourced to these special interests. Theocrats like Leonard Leo, who were, funded by right wing billionaires who wanted to take down the administrative state and radically reshaping the composition of the courts. And I could see the writing on the wall because it was already happening, frankly, right? This stuff is not totally new that big, dangerous decisions like Dobbs were on the way the Loper Bright decision that took out the longstanding Chevron precedent, which really allows the the regulatory state to pass. Have experts interpret the laws of Congress and pass regulations issue regulations that, protect our clean air and water and protect consumers and workers. I saw that stuff all coming down the pike, but, I think critically what I saw from this very interesting vantage point as a staffer on the Senate Judiciary Committee was that the big kind of power players in Democratic politics in Constitutional law, I'm talking about, establishment Democrats, the Constitutional law world the media, certainly, which had long accepted the premise that the courts were a place where politics didn't happen that they were doing real law we're not attuned to this threat to the threat that this insulated unaccountable branch was being captured by extremists to end American democracy. I felt like a new strategy was really necessary to invest in on the outside.
And so we've been active for a year now across a range of spaces. We do research and investigations work to all open source stuff to, to expose dark money influence on the courts. And then we do a lot of organizing work to help Democrats, to help other pro democracy legislators and elected officials and candidates on the C4 side, try to, Understand that all the stuff they care about the things they're promising that they're going to achieve things like voting protections and protecting reproductive freedoms that can't happen until we take on the court and deal with this capture of its power.
Jason Sattler: So my brain spins to be back and forth between Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh. Who should talk about next? Because they both seem so perfect to illustrate the problem with the court right now, but let's talk about since you were in the senate when Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed.
Can you tell us what it looked like from the inside and what people in the senate thought about Brett Kavanaugh and what you think about him as someone who's been confirmed and now it's been on the Supreme Court for the better part of a decade?
Alex Aronson: Kavanaugh is a good place to start. Working on that confirmation, being in that room during the Blasey Ford hearing where he erupted on the senators. It was a really seminal experience for me. Watching particularly Senate Republicans who I think, very clearly knew that these women were telling the truth. They had, I think, some valid objections to the way those allegations were ultimately made public, but watching them go to the mattresses for this guy who was very clearly to our minds, lying under oath and very, I think, credibly accused of sexual assault, watching them go to the mattresses to get him onto the Supreme Court and then watching the Democrats do what I thought was a, fairly inadequate job of raising questions about his temperament and character and really demanding a thorough investigation by the FBI and by the Senate Judiciary Committee, that was a seminal experience for me in terms of realizing that a lot more needed to be done here and, really, cementing my commitment to making this a big part of my life.
When he was first selected, there was a lot of jockeying on the right to to see who would get picked. And a lot of the movement conservatives didn't really want him because he had earned himself a reputation, I don't think necessarily justifiably, as a sort of, moderate in the vein of what John Roberts pretends to be. Then when he was chosen, I think there was some relief, frankly, from a lot, people on the center left and Democrats that this, it wasn't a total extremist that was chosen. But then, even before the sexual assault allegations, we started to see real indications that things were amiss in that process.
Chuck Grassley, who was the chairman of the committee at that time, talked a lot about how this was the most transparent judicial confirmation in history. It's a total lie. They were covering up hundreds of thousands of pages of this guy's records from his days as a very important senior political official in the White House under Bush, where he, on the inside, was working with Leonard Leo on the outside, on an earlier stage of this judicial capture project, right?
Leonard Leo had a outside group that they organized out of the Federalist Society. Even though the Federalist Society talks about how it doesn't engage in nomination fights or policy questions, they were hosting secret gatherings through this judicial umbrella group that Brett Kavanaugh would attend. And, Kavanaugh, we had reason to believe was lying in his circuit court confirmation years earlier about things he knew, things he worked on stolen documents he'd received. And when we tried to get them under the parameters of the document production that the Senate goes through in a Supreme Court confirmation, they were being blockaded.
Then moving into the, really traumatizing experience of those women coming forward and these allegations of serious sexual assault coming forward, the politics of that moment, I think we're deeply troubling, super traumatic for women in this country, and then, the upshot, of course, is that he was confirmed to the court under this cloud of scandal following an FBI investigation that was really seriously constrained by Don McGahn, the White House counsel, Chris Wray, the FBI Director went along with all sorts of directives from Don McGahn, not to pursue derogatory leads, real corroborating evidence, witnesses who were trying to come forward to corroborate these women's stories that he was not allowed to pursue. And he went along with that, and at the end of the day, they produced a really flimsy report that, purported to effectively clear Kavanaugh and they jammed him through. And then, just a few years later, of course, Kavanaugh joins the majority in Dobbs to overturn women's reproductive freedoms in this country, even though he had been you know, very very vague, but also left the impression that he saw Roe as an important precedent, like all the other Republican justices did in their confirmation hearings. And then, of course, joining these terrifically bad decisions that the court handed down this term on questions of the regulatory state and Loeb or Bright, and of course, Trump versus United States, which just radically restructures American government and ends checks and balances against criminal presidents.
Jason Sattler: He has a direct precedent on the Supreme Court in Clarence Thomas, who wasn't accused of sexual assault, but was accused of sexual misconduct in the process we all realized was faulty and has turned out to be most corrupt person ever to be on the Supreme Court, at least in modern memory.
It leaves one wondering, is there anything we can do about this? Can you put this in some sort of historical context?
Alex Aronson: I think I have 2 main points about Thomas as precedent to Kavanaugh and then the separate question about, accountability for Supreme Court corruption and for law breaking by justices.
You're right. Thomas is perfect precedent for what happened with Kavanaugh. And in fact, if you look at the hearing the Kavanaugh hearing, where after that devastating morning of testimony from Christine Blasey Ford, where everybody in the room knew she was telling the truth, Republicans had really nothing to say, I was filing into the, Senate train the subway underneath the Senate on a little train car with Chuck Grassley, and it looked like he'd seen a ghost and that all preceded this theatrical performance that Kavanaugh in combination with Lindsey Graham, in particular, on the committee really leveled as they came out of the gate and started talking about the Democrats search-and-destroy mission and how, you'll recall Kavanaugh accused Democrats of a "Hillary Clinton revenge conspiracy," attack on him because of his role in the Whitewater investigation. And, immediately to me I said, this is a redux of the "high-tech lynching" playbook that they rolled out for Clarence Thomas, which again involves a tremendous amount of cover up and dark money funded spin by these allies of the justices. And frankly, I think the Democrats in the cabinet proceedings were unprepared for the likelihood that they would roll out that playbook one really underappreciated little detail this is in a document production that an oversight group, oversight found. There was a big fight among Republicans about whether to have that hearing at all. They didn't want to have that hearing. The Senate Republicans didn't want to have that hearing. Leonard Leo was the one who really pushed and Leonard Leo, of course, is the outside judicial selection operator that, is on the board. He's the chairs the board of the Federalist Society, and he wields billions of dollars of money to throughout a dark money ecosystem. This document shows Leo pressuring the Senate Judiciary Committee staff to have that hearing. They wanted that hearing. I would speculate so that they could roll out that high-tech lynching playbook and go on the attack. Which is what they did and they got their base riled up and, the rest is history.
In terms of questions of accountability for lawbreaking and corruption by Supreme Court justices, I think you rightly point out that Clarence Thomas is like easily the most corrupt Supreme Court justice in U. S. history. And when we talk about corruption, it's not necessarily, quid pro quo corruption. He agrees with these guys that are, funding his half-a-million dollar trips to Hawaii and Indonesia. It's not like they need to pay him to do that stuff. I think of it more as like a reward mechanism. There was a story out of the post over the past year showing that back in the day, Thomas actually threatened to quit the bench if he didn't get a pay raise and they didn't give him a pay raise, but they started. Paying for his lifestyle through, RV loans and all these trips and often connected to retreats where they're talking about the agenda that they're trying to drive through the court.
So it's a different kind of corruption than what the court has narrowed corruption to mean. Of course, it's the court itself that has now, made bribery basically unprosecutable.
But then you have these other dynamics about holding judges and justices accountable for criminal activity, which to our mind at court accountability, Clarence Thomas's conduct here very clearly represents. There's a federal disclosure law that requires disclosure of certain information. It very importantly does not exempt disclosure of travel. And a lot of this, a lot of this gift giving was, basically provision of a private jet taxi service to Clarence Thomas, he would take these jet taxis, like to lunch in Palm Springs, he'd go for a day or for hours up to New Haven. It makes it a criminal penalty to willfully violate those laws. And we can see from his pattern of withholding these trips that he was willful about it. And then we can also see his evidence of willfulness by his failure to amend adequately once he did get caught, he started to amend these disclosures and then he didn't include all the trips. And so even if he wants to make, legal arguments about how it was within the scope of the personal hospitality exception to not withhold all these trips, which it very plainly isn't, as a matter of clear statutory text. That evidence of his failure to properly amend these disclosures, I think, demonstrates both of them. And I think, puts the ball in Merrick Garland's court, as the Attorney General, as the nation's top prosecutor, to make sure that our laws are enforced against, even the most powerful without fear or favor, and it really raises a lot of the same questions presented by the legal challenges against Trump assertions of immunity by presidents that the Supreme Court has now endorsed.
I think what we're seeing here is a court and justices who, of course, have said Congress has no authority to regulate us, has no authority to oversee us. They would certainly, I think declare unConstitutional any prosecutorial effort against their misconduct, a court that is trying to lock itself out of accountability so that it can continue to advance this agenda without democratic pushback
Jason Sattler: I want to ask you what Democrats have been getting wrong about this and what we should be doing. But first I want to propose a little theory because you're someone who actually has been in the Senate and I've always wondered this. It seems like a part of the problem. And for all of Joe Biden's good qualities, one of his other qualities is he is a Senator. More than anything else. He is someone who spent the bulk of his life in the Senate and has that kind of collegiality. This there's an ethic to it that I don't quite understand. It's a really special club that they get into and they want to be treat each other well and they think they deserve it. In a certain way, two of them in the state, they've earned it in a certain way. It also seems to have gotten in the way of democracy where there's this perception that we need to protect the club more than we need to protect the democracy. I wonder if you agree with that. And what do you think Democrats have been getting wrong?
Alex Aronson: Yeah, I think you put your finger on it. The Senate is a big problem. And, I fell into that, right? I had this career that sort of I fell a little bit into these like trappings of prestige law and politics. And, I had this sort of plum job as a DOJ civil rights lawyer.
It was great. I got to represent the interests of the United States in important civil rights matters. And it meant a lot to me. But of course, and I also had this like nice big office at Main Justice. And it was like, how do you not get drunk a little bit on the kind of trappings of where you are. And the Senate has a lot of those trappings also, particularly vis a vis the House, right? It was George Washington who described the Senate as the "cooling saucer" for the intemperate House. And I think there is this sort of superiority complex that pervades the Senate and where they really value bipartisanship. They really value collegiality. And these are good things to value, right? Like you want to work across the aisle, a democracy should entail compromise finding, commonality through disagreement is vitally important, but structurally, and in terms of our history the Senate is very much an anti-democratic institution in a branch that is, the most democratic of the branches the directly elected Congress, but the house, I think is living in a much more realistic of politics in 2024.
You can see that in the hearings in the. in the passion and heat of those hearings as they are presented with what the Republican Party in 2024 has become with characters like Jim Jordan and James Comer and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert. That's right there in their faces. Frankly, the Senate Republicans aren't so much better, going back to Lindsey Graham in this, in the Senate Judiciary Kavanaugh hearing, he was screaming at people. John Kennedy in that committee is screaming at witnesses.
But there is, I think, a desire, particularly post Trump's term, in the Senators and particularly among the sort of, you Senate establishment leaders, folks like Dick Durbin, who runs the Senate Judiciary Committee, to wave a magic wand and bring back the peace that used to exist. And I would say, the Senate that peace was never that great for regular people, right? That collegiality, that sort of prioritization of bipartisanship. Practices like the filibuster, these are like relics of slavery. And, they were the things that kept us from being able to achieve progress in the civil rights era, and only through very hard work and negotiation and power politics, particularly from Johnson, were we able to get bipartisan agreement on passing signature bills like that, the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act.
That's just gone post-Trump. Republicans have fallen fully into the thrall of a man who is explicit about his dictatorial aspirations, who associates himself with authoritarians around the globe. And Democrats, I think, have been much too slow to recognize this fundamental paradigm shift in what's happening with our politics right now.
So they're thinking about this, I think, still too much in terms of, Republican Democrat politics, liberal versus conservative politics and seeking to foster this type of comity, which is just gone, right? That it was the Republicans that unilaterally destroyed all these norms going back to the court context in judicial confirmations.
They'll say that it was, Democrats attacks on Robert Bork in the eighties that really was the watershed moment. Bork was an extremist.
Ted Kennedy: In Robert Bork's America, there is no room at the inn for blacks and no place in the Constitution for women. And in our America, there should be no seat on the Supreme Court for Robert Bork.
Alex Aronson: He was opposed on the merits. It was a bipartisan vote to defeat his nomination. But the maneuvers that McConnell and Senate Republicans pulled to jam these folks onto the court, broke the mold. They broke the system and Democrats have been, it's like they're reading their game theory book upside down. They're just trying to put these norms back in place. That only one side is, Abiding by. And that's just not how norms. So I think that's what's going on. And then I also think there's just like a temperamental reluctance to face the fire that any kind of forward leading politics would produce because the Republicans know their policies are not broadly popular. And so what they do when they are confronted with evidence of corruption, misconduct, extremism, as they just start to shriek. And the Democrats, particularly the older ones, don't, they don't want to face the howls, and so I think that's a big part of it also.
Jason Sattler: And as far as not seeing the alarm and one thing that I'm just terrified of is because if you even just glance at the ruling where John Roberts awarded Donald Trump absolute immunity, I don't think people, or if you listen to the hearing
Supreme Court Absolute Immunity Hearing: If the president decides that his rival is a corrupt person and he orders the military or orders someone to assassinate him, is that within his official acts for which he can get immunity? It would depend on the hypothetical, but we can see that could well be an official act.
Jason Sattler: if I understand it correctly, the decision didn't actually weigh in on whether that would be an official act. It said it may be an official act. We are now entering in to a prospect where it's a coin flip or Donald Trump could be president. And it's a coin flip under, he could pretty much do whatever he wants under the premise of official immunity.
Am I reading that correctly? And why aren't people I'm freaking out about this?
Alex Aronson: Yeah, it's, you're reading it correctly. I would recommend a new resource put out by the Center for American Progress really breaking down the real-world implications of this decision in terms of what it would and could allow dictatorial presidents to get away with. People should be freaking out about it.
They should be freaking out about it in the context of Trump's Project 2025 which this decision really, really opens the door for. One of the big long term agendas of the right wing legal movement going back, at least to the Reagan era is to establish a really broad and sweeping unitary executive authority. So what's happening right now is that, with this immunity decision, not only in insulating presidents from criminal liability for hugely widely scoped official act standard, but in giving presidents the preclusive and conclusive authority to do all sorts of other executive actions. They're really giving, a potential dictator, the keys to doing whatever he or she wants without any pushback. And, meanwhile, the other, I think, important lever that they're pulling is around the administrative state. And, on some level, what they've done in the Loper bright case. Is a judicial power grab, right? Nominally, they're taking power away from the executive branch to interpret laws of Congress to pass regulations that help people's lives. But what they're doing is they're taking that they're creating a lever that allows them who have durably captured the court. To strike down mostly democratic past and democratically implemented regulations that they don't like, that the billionaires that fund them don't like, while at the same time moving toward this expansive unitary authority, unitary executive authority that would really give, again, scary presidents the keys to do all sorts of stuff without pushback. And one thing I'll say is that we've been surprised by focus groups and survey results since this election about just how alarmed. Many Americans are about the erosion of checks and balances that this represents. And I think one of the, one of the asymmetries is that our elected leaders, particularly in the Democratic Party, they don't have great answers, right?
I think it's great that Joe Biden came out with support for court reforms, including a Constitutional amendment to overturn that decision. But we can't pass a Constitutional amendment, right? What are we gonna have? A convention of states where the reactionaries that control the majority of state legislatures are going to have their way with us, or we're going to convince, 2 3rds of the Senate to pass a Constitutional amendment to overturn this ruling.
It's just not going to happen. And more than that, it accedes to the legitimacy of what we view is a illegitimate court majority. 1 that has stolen this power and is weaponizing it against us. Without any political pushback. And the direction we're trying to push the party to head the advocacy movement, the legal community to head is that no, it's not just the court that gets to decide these things. And this and what's happening in this country right now. It's not Marbury v. Madison, right? Marbury v. Madison, the seminal kind of early American history case about the role of the courts to decide what the law is. It didn't envision this level of judicial supremacy, particularly over the other co-equal branches of the federal government. And so what's happened is that, the Congress and the President have ceded this fundamentally important power, the people's power. Again, they are the most democratic of the branches. The court structurally is much less democratic. It's unaccountable. And it is selected, in our case now by presidents who didn't win the majority of votes confirmed by a Senate that has deeply baked in countermajoritarian features and is deeply malapportioned. And that's the direction we are trying to head, which is to, say, we, the people have real power to say, "No, this is wrong."
One final note on that is that, we're starting to see that movement from important leaders in Congress. Just a couple of weeks ago, Chuck Schumer, the Senate leader, the majority leader, introduced a really bold and watershed bill, the No Kings Act, that doesn't take the Constitutional amendment approach on Trump versus the United States.
It says, no we, the Congress, have power to say, no. Say this is wrong with this is wrong, and it limits the court's jurisdiction to get in the way of that ruling, channeling that jurisdiction to lower courts. And, we think this is the type of move that, would be really salutary for Congress to start to lead into.
Jason Sattler: And that's really good in a kind of a legal sense and in the public opinion sense, a lot of activists wonder what is going on in the Senate and given, the nonsense that they've been having hearings about in the Republican House over the last three years. Literally any Trump-loving agent at the FBI has any sort of complaint generates an actual hearing. You can't get anything to happen in the Senate in terms of this, historic corruption from Clarence Thomas.
Now we're hearing that there are going to be hearings connected to the legislation you're talking about, the no Kings legislation in September. Is there anything else that you're pushing for that activists should be pushing for the Senate to do before the election?
Alex Aronson: We've been pushing for oversight for over a year now and, we think that this is another area where Congress has tremendous power. Under the Constitution under the precedence of the Supreme Court. Remember the Mazar's case where Congress, of course, it was the House was trying to get former presidents Trump, former President Trump's tax records. And in that case, the court allowed it to happen. It's really at odds with the ruling in the Trump immunity case. They've indicated a really broad oversight power connected to the Congress's very clear legislative authority, and there's no reason that same oversight power shouldn't apply vis a vis the courts themselves and the Supreme Court, but now that they are in the in the in the limelight of the spotlight of kind of these judicial corruption scandals, what we're hearing from John Roberts, what we're hearing from Sam Alito is, no, the separation of powers, insulates us from your scrutiny, what we're You know, never mind checks and balances.
There's nothing you can do. And I think, again, speaking back to that sort of like institutional temperament that reluctance to engage into these important Constitutional fights. We haven't seen leaders like like Dick Durbin. Be willing to really aggressively confront that stuff. And you mentioned the hearing that's coming up on the immunity case. One of my concerns is that case is going to be academic, right? It's going to be, it's going to be a criticism, of course, of the merits of the decision, but it's not going to connect the dots between the interests that for 50 years have been working to capture the courts that we've now learned so much about in terms of these episodes of scandal and corruption at the court over the past year. And where this is going in terms of the further erosion of American democracy as these interests work to cement what they view as a Constitutional counterrevolution. And, that has been sorely lacking from the oversight space as well. So that's where we're pushing. We're pushing on oversight on, building consensus around an aggressive package of court reforms and then looking ahead to what we hope will be a pro democracy majority in the House next year, partners who really understand this stuff, who are going to be able to jump in on day 1 and take this seriously for the threat that it is because, in many ways, It's the flip side of the violent, deadly January 6th insurrection that we see this as the the Federalist Society coup, the prestige coup, and there's a lot that the House and the Congress broadly can do to help educate the American people about it, get to the bottom of the the depth of this corruption, which has not even, the tip of the iceberg, I think, has still not yet been scratched. And then ultimately build real movement power and consensus toward real reforms, likely connected to the substantive priorities that Democrats are saying they're going to pass. That's what's going to happen. They're going to come out of the gate. If they do have this trifecta scenario that a lot of folks are planning for, and they're going to try to pass voting rights protections, they're going to try to pass row codification. But where does that go? When the Supreme Court is already telling us in its opinions that it thinks those things are unConstitutional.
What's the plan for when they strike that stuff down? Yeah.
Jason Sattler: I think that's the dead end that we come into this conversation.
We have a lot of great voters, a lot of great ideas and six people who will veto every single one of them, or at least five of the six. So what are the court reforms that you ideally imagine?
And how can voters fight for them?
Alex Aronson: so I like a lot of the court reforms that biden endorsed. I think we shouldn't I think we shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking that any of these reforms is going to be a silver bullet to deal with this captured court. But, having enforceable ethics and anti corruption laws, a post-Watergate style ethics reform effort.
My old boss, Sheldon Whitehouse has a great bill on this: The Supreme Court Ethics recusal and Transparency Act. I think that would go a long way to deterring some of this corrupt behavior. Term limits, I think, are a great idea, and again, I think we can root them, although there are Constitutional questions about this, I think we can root them in Congress's clear power to legislate vis a vis the court. I love what's going on in the No Kings Act, where the Congress is using its powers under Article 3 of the Constitution. It's called the Exceptions Clause. Turns out the Supreme Court's jurisdiction, its appellate jurisdiction, which makes up 99 percent of its docket, is subject to Congress's exceptions and regulations. And this is a long standing debate in Constitutional law and federal court scholarship about the breadth and the limits of Congress's power to set the court's jurisdiction. But again, if we want to be textualists about this, there are no limits. Some people, smart people, think that Congress has plenary authority to take the court's power to review certain categories of cases or certain cases away from the Supreme Court.
So that one move that I think could be really good. Appropriations, right? This is an undeniable power of Congress. And it used to be that the Supreme Court until, like not that long ago, it was in the 20th century that the Supreme Court moved into its marble facade on One First Street.
Before then, it was in the basement of the Senate. They did not have the level of money they do now. And they come singing for their supper every year to Congress, and there's no reason that a, a Congress should, a Congress that cares about democracy should be funding the court at the level it does and funding all of these clerks which are now being selected through the same dark money networks, at the level they are if the court exists now as we see clearly to break democracy.
I'm not suggesting that the Congress take away the courts like security apparatus. I think that would be a bad idea. They should keep the security funding in place in this era of political violence that Trump has wrought on us. But, the appropriations tool is a very powerful one. Appropriate oversight, I think, needs to be a part of the reform conversation. Oversight itself is productive, and I think would be deterrent and really help build momentum toward a lot of these other reforms.
And then, I think what has to happen, because what we don't have is support for court expansion, which I think a lot of people understandably want might well be the only thing that gets us out of this thicket. And, of course, when you talk about court expansion, You talk about FDR and where they were, right? It was a lot of the same dynamics at play when FDR was trying to pass the New Deal and this reactionary court controlled by, billionaires, not billionaires, but the wealthiest people, in 1936 and 37 was standing in the way and what they, what FDR had then was 76 votes in the Senate. We don't have that now. And we have three co-sponsors in the Senate on court expansion. I actually don't think that the way to get to court expansion is to try to like whip votes for court expansion. I think it's a hard sell for most of this caucus. I think the way we get to court expansion is by trying to pass the stuff we say we need and that we want, things like protecting reproductive freedoms that are under assault, things like voting protections. And then being ready when the court inevitably strikes that stuff down to start escalating our court reform agenda through, mechanisms like court expansion, which, I think the court would be pretty inevitable to strike down despite the clear Constitutional grounding for expanding the size of the Supreme Court.
Jason Sattler: Is there anything else that you would just say to people that they should be thinking about for people to average people to get involved?
Alex Aronson: Yeah, I think we're in a really important moment right now where over the course of the last decade or so this court has been escalating its attacks on everything we care about. And over the past year in particular as, particularly post-Dobbs and particularly post this year of scandal and corruption at the court, there is a true public understanding about just how badly out of kilter things are at the Supreme Court with these justices. Now, 70 percent of Americans agree that the court is driven more by politics and ideology than by law, and this gives us a real opportunity. I think issue communities, movement groups, and people on the ground are starting to connect the dots between the things they care about and how we can't achieve them and the power being wielded against them by this corrupt Supreme Court majority. And so I think we've got a really critically important moment to seize and help our elected representatives, help our candidates understand that, you need to be serious on this. I need to hear, good answers from you on this. And I want to see you running on this. I want to see you prioritizing it in the context of all the other stuff you say you care about. We can't be, we can't be saying, we can't say we care about bold things. And we want to do bold things if we're not prepared to do the hard things that will protect them and secure them.
"The Federalist Society Coup" with Alex Aronson