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Corporations behind efforts to label Sotomayor ‘racist’

By Larisa Alexandrovna and Muriel Kane

Published: June 5, 2009
Updated 5 months ago




How corporations are buying the judiciary: Part I

Corporate interests posing as a grassroots conservative group are behind attacks on President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, a RAW STORY investigation has found.

The Committee for Justice (CFJ), an astroturf group established by big business in July 2002 to create an appearance of popular support for President Bush’s judicial nominees, is now leading the effort to oppose the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the US Supreme Court.

CFJ’s Executive Director Curt Levey has been sending out press releases and making media appearances to promote the theme that Sotomayor is racist and biased in her rulings, drawing his talking points largely from a speech in which she suggested that when it came to race and sex discrimination cases, it was possible that “a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences … would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

“It’s pretty disturbing,” Levey told The Hill. “It’s one thing to say that occasionally a judge will despite his or her best efforts to be impartial … allow occasional biases to cloud impartiality. But it’s almost like she’s proud that her biases and personal experiences will cloud her impartiality.”

CFJ was created at the urging of former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-MO) – who has himself been plagued by allegations of racism. In 2002, as Senate Democrats stalled the nomination of Judge Charles Pickering to the Federal Court of Appeals over Pickering’s alleged racial insensitivity and opposition to abortion, Lott recruited C. Boyden Gray to create a fake grassroots organization to drum up support for Pickering’s confirmation.

Gray had been White House counsel during the presidency of George H.W. Bush, who threw a fundraising party for the new organization. Former Bush White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove was also involved in the group’s creation, and the lobbying firm of Barbour Griffith & Rogers — founded by Haley Barbour, who is now governor of Mississippi — took an active role in its fundraising.

Perhaps Gray’s strongest qualification to head CFJ was his background in the creation of “astroturf” organizations, such as the anti-tax group Citizens for a Sound Economy (now part of Freedom Works). These groups routinely solicit anonymous corporate donations, which are used to promote pro-business candidates and issues by running advertising campaigns designed to appeal to cultural conservatives. They also use their influence to oppose judges whom they feel to be too populist.

Soft money groups like the Committee for Justice are not bound by campaign finance laws as long as they restrict themselves to issues advertising and avoid endorsing political candidates. This allows them to pour an enormous amount of money into issues such as judicial nominations without revealing their funding sources.

And it allows them to posit arguments that elected Republicans have distanced themselves from – but which may strike a chord among the party’s conservative base.

“The only plausible explanation for Sotomayor’s selection is that the President was boxed in by demands from Hispanic and women’s groups that he pick one of their own,” the Committee for Justice declared in a May 27 release. “What else could explain his choice of a nominee who presents such a big target for conservatives and so clearly forces red state Democratic senators to choose between the values of their constituents and those of the nominee? Among the more obvious sore points for moderate Democrats are Sotomayor’s controversial rulings on Second Amendment rights (Maloney v. Cuomo), property rights (Didden v. Village of Port Chester), and racial preferences (Ricci v. DeStefano) – all issues that President Obama would love to avoid. With gay marriage sure to be a big issue no matter who he nominated, it is hard to believe that Obama would have chosen to focus attention on three more issues that cut the GOP’s way unless he felt backed into a corner.”

Committee for Justice – A big business cut-out

Following the campaign for Pickering — who was eventually given a recess appointment by Bush but was never confirmed by the Senate — CFJ went on to support other ultra-conservative Court of Appeals nominees, including former Alabama Attorney General William Pryor, Miguel Estrada, and Janice Rogers-Brown. In all these cases, the CFJ campaigns invoked cultural issues — claiming, for example, that opposition to Pryor was based on anti-Catholic prejudice and that Estrada’s opponents were anti-Hispanic — but the real objective was to move pro-business judges onto the courts.

At the peak of the Pryor confirmation battle in November 2003, Mother Jones ran an article titled “The Making of the Corporate Judiciary: How big business is quietly funding a judicial revolution in the nation’s courts.”

The cultural issues surrounding Pryor “obscured the most important factor in Pryor’s swift rise from Mobile, Alabama, to the national stage: his longtime courting of corporate America,” the article averred. “‘The business community must be engaged heavily in the election process as it affects legal and judicial offices,’ Pryor told business leaders in 1999, after refusing to join other attorneys general in lawsuits against the tobacco and gun industries.”

“Since 1998, major corporations — Home Depot, Wal-Mart, and the insurance giant AIG, to name a few — have spent more than $100 million through front groups to remake courts that have long been a refuge for wronged consumers and employees,” it continued. “At the same time, corporate lobbyists have blitzed state legislators with tort-reform proposals, overseeing the passage of new laws in 24 states over the past year alone.”

The corporate agenda intensifies

In the course of the 2004 presidential campaign, corporate funding became increasingly significant. The corporate front group Progress for America — in which Gray was also a principal figure — did much to insure Bush’s narrow victory with its lavish advertising campaigns. After the election, PFA pushed for Social Security privatization and also launched a multimillion dollar campaign to press for the confirmation of Bush’s most controversial judicial nominees. By November 2005, it was being described by the New York Times as “an unofficial extension of the White House.”

Not only had the corporations become more influential over the political process than ever before, but their agenda had grown more ambitious. It now extended beyond merely promoting pro-business judges and passing “tort reform” legislation that made it more difficult for workers and consumers to seek recourse in the courts and included such major financial wish-list items as Social Security privatization and the deregulation which made possible the subprime mortgage crisis. The leading donor to Progress for America was Dawn Arnall, head of the Ameriquest Capital Corporation, which was the country’s largest subprime lender until its collapse in 2007.

The Committee for Justice also did its part in promoting the corporate agenda. In July 2005, when John Roberts was nominated to the Supreme Court, the conservative National Review frankly praised him for his pro-business stance and described the Committee for Justice explicitly as a group created to promote pro-business candidates.

In an article titled “A Supreme Pick For Business: John Roberts is right for growth and the economy,” conservative economist and TV host Larry Kudlow wrote:

C. Boyden Gray, the key organizer of a business coalition that weighed in on the White House nominating process, told me Roberts believes that “government intrusion should be limited.” In other words, in the economic area, Roberts is “likely to take the view that government should get out of the way and not pick the winners and losers; that government should work to level the playing field and trust markets to get the job done.”

Gray, who is also a former lawyer for George H. W. Bush, created an infrastructure to offset the special-interest groups on the left. He was asked to do this by Sen. Trent Lott, with a particular view toward representing business in judicial choices. “Judicial appointments are not all about social issues,” he says, “nor should they be.” He’s right. Believe it or not, roughly 40 percent of Supreme Court cases are now related to business and the economy.

Gray’s Committee for Justice includes Stan Anderson, the legal advisor to the Chamber of Commerce, John Engler, the president of the National Association of Manufacturers, Frank Keating, president of the American Council of Life Insurers, and Connie Mack, the former Senator and pro-growth advocate. This is the first time in anyone’s memory that business has entered the judicial fray, and Judge Roberts was their first choice.

Stan Anderson, better known by his full name of Stanton B. Anderson, provides an interesting link between CFJ and the US Chamber of Commerce, which has also been actively involved in promoting corporate interests, creating pro-business groups, and helping pro-business judges find their way into the federal and state judiciary.

Described in 2006 as a “longtime Bush family ally,” Anderson began his political career in the 1960’s as a director of the Young Republican National Federation. He then worked in the Nixon administration, served as a deputy assistant secretary of state under Henry Kissinger, and was active in the 1980 Reagan campaign. Rather than joining the Reagan administration, however, he focused during the 1980’s on serving as a US lobbyist for powerful Japanese corporations – benefiting, according to author Joseph Trento, from a business relationship with Korean influence-peddler Tongsun Park.

Anderson established the Center for International Private Enterprise on behalf of the US Chamber of Commerce in 1983. In recent years, he has worked even more closely with the Chamber, first as an outside counsel and since 2003 as executive vice president and chief legal office. During that time, he has been involved in setting up many of the Chamber’s operations, such as the founding of a pro-business newspaper in Illinois in 2005.

The Chamber has also been one of the strongest opponents of the Employee Free Choice Act, which would make union organizing easier, but which businesses are resisting as a threat to competitiveness.





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