 I get that the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominees is a very long, arduous and dull process so watching it isn't necessarily that entertaining. Having said that though, if you watch any moment from the hearings, please take the time to watch the video that I'm about to play for you. Now, the original clip is 30 minutes long, so before you watch this shortened version of it that I'm about to play for you, I would encourage you to pause this video, go to the link in the description box and watch the full thing because it really is worth your time. I think that everyone has to see this. And for people who, you know, understand already that there's this dark money influence that's fueling the radicalization of our judiciary system, people may still be a little bit naive for lack of a better word and think, well, you know, that doesn't necessarily mean that Roe v. Wade or Obergefell will be overturned because, you know, it's going to be unlikely that a case, you know, related to these things will come up before the court. You would be horribly mistaken to think that. So let's watch. This is a long clip, but it is worth every second. We have colleagues here who supported you, this nominee, before there was a nominee. That's a little unusual. We have the political ram job that we have already complained of driving this process through at breakneck speed in the middle of a pandemic, while the Senate is closed for safety reasons and while we're doing nothing about the COVID epidemic around us. We have some very awkward one eighties from colleagues. Mr. Chairman, you figure in this. Our leader said back when it was Garland versus Gorsuch that, of course, of course, the American people should have a say in the court's direction. Of course, of course, said Mitch McConnell. That's long gone. Here's the GOP platform, the Republican platform, the platform of my colleagues on the other side of this aisle, say that a Republican president will appoint judges who will reverse Roe, Obergefell, and the Obamacare cases. When we say the stakes are high on this, it's because you've said the stakes are high on this. You have said that's what you want to do. So how are people going about doing it? What is the scheme here? Let me start with this one. In all cases, there's big anonymous money behind various lanes of activity. One lane of activity is through the conduit of the Federalist Society. It was managed by a guy named Leonard Leo, and it's taken over the selection of judicial nominees. How do we know that to be the case? Because Trump has said so over and over again. His White House counsel said so. So we have an anonymously funded group controlling judicial selection run by this guy, Leonard Leo. Then in another lane, we have, again, anonymous funders running through something called the Judicial Crisis Network, which is run by Carrie Severino, and it's doing PR and campaign ads for Republican judicial nominees. It got single $17 million donation in the Garland Gorsuch Contest. It got another single $17 million donation to support Kavanaugh. Somebody, perhaps the same person, spent $35 million to influence the makeup of the United States Supreme Court. Tell me that's good. And then over here, you have a whole array of legal groups, also funded by dark money, which have a different role. They bring cases to the court. They don't wind their way to the court, Your Honor. They get shoved to the court by these legal groups, many of which asked to lose below so they can get quickly to the court to get their business done there. And then they turn up in an chorus, an orchestrated chorus of Amy Key. Now, I've had a chance to have a look at this. And I was in a case, actually, as an amicus myself, the Consumer Financial Protection Board case. And in that case, there were one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven amicus briefs filed. And every single one of them was a group funded by something called Donors Trust. Donors Trust is a gigantic identity scrubbing device for the right wing so that it says Donors Trust is the donor without whoever the real donor is. It doesn't have a business. It doesn't have a business plan. It doesn't do anything. It's just an identity scrubber. And this group here, the Bradley Foundation, funded eight out of the 11 briefs. That seems weird to me when you have amicus briefs coming in little flotillas that are funded by the same groups but nominally separate in the court. So I actually attached this to my brief as an appendix. Center for Media and Democracy saw it and they did better work. They went on to say which foundations funded the briefwriters in that CFPB case. Here's the Bradley Foundation for 5.6 million to those groups. Here's Donors Trust, 23 million to those briefwriting groups. The grand total across all the donor groups was $68 million to the groups that were filing amicus briefs pretending that they were different groups. It goes beyond just the amicus presentations. The Federalist Society, remember this group that is acting as the conduit and that Donald Trump has said is doing his judicial selection? They're getting money from the same foundations. From Donors Trust, $16.7 million. From the Bradley Foundation, $1.37 million. From the same group of foundations total, $33 million. So you can start to look at these and you can start to tie them together. The legal groups, all the same funders over and over again bringing the cases and providing this orchestrated chorus of amici. Then the same group also funds the Federalist Society over here. The Washington Post wrote a big expose about this and that made Leonard Leo a little hot, a little bit like a burned agent. So he had to jump out and he went off to go and do anonymously funded voter suppression work. Guess who jumped in to take over the selection process in this case? For Judge Barrett, Harry Severino made the hop. So once again, ties right in together. So Center for Media and Democracy has done a little bit more research. Here's a Bradley Foundation memo that they've published. The Bradley Foundation is reviewing a grant application asking for money for this orchestrated amicus process. And what do they say in the staff recommendation? It is important to orchestrate. Their word, not mine. Important to orchestrate high-caliber amicus efforts before the court. They also note that Bradley has done previous philanthropic investments in the actual underlying legal actions. So Bradley is funding, what do they call? Philanthropically investing in the underlying legal action and then giving money to groups to show up in the orchestrated chorus of amici. That can't be good. And it goes on because they also found this email. This email comes from an individual at the Bradley Foundation and it asks our friend Leonard Leo who used to run the selection process. Is there a 501c3 non-profit to which Bradley could direct any support of the two Supreme Court amicus projects other than Donor's Trust? I don't know why they wanted to avoid the reliable identity scrubber Donor's Trust but for some reason they did. So Leonard Leo writes back on Federalist Society address. Don't tell me that it isn't Federalist Society business. On Federalist Society, on his address he writes back, yes, send it to the judicial education project which could take and allocate the money. And guess who works for the judicial education project? Carrie Severino who also helped select this nominee running the Trump Federalist Society selection process. So the connections abound in the Washington Post article, they point out that the Judicial Crisis Network's office is on the same hallway in the same building as the Federalist Society and when they sent their reporter to talk to somebody at the judicial crisis network, somebody from the Federalist Society came down to let them up. This more and more looks like it's not three schemes but it's one scheme with the same funders selecting judges, funding campaigns for the judges and then showing up in court in these orchestrated amicus flotillas to tell the judges what to do. Here's how the Washington Post summed it up. This is a conservative activist behind the scenes campaign to remake the nation's courts and it's a $250 million dark money operation. $250 million is a lot of money to spend if you're not getting anything for it. So that raises the question, what are they getting for it? Well, I showed the slide earlier on the Affordable Care Act and on Obergefell and on Roe versus Wade, that's where they lost but with another judge that could change. That's where the contest is. That's where the Republican Party platform tells us to look at how they want judges to rule, to reverse Roe, to reverse the Obamacare cases and to reverse Obergefell and take away gay marriage. That is their stated objective and plan. Why not take him at their word? Phenomenal job here. This was really, really informative and I'm glad that he took the time to do this because why take the time to ask Amy Honeyberry any questions when you know she's not going to answer any questions? So why waste your time? Why not take that time while everyone is watching while this is being televised nationally to explain what is happening here? $250 million being made to remake the court system in the United States to radicalize the court system. I mean, conservatives oftentimes talk about activist judges. I mean, what we're seeing now is a takeover of the court system in a very brazen way before our eyes. I mean, we know that in 2016 Mitch McConnell wouldn't even allow Obama's nominee at the time, Merrick Garland, to have a single hearing. We know now that after saying we don't confirm new Supreme Court appointments in an election year, they're confirming Amy Coney Barrett. She'll very likely be on the Supreme Court. But if you look at the federal appointments, what Mitch McConnell did or didn't do more specifically in the last years of Obama's term was he didn't allow Obama's federal appointments. He blocked almost all of them. I was shocked that former President Obama left so many vacancies and didn't try to fill those positions. I'll tell you why. I'll tell you why. I was in charge of what we did the last two years of the Obama administration. I will give you full credit for that. And by the way, take a bow. All right, that was a good life. And then guess what? After holding all of those vacancies for years, as soon as a Republican president comes to power, all of a sudden they're getting filled. One after another after another. And sure, Democrats have been complicit. I mean, there's the infamous story from, I think it was 2018, where Chuck Schumer fast-tracked a bunch of Trump's federal judge appointments so that way Democrats can go campaign. And that's astonishing, but you've got to understand Republicans have been so incredibly effective at remaking the court. And it's not for nothing. As Sheldon White House pointed out, they're not spending all of this money for nothing. They're expecting a return on that investment. And this is being done with the specific intent to win the cases they previously lost, the Affordable Care Act, Roe vs. Wade, and Oberg-Fell v. Hodges. They are bringing cases before the court, filing amicus briefs, doing everything in their power to make sure that this conservative Supreme Court takes up these cases. So they do rehear cases related to Roe v. Wade and marriage equality. And you've got to understand that if you're still of the mindset that these justices are principled and they really are just, you know, guided by their own judicial philosophies, you cannot think about it that way anymore. These are political actors. These are partisan actors doing what their party and donors who paid to get them there want them to do. Again, it's in the GOP platform. Donald Trump is going to appoint judges, justices, rather who are going to overturn the ACA, abortion, and gay marriage. And if you think that can't happen, you are horribly mistaken. And the scariest part is that they don't even necessarily need Amy Coney Barrett. They already have a five-four majority. But if they get a six-three majority, I don't think you understand how much damage they could do for an extended period of time. Think of the Lochner era, but on steroids. So all of the progress that we've made, all of the arguments that were successfully won when it comes to LGBTQ rights, Lawrence v. Texas, Obergefell v. Hodges, that's all up for grabs. I mean, they're going to take us in a draconian direction. If you think that that's not possible, you are terribly naive, terribly naive. It's funny because Amy Coney Barrett basically made it seem as if, oh, well, I mean, the Supreme Court isn't likely going to take up a case related to gay marriage. Really? They're fast-tracking judges. I mean, all of these dark money networks, they're making sure that specific justices get nominated who are going to do what they want. So people have got to wake up and stop fooling themselves about the Supreme Court. This is not a body that is apolitical. This is a body of highly ideological political actors. And they should scare everyone because all of the battles that we fought and won, we're going to have to fucking have all of those battles again, most likely. So the only solution is to pack the Supreme Court. Now, I talked about this in another video, and I think I made a pretty solid case in my opinion for packing the Supreme Court, but I'm open to, you know, counter-arguments. But we don't have a choice. It's either 20 to 30 years of nonstop conservative rulings or we go tit for tat with Republicans. We add justices. They add justices. So at least like within the next couple of decades, there's some periods where there's a liberal majority. We can't afford to go backwards. We just, we can't. We have a climate catastrophe looming over our heads. And we don't have time. Democracy is at stake. So expand that fucking court because that's what they did. Republicans, they packed the court, holding open seats. It may not be court packing in the traditional sense where you expand the number of justices on the Supreme Court, but make no mistake about it. They're packing that court. They're stacking that motherfucker so much that they're remaking the entire judiciary in the United States. Trump appointed, what is it now, over 300 federal judges? That is enough to completely change the trajectory of this country for decades. So you've got to understand. There's too much at stake. We've got to pack the court.