It’s true: millions in dark money spent to tilt courts right
tulc( )After the Supreme Court agreed this term to hear a Second Amendment case brought by an NRA affiliate, several Senate Democrats cried foul.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and four other Democratic senators took the unusual step of filing a friend-of-the-court brief imploring the court’s conservative justices to resist right-wing activist pressure. These groups aim to reshape the judiciary to reflect their undisclosed financiers’ interests, the Democrats argued, on everything from expanding the Second Amendment to weakening unions and eroding voting rights.
To influence the court’s composition, Whitehouse said, a combined $34 million in "dark money" went toward both blocking President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland and confirming President Donald Trump’s two Supreme Court picks, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.
In a follow-up to the legal brief, Whitehouse in a Sept. 6 Washington Post op-ed described the money as follows:
"One unnamed donor gave $17 million to the (Leonard) Leo-affiliated Judicial Crisis Network to block the nomination of Judge Merrick Garland and to support Gorsuch; then a donor — perhaps the same one — gave another $17 million to prop up Kavanaugh."
It can be difficult to trace the path of anonymous political spending with precision, and we wanted to know the factual basis for Whitehouse’s claim. The evidence we found about the money’s origins, and where it went, backed it up.