Leonard Leo

The implementation began under Ronald Reagan, who arguably was the worst president of the 20th century, and we see the result.

I mean, the outcome is a handful of plutocrats that can basically overwhelm Any thought of one person, one vote with a huge pouring out of dark money going into PACs? There's somebody that a lot of folks don't even know, a person by the name of Barr Seed, who gave a billion dollars to the Marble Trust, which is run by Leonard Leo, who runs the Federalist Society.

And they make significant decisions on who gets to the Supreme Court, who the nominees are, and who are nominated to the appellate courts.

It's incredibly powerful in the fact that a billion dollars can go.

And I've said this before and I'll say it again.

You've got your hard right Catholics like Leonard Leo and Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation.

You've got William Wolfe and Joel Webb on and all of those, you know, Theobro types.

Oh, yeah.

They're destroying the house from the inside very, very quietly in the dark, and nobody's paying attention.

Leonard Leo is responsible for getting a majority of the conservative Catholic justices on the Supreme Court.

I think you worked with him.

Why are you sounding the alarm?

He was a political appointee and my boss for three years.

Yeah, he spent 35 years at the Federalist Society and $600 million finding vetting and installing six far-right extremist Catholics kind of interesting in all of that time all that money he couldn't find a single evangelical that was qualified they were so there it's now a six to three a Supreme Court and they're deciding the most important issues in the land that we're dealing with, whether it's abortion, immigration, immunity for the president, gutting voting rights, expanding gun laws.

It's astonishing the list of things that they have, that the Leonard Leo Court, everybody calls it the Roberts Court, I call it the Leonard Leo Court, has accomplished and the ways in which they've changed And there has never been a single that I know of hard look at the Catholic nationalists and their ideas and what their strategy is and what their goals are in any U.S. media.

Gareth did a great job in his book Opus.

From the

Fifth Circuit that Leonard Leo told him to.

He doesn't even talk to Leonard Leo any longer.

No, he's going to, this group of who stood by him, he's put a lot of them into the appellate courts.

A lot of his, you know, a lot of the people at these major law firms that you and I know well.

And he certainly seems quite aligned with Donald Trump in all sorts of ways.

And he could get a cushy gig at one of these entities that might have funding from Leonard Leo or other big right wing donors and be free to attack progressives, to attack Democrats in a way that he is not, you know, cannot say truly what he thinks, in essence, in through those Supreme Court opinions.

But let's be clear, he sometimes is very clear about what he thinks, like when he wrote the Dobbs decision and finally admitted that that he always considered Roe to be an illegitimate decision, even though he promised to follow it when he was nominated to the Supreme Court.

People know I'm a sports fan, so let me use a sports metaphor.

What's your dream job? What's your next chapter look like? And I could definitely see people having an interest in providing a sinecure for him at that residency somewhere at a university like Catholic University or another entity where he would have access to even more luxury than the private jet of a random billionaire, but not so random a billionaire that had a lot of business before the court, where he could have some of those perks more directly and have a platform for his attacks.

on the left and progressives.

And I think that that situation is made even more acute by the divide between the Leonard Leo contingent of right-wing Catholic activists and the Pope.

We have a Pope that has in some ways rebuked the sort of right-wing power structure, its disregard for immigrants' rights, for neighbors, for the duty to your fellow citizen, and instead has elevated greed and power.

You have the chance to get Democrats, adults in the room, back in the majority in the House and the Senate.

But a lot of the damage has been done with these lifetime appointments, courtesy of, you know, Mitch "I'm still in a coma" McCo- McConnell, right, and Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society.

These have been long-term plays.

This is long ball, folks.