Government-Judicial Branch

Federalist Society quiet on bigwig member who spoke at insurrection, told Pence to overturn election

DailyKos 1/14/21 Joan McCarter

More than 200 judges have been embedded in the federal judiciary by outgoing Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump. The huge majority of those judges come from the Federalist Society, the right-wing dark money association that has been working for years to erode civil rights, end abortion, oppose LGBTQ equality, stop gun safety laws, and fight regulations protecting the environment, health care, and worker safety—aka everything achieved in roughly half a century of progress. They are responsible for the current makeup of the Supreme Court and most of the Republican Senate. And they also have at least partial responsibility for the insurrection that happened at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

Supreme Ambition review: Trump, Kavanaugh and the right's big coup

<embed> https://www.theguardian.com/law/2019/nov/30/supreme-ambition-review-ruth-marcus-trump-kavanaugh-gorsuch</embed> The Guardian 11/30/19

Most memorable is her revelation that 14 months before he would leave the bench, Justice Anthony Kennedy, Kavanaugh’s former boss, lobbied Trump to elevate the appeals court judge. As Marcus described things, Kennedy’s “message to the president was as consequential as it was straightforward, and it was a remarkable insertion by a sitting justice into the distinctly presidential act of judge picking”. Kennedy has not issued a denial.

Supreme Ambition offers a possible additional glimpse into Kennedy’s thinking. Marcus reports that at a gathering of Washington’s high and mighty, the Alfalfa Club dinner, shortly after Trump’s inauguration, Gregory Kennedy, the justice’s son, approached the White House aide Kellyanne Conway and conveyed that “no one … was happier about the election” than his father.