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The Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats can add a few questions to the list for conservative Supreme Court fixer Leonard Leo, if they can get him to comply with the subpoena they approved last week. Those questions revolve around the extent to which the network Leo has spun to shape both the court and the cases it hears are influencing decisions by the conservative justices.
Politico’s Heidi Przbyla continues her investigations of Leo and his reach on the Supreme Court with a deep dive into the amicus briefs filed by conservative groups. She found that “Leo and his network of nonprofit groups are either directly or indirectly connected to a majority of amicus briefs filed on behalf of conservative parties in seven of the highest-profile rulings the court has issued over the past two years.”
That majority is significant; 69% of the briefs filed by conservative groups in the last two years are directly tied to Leo. “In 15 percent of the 259 amicus briefs for the conservative side in the seven cases, Leo was either a board member, official or financial backer through his network of the group that filed the brief,” Politico found.
Another 55 percent were from groups run by individuals who share board memberships with Leo, worked for entities funded by his network or were among a close-knit circle of legal experts that includes chapter heads who serve under Leo at the Federalist Society.
What’s more striking about the analysis is how frequently the arguments and the actual language made by these groups in their amicus briefs end up shaping decisions—no matter how specious the claims made are. The example Przbyla uses is a brief from Princeton professor Robert P. George, who is not a historian but who originated the idea that abortion has been considered a crime or “a kind of inchoate felony for felony-murder purposes” since the 13th century in a brief he filed in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, the case that overturned decades of federal abortion rights.
That argument made its way into Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion, which alarmed actual historians represented by the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association, who called it “a flawed and troubling precedent” in a statement following the Dobbs decision. Those organizations represent thousands of students, experts, and professional historians, so they should know.
That’s just one example of the deep and insidious influence this one man has over the court. He and his Federalist Society didn’t just construct the conservative majority on the court, but are using those justices to enact their radical agenda.
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