The Most Corrupt Supreme Court in U.S. History — Who's Paying It Off, And What It's Costing Us

Welcome to Phil and Ted's Sexy Boomer Show. I'm Ted Bonnitt.

I'm Phil Proctor and I just flew in from the D.C. area yesterday.

Yeah, I can. I can smell it.

Yeah, no, that's because I'm feeling a little jet fuelish.

I just thought I got a whiff of corruption.

A whiff of corruption? Oh, yes. Yeah, that's his latest perfume. Yeah, it's in a little gold bottle.

Right.

But, you know, at least we have the three branches of government checks and balances to reel this all in.

The only checks and balances I are the bank accounts of the billionaires.

We're going to ask, is today's U.S. supreme Court the most corrupt in U.S. history? Our guest thinks so.Lisa Graves is the author of the national best selling book Without How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights. This book is a bombshell. It's so well written, it's so God awful. To understand the level of corruption.

You read it twice.

I did. We're so fortunate to have Lisa Graves with us. Hello, Lisa.

Hello. Hello. It's a joy to be with you, Barry.

Oh, thank you so much for coming on the show. We appreciate it.

Where are you calling us from?

I'm calling you from Northern Wisconsin, on the Wisconsin side, near Duluth.

Oh, that's nice.

Oh, summer must be there now. It must be nice.

Summer. Summer has finally arrived. We have six months of winter up here and six months of not winter.

Lisa, you really did work as an insider on Capitol Hill.You're one of the nation's foremost experts in exposing how special interests are distorting public policy and trying to thwart the public's interest in a thriving and inclusive democracy, as you wrote, and impede measures to protect our environment and mitigate climate change. Other than that.

Yeah, you just.

Free as a bird.

You are the founder and executive director of True North Research, a national investigative watchdog group that works with journalists and other researchers to expose the dark money fueling regressive agendas that are targeting vital institutions in our republic, like the courts and our public schools.

Is it dark because it's soaked in oil? I've never quite understood.

Some of it is. Some of it is. That's a great question.

The dark money thing, We've been talking about that as the greatest problem we're facing. Citizens United, we're gonna talk about all of that.We're ready to go with you, Lisa, to get as much as we can of your book out in one hour because it's public service. It's something that needs to be said.And again, your perspective is very important because you were chief counsel for nominations for Senator Patrick LEAHY in the U.S. senate Judiciary Committee. You were also a senior strategist for the ACLU on security and civil liberties.You've been asked and have given expert testimony before several committees in the U.S. senate and House of Reps. And you've helped shape the national debate about the culture of corruption on the U.S. supreme Court. You have an insider's perspective, and what you saw didn't make you happy to draw the picture.We have a conservative supermajority on the court, which is what has tipped the balances.

I call it the extreme court. Right.

Your book focuses on Chief Justice John Roberts, and that's who we're gonna speak about primarily today, because I don't think people realize that that face, nice smile that he has masks a much nefarious, if you will, background in his history. He's the nation's 17th chief justice.

Listen, I loved him when he did his television show, Mr. Roberts.

No, I think you got that wrong.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

But being only the 17th chief justice, his role is extremely consequential, historically. He's also the richest, by far, on the Supreme Court, with a net worth of over $25 million.

Because of his wife, though, right?

Well, he was born with a silver spoon in his mout. Makes him, as you wrote, wealthier than 99.9% of the US population.He was born, as you say, on third base, the son of a Bethlehem Steel executive with access to the best private schools money could buy. But his wealth has surged since he was appointed to the Supreme Court because his wife, Jane, has made a fortune as a headhunter.She's been paid large commissions for placing elite lawyers at elite law firms that litigate before the Supreme Court and other courts. Not a conflict of interest there, eh?

No. Yes. Gosh, Just let me begin by saying what an honor it is to be on your show and have this conversation with you and with your audience.I wrote this book because I was very concerned about how the court was operating. Not really like a court, but like an arm of a political party, like a weapon in a far right agenda, quite frankly. That's right. And how.John Roberts really was a Reagan revolutionary. He was back in the Reagan era, and on the court. He is still a Reagan revolutionary. He is still advancing an extreme agenda.And in some instances, he is using the courts to win battles that he lost when he was a lawyer for the Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush administration. So he's someone who I think, really deceives the American people.In his confirmation hearings, when he was nominated to be the Chief justice, when he claimed that he was going to be merely an umpire calling balls and strikes, he wasn't chosen to be an umpire. He was chosen to be a player to move this ball down the field, to regress American law, to roll back our rights.And that's what he's done on the bench. And I can tell you a little about how I tried to stop him initially from getting a judgeship when he.

Was announced as Supreme Court nominee. You wrote that you wept.

Yes, I was very concerned. Concerned is the least of it, really. I had been certain that he was going to be the nominee if there was a vac.If there were a vacancy for George W. Bush.That's why I asked my boss if I could ask Senator Reid, who was then the whip for the Democrats, that there not be a recorded up or down vote for John Roberts when he was nominated and confirmed the D.C. circuit, which is one of the appellate courts in the country. And so that's why John Roberts was confirmed by unanimous consent. It doesn't mean that he was unanimously approved to the D.C. circuit.It just meant that I was trying to preserve for the Democrats an opportunity to vote against him when he was elevated or promoted to the Supreme Court, which I was certain that he was going to be George W. Bush's nominee for the Supreme Court. And he was. And so when he was confirmed, I. I wept.

So you knew that he was a bad choice for America as far as the Republic is concerned. What were the things that he had done that made you so concerned about him?

Well, I thought that John Roberts was really like Robert Bork without the goatee and the sort of villainous look about him that the editorial cartoonist had really captured.

Yeah, or the funny name.

Yeah.

Robert Bork was very loud about his regressive views. And John Roberts, in essence, learned from that and was quiet about his views.But he held and continues to hold very extreme views about the presidency, really aggrandizing presidential power and a very narrow view of civil rights and the rights under the Voting Rights Act. If you remember back then, maybe it was like 1999, 2000, there was this chant that began at a Federal Society event.The Federal Society is a group that was created in the early 1980s to create a pipeline for power for right wing lawyers to become judges and get other key posts. It was funded by a man who has faded in history, but who was Very famous for a while. Dick Scaife, he was an heir to the Mellon banking fortune.And Dick Scaife was sort of a demi billionaire back then. And he funded this group to really create this pipeline. And John Roberts is a beneficiary of that.So Fast forward to 1999, 2000, after Clarence Thomas had been confirmed to the Supreme Court along with David Souter. For a number of years there was this chant, no More Suitors.The right wing felt that they had wasted a seat on Souter because he was following the law, he was following legal precedents like Roe vs Wade and other precedents. And they didn't want any more suitors. Right. How dare, how dare a judge follow those precedents. So John Roberts, yeah.Is the beneficiary of the no More Suitors campaign. He and Sam Alito both. That chant was not, did not go for them.In fact, if you look at what happened that year in 2005, what you see is John Roberts gets confirmed, Harriet Myers is nominated by George W. Bush to the Supreme Court.These howls of protest by none other than Robert Bork and others against her arose, you know, on this no More Suitors campaign, saying she wasn't doctrinary enough, she wasn't reliable enough, she wasn't going to be a sure vote. So after about three weeks of pressure, George W. Bush pulled down the nomination of his longtime counsel and they swapped in Sam Alito.And so Sam Alito and John Roberts were confirmed, you know, as part of this agenda to capture the court and not just like to capture with fair judges.Right, to capture with judges who are going to use that judicial power, I think, illegitimately, quite frankly, to roll back our rights to reverse the key precedents of the 21st and 20th century.

We can look in retrospect, and it's a little sad because we had this moment in the 60s where we swung to a liberal society. We had a robust middle class. People could afford housing, they could afford one income families.And the rate of wealth among the middle class was rising faster than the wealth class. And that had to come to a stop. And the Reagan revolution represented the clawing back to a more conservative age.And Roberts, he was the go to guy for the Reagan administration.You wrote in the book that when Justice Sandra Day o' Connor was nominated by Reagan, John Roberts coached Sandra Day o' Connor on how to not answer questions when she was in hearings.And then in 2000, when he was an appellate lawyer in private practice, Roberts traveled to Florida to advise then Florida Governor Jeb Bush, the President's brother on how to navigate the recount. Less than a week before the court issued its partisan 5, 4 ruling of Bush v. Gore, they stopped the recount.And when that happened, Jeb sent a personal note to Roberts thanking him. And as you write in the book, there's a good chance that Gore would have won.

Yep. Yeah, this is, it's really extraordinary when you think about where we are now in 2026 compared to 2000.That was a hyper partisan decision by the Rehnquist Court. That was John Roberts mentor, Bill Rehnquist.And although Souter was on the other side of that vote, it was five Republicans voting to stop the ballots from being counted in Florida. And they adopted arguments that were made by the Bush team.And we now know that John Roberts helped advise some of the main lawyers arguing the cases below before the Florida Supreme Court. But it wasn't just him.Brett Kavanaugh went to Florida also to help with the recount, and also Amy Coney Barrett went to Florida to help with the recount.And we also learned through the research that I've done and that my team has done, that Ted Cruz was instrumental in bringing people together for that recount, including lawyers like John Roberts. That was one of his first calls.But also Leonard Leo, the man that Donald Trump tapped to choose his list for the Supreme Court, to hand pick the Supreme Court justices in Trump's first term.Leonard Leo was organizing lawyers, including John Roberts and others, to, you know, be there people who had been either part of the federal society or helped or friendly the federal society.And so you have a situation where these key players who were not famous then, but are very famous now, were part of that effort to block Americans votes from being counted in that election.And what that meant was not just that we had a president in George W. Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney, who lied us into the war in Iraq, who made false claims about weapons of mass destruction and the like. But what that meant was that in 2004, they were incumbents when they ran again, and incumbents typically have an advantage.And so they were in the place to benefit from those vacancies from Sandra Day o' Connor stepping down after George W. Bush was elected in 2004. And then you had Bill Rehnquist dying in the fall of 2005. And that opened up two seats for George W. Bush.Had Gore been president, it would be a Democratic majority in terms of the appointees on the Supreme Court. But not just that.That wasn't the only sort of thing of fate or, you know, thing that was sort of changed in history due to this unprecedented intervention by the Supreme Court in 2000. But also, as we all know, we saw the Republicans block President Obama from filling the vacancy when Scalia died.And Obama was a twice duly elected, popularly elected President of the United States. And the Republicans, conspiring with their funders and with people like Leonard Leo, blocked that vacancy from being filled with Merrick Garland.Filled it with no Gorsuch. Their claim was you couldn't confirm someone at the Supreme Court while a presidential election year was happening.

Yeah.

Even though he died. Yeah. In February and the election was in November. Then, of course, Fast forward to 2020 when Ruth Bader Ginsburg dies in September of 2020.They moved Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court within a month as Americans were voting Donald Trump out of office. And in the middle of that, you had Brett Kavanaugh confirmed, despite the very serious allegations against him.So if Gorsuch had not been confirmed and if Amy Coney Barrett had not been confirmed, you would have a super majority on the Supreme Court of Democratic.

So you had this complicity by all branches because Mitch McConnell, who was the Senate leader at the time, considers one of his proudest achievements was to destroy the Merrick Garland nomination. People could argue and say, you guys are left. You guys just don't agree with what they're doing and they're winning.In your sour grapes, there's a very interesting personal perspective you wrote about in your book.When you were involved in the vetting of judicial appointees, you were reporting to Attorney Generals Janet Reno and then John Ashcroft, and you witnessed a shocking view from the top in the way in which they operated or performed their duties in vetting potential judicial nominees. This perspective, you saw how Ashcroft on the Republican side operated and how Reno operated says another story, doesn't it?

There's so much more to the story. I know we have time for the full version, but read the book. Ms. Reno was very conscientious and very devoted to making sure that we had people.What would happen is a senator or a member of Congress or maybe a donor might say, hey, I recommend this person for judgeship, but we did a full vetting of those nominees to make sure that they qualified and that wasn't nepotism and that they didn't have issues or scandals in their background that they were qualified.

Reno was under Clinton.

Yes, under Clinton. Yes, under Clinton.And then when Bush came in and Ashcroft became the Attorney General, they threw the American Bar association out of the review process. Where you would have the bars of a particular state or city, the people in that bar being asked, does this person have a good reputation?Are they honest? Are they an honest lawyer? Are they someone who is deceptive and biased? And they immediately cut that out.And the Ashcroft Justice Department worked with the Federal Society with Leonard Leo to be the ones who screened people to be, to get judgeships.And they started putting forward very young people because they wanted them to stay on the bench for 30 or 40 years beyond like 10 times the period, the term of a president. They wanted young ideologues. They didn't want people who had more experience, who are the overlords, who are.

The puppet masters, who's in the writers room doing all of this?

Oh, I love you know what I mean?

Yeah.

I'm super happy on this show with you, Phil and Ted. That is a great question and it really is the right question because this just, this didn't happen overnight.Like I said, the Federal Society was initially staked by Dick Scaife, a very notorious right winger who ultimately would go on to fund the attack on the tax, on Bill Clinton, the American Spectator attacks and the like, along with a bunch of other dirty tricks. He was, you know, very Nixonian, supporter of the far right in America.When the Federal Society was launched back in 1982, it claims to have been just three students getting together to advance so called conservative ideas.Well, its two leading advisors were Robert Bork, who'd just been confirmed to a judgeship by the Senate after Reagan nominated him, and Antonin Scalia, who a few months later would also be nominated to a circuit court position. And the Federal Society was created not just as a so called conservative organization, but as a conservative and libertarian organization.And we know that the biggest funder of the libertarian party in 1980 was David Koch. He was the brother of Charles Koch. Charles and David Koch had cumulatively spent hundreds of millions on elections to influence elections in America.

Oil money.

Oil money, yeah, big oil money.

And these people play the long game. The Koch brothers have funded curriculums in college campuses in return for right wing ideology. And a lot of universities take that money.I think Harvard was the one that did not. And they've been under attack.

Yeah, Price they're paying, the dark money is extraordinary. And Charles Koch, as you said, it has played the long game.We know from my research that he's been targeting universities for capture since the 1960s. Like how can he get his fringe ideas into a position where they become dominant?

We're speaking with Lisa Graves, the Author of the bestselling book Without How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights. Again, Roberts, who you're focusing on, this guy is a lifelong operative for the right wing.When he was with the Reagan administration, he was vocally opposed to affirmative action, minority set asides, employment tests. Roberts asserted that the Supreme Court precedents against voluntary prayer, or so called moments of silence in schools, seemed indefensible.He also routinely used his perch, as you wrote, to assail women's equality rights, including the Equal Rights Amendment. And you wrote, quote, his writings show him to be arrogant and sarcastic on the subject.

Yes.

So this is a guy who is far from impartial. We know why they pick young nominees because their shelf life is long, to keep the political wins the way they want.But why not pick an experienced associate judge to run the court? How does a guy out of nowhere suddenly become Chief Justice?

Well, so the Chief justice position is a position that gets filled by a presidential nomination with the Senate's consent. And it, I think it should be someone who is skilled in administration and has an impeccable record for fairness. But that's not how it has worked.It has been used in the case of John Roberts to reward someone with such a position who is very devoted to this right wing agenda. But it is not just the Chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. It's also the Chief justice for the US Judicial system.And so the person who is the Chief justice is, gets to choose who sits on almost all of the judicial committees for issues like ethics and the like, including overseeing the Judicial Conference, which is the chief judges of the other circuits of the circuit courts and representatives from the district courts.And in that role, the Judicial Conference has swept under the rug the very serious ethical concerns and allegations and evidence against Clarence Thomas, against Sam Alito and others.And so you have a judiciary helmed by someone in John Roberts determined to not hold a Justice accountable for violating the ethics rules in numerous ways. But who is John Roberts?He's someone who, when he was nominated in 2005 for that Chief justice position, his confirmation was backed by a bunch of billionaires, including people who were not famous then, like Charles Koch and also Harlan Crowe, not famous then, very famous now. So he was one of the first beneficiaries of dark money influencing the appointment process for the Supreme Court.And so he has had no incentive to do anything about it.In fact, I would say to you and your listeners that when you look at what John Roberts did around the immunity decision, the unprecedented counter constitutional creation of immunity from criminal prosecution for Donald Trump. John Roberts needed Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas to be part of those decisions, or he risked Amy Coney Barrett swinging to the other side.And so you have two men, Clarence Thomas, whose wife was demonstrably that.We have ample evidence that she was actively contacting the White House Chief of staff, Mark Meadows, trying to subvert that election, stop the recount from happening.We know that from the Washington Post reporting and we know from other reporting that she was actively soliciting fake electors in Arizona and in Wisconsin, sending emails urging those state reps. And yet Clarence.

Thomas refuses to recuse himself. Yes, he takes gifts of big RV campers, real estate for his mom's house, expensive trips on private planes. Is it fair to say he's taking bribes?

I think that it's definitely intended to influence him by keeping him on the court.Because what the ProPublica reporters uncovered in their Pulitzer Prize winning investigation from two years ago, what they uncovered was that in 1999, 2000, Clarence Thomas was complaining that he wasn't living the lifestyle to which he wanted to be accustomed. And he was threatening to quit, to resign, to go take a job as a partner at a law firm and cash out. And then all of a sudden, there was all this.All these trips started coming in, all these benefits started coming in to keep him basically on the court, where he gets to live the lifestyle of a billionaire, specifically Harlan Crow, but also hang out, rub elbows with Charles Koch and other billionaires at secret men's clubs and the like.So you have John Roberts not insisting that Clarence Thomas recuse himself from cases where he's clearly conflicted due to his wife's activity, but also where he himself is conflicted.So that Citizens United decision that you mentioned, which has just had such a devastating effect on our democracy, injecting billions of dollars into our elections by billionaires, trying to drown out the voices of ordinary people and also distort their voices, basically ply them with propaganda. What happened in that Citizen United case is an absolute scandal. In that ruling. Clarence Thomas sat on that case. It was a 5 to 4 ruling.Just weeks before that decision was issued, Jenny Thomas received $500,000 from Harlan Crow to stake her nonprofit, a 501C4 nonprofit that she was creating to take advantage of, of the decision to come by the Citizens United in that City United case, to allow these C4 groups, this dark money operation, to really proceed. So on New Year's Eve, she rushed an emergency LLC request to The Virginia Corporation Council, because she needed to cash the check.There's no scenario in which Jenny Thomas did not tell Clarence Thomas that their benefactor, the man that had been bankrolling them for luxury trips to his resorts and his super yacht and his super private plane, that he didn't know that she got $500,000 to fund this organization. He did not recuse himself. He was the swing vote.Had he recused himself, it would have been a 4 to 4 decision that would have left the campaign finance laws in place.And Thomas had the audacity, Clarence Thomas, to write a concurring opinion in which he claimed that under the new precedent of Citizen United, banding on the notion that money is speech, anything that chills the spending of money is unconstitutional. And so he affirmatively attacked disclosure because disclosure of who was giving money to these C4 groups would chill the spending of money.Knowing that his wife had just received a half a million dollars from his billionaire backer.

I always thought of Citizens United as being oligarchs untied, right?

Yes.

Really?

I mean, I call it Billionaires United, but I like billionaires untied.

Jenny Thomas had a high paying job at the Heritage Foundation's executive branch liaison. She was given this high paying role after her husband cast the tiebreaking vote on Bush v. Gore. So these people are institutionally corrupt.

Yes.

Scalia died in his sleep at a rich man's retreat in Texas. Did that raise eyebrows?

It really did.And there were requests and questions raised by members of Congress about who was paying for that trip and whether they had any business with the court.You know, Scalia is someone who really in some ways, was a model, and I say that word loosely, but a model for Clarence Thomas in this Gift of Palooza, where basically Scalia would solicit trips from wealthy businessmen to fund his hunting habits, his shooting habits.And one of the things that people don't know about Scalia, not just his penchant for these free gifts of trips from very, very rich people, is that the year before the ruling changing the interpretation of the second Amendment to assert that it protects an individual right to bear arms rather than a collective right.

Yes.

Scalia was on a trip with gun advocates, very well placed gun advocates, to go to the international version of the National Rifle Association, National Sports Shooting association, where Scalia was named the international ambassador for the shooting community and received a gift of a gun.And at that meeting, he told those gun rights advocates who were traveling with him that if the Supreme Court accepted the petition for cert on a case involving the Second Amendment that was coming out of D.C. the Heller case, that would mean that they had the votes, the five to four votes to overturn more than a century of precedent about reasonable regulations of our gun laws.He didn't call them reasonable regulations, of course, but he basically signaled that when this right wing majority on the court that's now a super majority, when they accept a case, it basically means that they have the votes to change the law in the direction that they want.

Brett Kavanaugh, that had to be one of the most disgraceful nomination processes ever, where you had someone spitting and crying in the hearing, saying, I like beer. How did we sink this low?

Well, this was really grassly in the Republican Party.And Donald Trump, because why would Donald Trump withdraw a nominee who's been accused of sexual assault when he himself has been accused of sexual assault and subsequently was found in the E. Jean Carroll case to have committed sexual abuse and then smeared her and defamed her?This is someone in a president who, who is nominated and forced through the confirmation of Pete Hegseth, who was accused of sexually assaulting a woman, settled that case without an admission of responsibility for doing so. And we've seen other allegations of the like.But regarding Brett Kavanaugh, not only was it just, it revealed his character, it revealed his, his anger and his nature.And so much so that Justice Stevens, who had previously endorsed him, this was a. Ford's nominee to the US Supreme Court, withdrew his endorsement of Kavanaugh for his behavior.But what was happening behind the scenes is even more astonishing because what we learned subsequently, and this was due to the efforts of Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and others, what we learned subsequently was that basically the Trump administration made an agreement with the Republicans on the Senate that if they would basically allow the FBI to look into whether there was corroborating evidence or other allegations of sexual assault or sexual misconduct by Brett Kavanaugh, that they would be examined.And what really happened, what we know subsequently, is that the FBI didn't look into any of them, didn't follow up on any of those allegations, didn't ask for any of the corroboration, sent the materials over to the White House, the White House counsel's office, to Don McGahn. And Don McGahn threw them away, basically threw them in the trash.There was no investigation to follow up on all the people who were coming out in news stories saying that they had experienced or they'd seen sexual misconduct by Brett Kavanaugh. And so you had a complete whitewash, just a Total subversion of the FBI background investigation process. I'm familiar with that.When I worked at the Justice Department, I was the lead counsel for the working group on judicial nominations.I used to review the FBI files of potential nominees, just go back to their 18th birthday and look into whether there's any crimes or allegations of criminal activity, whether they have blackmailability issues and the like.Were they significant debt, like somehow buying a bunch of tickets for baseball games and getting cash from your friends, paying off loans mysteriously. But the FBI did no follow up investigation in response to the allegations of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who took the.

Same hit Anita Hill took.

Yeah, her life was threatened over and over for daring to testify about what she experienced. I think she testified compellingly under oath.And yet, like you said, it is genuinely a scandal that this man, Brett Kavanaugh, is on the Supreme Court.I actually wrote a piece right after he was nominated and his hearings began saying that he should not be confirmed, he should be impeached from the D.C. circuit for lying under oath to Congress about files that have been stolen from me that were in his possession. But not to make it all about me, because it's about what's happening in our country.The fact of the matter is, is that neither Brett Kavanaugh nor Clarence Thomas should be on the Supreme Court based on the very credible testimony of women about how they were treated by those men.

And Kavanaugh lied under oath, too. He said that he would not overturn precedent. And of course they did with Roe v. Wade through the Dobbs decision, among other things.Another big issue is gerrymandering and conflicts of interest. And that Sam Alito blatantly constituted racial gerrymandering. He disregarded factual findings of the lower court by overturning a lower court.Alito should have recused himself when he was flying that upside down flag during the insurrection, the appeal to heaven flag. I mean, here we had an Associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States flying an insurrectionist flag and then denying it.How does this happen?

And how do they stay in power?

Part of what's happened is that you have a U.S. supreme Court led by John Roberts that has blocked every effort to have an enforceable ethics code. And so every time Congress has raised those issues correct, Roberts has assailed that.In fact, right before the U.S. senate Judiciary Committee was about to approve subpoenas for Harlan Crow and Leonard Leo regarding this gift and travel situation that reporters had uncovered.John Roberts made a public release saying there is an ethics code for the Supreme Court and every justice has signed saying that they follow it, which means.It means nothing given the billions of dollars of gifts that have come in to the benefit of Clarence Thomas and the non recusal that we've now seen of Alito, despite having those instructions, flags flying over his homes and more.And so John Roberts is complicit in all this, in trying to keep his Republican appointees safe on that court in order to continue to damage the law in this country, as with these cases on redistricting, on voting. One of the things about John Roberts that most people don't know is that he was basically the person who mentored with Bill Rehnquist.Bill Rehnquist was a Justice on the Supreme Court at the time. He was a Nixon appointee. But before that he was known for his role in the Republican Party in Arizona.And he helped implement a thing called Operation Eagle Eye, where he and other white Republicans would go to the black neighborhoods in Phoenix, in Bethune and other neighborhoods to have cameras to photograph voters. This was in the 1960s where people were still being lynched. People had great, a great amount of fear about voting.And the Voting Rights act had just passed in 1960. Roberts chose to clerk for Bill Rehnquist.The clerks on the court at that time, in 1980, 81, they remarked on how close they were on civil rights issues, meaning hostile to civil rights.And then what happened was Bill Rehnquist called the chief of staff for the Attorney General of the United States, who was not then famous, a guy named Ken Starr, who became very famous. He called Ken Starr to get John Roberts a job at the top of the Justice Department advising the Attorney General of the United States.And he got him that job. And what was John Roberts job?It was to attack the Voting Rights act, to attack efforts by Congress to renew the Voting Rights act and repair a decision that John Roberts mentor had helped make on Section two of the Voting Rights Act.And what the Supreme Court, with Frankvist on board had done was try to gut Section two of the Voting Rights act to say that you couldn't look at the effects of a map if you couldn't look at the effects of changing a map if it bleached out black voting, if it diluted black voting, you could only look at the intent, whether someone said the N word, basically. And Congress knew that was wrong. Congress knew that that would destroy the Voting Rights act if you could not take into account the effects.And so Congress repaired it over John Roberts strenuous objections. He spent hundreds of hours fighting the renewal of the Voting Rights act and the repair of that damage.And then just this spring, just weeks ago, John Roberts handed the pin to Sam Alito to put a dagger in the back of the Voting Rights act on this very section, section 2 of the Voting Rights act to bar the effects from being taken into account, to show a violation of the Voting Rights act, the very issue he knows with every bone in his body he lost as a lawyer. And now he's using the court to win in a way that demonstrably hurts the American people.

Revenge.Our guest today is Lisa Graves, the author of the national best selling book Without How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights in the Time we have left. Lisa, why do you suppose the American public seems to be disinterested or oblivious to this?

Well, for a long time there was this notion by some Democrats that people weren't paying attention to the courts, that it was inside baseball to fight with the court. The Republicans did not take that approach. The Republicans took the approach that they didn't want neutral judges.They wanted players on the chessboard who were going to move the ball forward. And Democrats were just trying to have neutral and fair judges, which means you're not putting a lot of political capital into those fights.But that has changed.There's been a growing awareness among the Democrats about what's been happening starting in the early 2000s and up to now in terms of this effort to capture the court. The other thing that's happened that has been amazing and so changing is investigative reporters have started covering the court.Previously there were like legacy reporters, famous names, people who built their reputation in part on friendships and connections to Supreme Court justices, talking about the court, but normalizing it in a way and not actually conducting investigations.Their job to be fair to them wasn't investigative reporting, but began a few years ago, real investigative, Investigative reporting by ProPublica, by the Washington Post, New York Times, by Rolling Stone and Politico.And that investigative reporting changed things because it uncovered these scandals, it showed these biases, it helped reveal and unmask this dark money so that people could understand how this court was captured and what it meant for our rights. And as a consequence, over the last three years, public opinion of the US Supreme Court has plummeted.The support for John Roberts, the support for the court, the belief that it is fair is, is the lowest point it's been in history.And that disdain for the court is growing not just because of the Dobbs ruling that overturned Roe, not just because of the Immunity decision, not just because of 23, 24 decisions in the past year giving Donald Trump the green light on all sorts of violations of our rights and our rules, but because there has also been this demonstrated scandal of how these Justices are living these very high lifestyles, how they're not recusing, how they're not being fair. And so we've never had more support than now for reforming the court.

So we have some hope. We have to undo so much damage. Gun control, the Chevron decision, the Dobbs decision, voting.There are efforts being made on the Hill to reel this in. Basically, it's this tsunami of dark money.How do we stop this influence peddling that has completely consumed Washington D.C. unless the Democrats take control of Congress, what hope do we have?

There are a number of Democrats, including Senator Whitehouse, Representative Raskin, a growing number on the House and Senate side who have put forward these reform measures, including, as you mentioned, Senator Schumer in terms of the no Kings Act. So there's actually a robust and growing call for both the substantive reform of the law and for reforming the court. And not just around the edges.Because the reality is, is that this court, this Roberts Court, will continue to destroy our rights, including our voting rights, unless we reform the court and limit its jurisdiction, limit its power and limit, have term limits and have other things, because this Court has shown how hostile it is to the Voting Rights Act.So we need to build that momentum with a Congress in the next two years that will investigate this Court, that will investigate that corruption, that will build the case for reform coming in to 2028.And I hope in my personal capacity that there will be a President willing to sign what Congress passes to reform this court and limit its ability to harm our rights.

You mean actually follow the law?

Yeah.

There's this idea, of course, of expanding the Court, which is not unprecedented, which could in effect go up to 15 and create a de facto attrition rate.And you wrote that to increase the size of the Court would also possibly include ensuring that each presidential term has at least one Supreme Court seat to fill to better represent the interests of the voters. You also talk about 25 year term limit because Roberts is still a relatively young guy.This guy could be doing what he's doing for another couple of decades.

Terrifying.

Is there any movement to impeach Roberts?

There are. There have been members who have been working on a bill, particularly for John Roberts.There also was a bill introduced by AOC to impeach Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas. The term limit measure at 15 years or 20 years.If that went through 15 or 20 years, that would immediately remove Alito and Thomas and Roberts because of how long they've been on the court. And I think those terms should apply to the judiciary across the board.Trump is putting bloggers and people who are, like, in their 30s on judicial position.People like Eileen Cannon who have not had any distinguished career at all, but have used that position of power to favor Donald Trump and try to twist the law in his direction. And so we need substantial reform.And that's one of the reasons why I'm so proud to have co founded Court Accountability with my work partner, Alex Aronson.And we are putting forward this summer to come a really significant reform memo that goes to the heart of what we're facing with real bold reforms to protect our rights. And we call up basically the words of Abraham Lincoln, who was taking on that court that issued that Dred Scott decision, that Roger Taney court.And what Abraham Lincoln said that is that if we let these unelected judges be the final arbiters of our rights, we will cease to be able to rule ourselves. And so we have to reinvigorate our democracy and restore the power of our representatives to represent our interests.And as Senator Whitehouse said this weekend on a panel I was on with him, it's one thing if Congress gets it wrong, they make a mistake in two years, you can have a new vote and vote them out. But these judges are serving by design by these Republicans choosing them so young.For 10, 20, 30, 40 years, Clarence Thomas is on track to be the longest serving Supreme Court justice in history. He has been on the bench for 45 years. That is an outrageous period of time. Crazy to invest in someone to have such power over our lives.We have no way to check other than through impeachment. Yeah, I think he should be impeached, and I think we should have bills of impeachment for others as well.

There's hope that Citizens United in some of these more egregious decisions could be either nullified or overturned. I want to end with this quote from your book. You wrote, I think John Roberts will go down as the worst chief justice in American history.The path of deep destruction he has carved through our laws and our democracy all but ensures it. He has sown the seeds for his fall from grace by opening the door to authoritarianism in America.

How can people follow you in your work? And is there some way for them to support you?

Yes, through so Court Accountability is the work I do on Court reform and court Policy. That's a group where we receive donations to support that work, along with my research at True North Research, but through Court accountability.And I'm a co host on the Midas Touch Network on Legal af. And I have a substack called Grave Injustice. And you can follow me basically on any social media as helisagraves. Helisagraves.So I would welcome the chance to meet you guys in person one of these days when I get to LA for book tour. And it's just been a delight being on your show.

Pleasure. Lisa Graves is author of Without How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights.You can also learn more about it at: withoutprecedent.info

Hope is a choice, so let's choose it and take action.

I'm Ted Bonnitt.

I'm Phil Proctor.

Thanks for listening. Take care.

Bye for now.