FWD: [surgelocal] Scarry Right Wing info

>===== Original Message From Dougstuber@aol.com =====
Students United for a Responsible Global Environment -
                 www.unc.edu/surge


>
>Sunday, April 29, 2001
>Observer of London
>
>CABAL OF LAWYERS DRIVES BUSH EVEN
>FURTHER TO THE RIGHT
>By Ed Vulliamy
>
>
>George W. Bush's administration - 100 days old today - is
>being hailed as his country's most ideologically right-wing
>of the past 100 years, across a spectrum of policies ranging
>from the environment to labour, civil rights to social
>issues.
>
>But the rip tide that cuts beneath all Bush's plans to
>transform the landscape, with more durable results than any
>other policy, is the hijacking - behind closed doors - of the
>US judiciary.
>
>The administration - to which power was in effect granted
>by the Supreme Court in a controversial ruling last
>December - is preparing not only to set the highest court in
>the land on course for a conservative generation, but
>has quietly revolutionized the way in which all federal
>judges are appointed to benches across the country,
>guaranteeing politically right-wing selections.
>
>At the core of this manouevre, which will weave a new
>fabric in US society, is a tightly organised right-wing lawyers' group
which has come in from the fringes to the core of the administration.
>
>It is called the Federalist Society, of which Bush's Solicitor
>General Theodore Olson, Interior Secretary Gale
>Norton, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham and Senate
>Judiciary Committee chairman Orrin Hatch are leading
>members - as are many members of the new White House
>counsel team.
>
>Stalwart conservative judges on the Supreme Court
>Anthony Scalia and Clarence Thomas are patrons and
>guests of the group, and Attorney General John Ashcroft is
>a close affiliate.
>
>The emergence of the Federalists is traced in a study by the New
York-based Institute for Democracy Studies,
>which concludes that 'extreme conservative organisations
>sponsoring a combination of right-wing litigation and
>advocacy are opening the way for a radical transformation
>of the American legal system'.
>
>Ralph Neas, President of the Washington think-tank People
>for the American Way, says that 'the White House
>counsel's office and the Department of Justice are being
>turned over to the Federalist Society, a bastion of
>far-right legal thought'.
>
>The Federalist Society's philosophy underpins, and is ready
>to steer, all the administration's cornerstone policies
>on deregulation of environmental and labour law,
>education, civil rights and abortion. The author of the IDS
>study, Julie Gerchik, says that 'the agenda is to dismantle
>everything built since the New Deal'. There was even a
>Federalist panel in Chicago on 28 March entitled 'Rolling
>Back the New Deal'.
>
>'Where is the divide between politics and the law here?'
>says Gerchik. 'This is politics enforced by legal
>mechanisms.'
>
>The society has already had an impact on major decisions:
>when Bush pulled America out of the Kyoto treaty on
>climate change, he did so after reading what he called
>'important new information'. That information was a report
>commissioned by David McIntosh, a Federalist Society
>founder, arguing that toxic emissions were exaggerated
>and warning of costs to business.
>
>But above all, the society has ousted the legal establishment which - in
the form of the profession's traditional
>representative body, the American Bar Association - has
>helped oversee the selection of judges and guarantee the
>profession's integrity for five decades.
>
>Since Eisenhower, the ABA has had a semi-official role in
>advising on judicial appointments. But in a sudden,
>little-noticed move last month, President Bush cut the ABA
>entirely out of the appointment process. The Federalists
>were delighted, having for years targeted the association (in
>a special publication, ABA Watch) for such issues as its
>support for gun control and opposition to the death penalty.
>
>The ABA's removal creates a vacuum in the
>recommendation of judges, and into it has moved a 15-
>person committee formed between the White House and
>Justice Department urgently to seek candidates for some
>100 vacancies to federal benches (one-eighth of all judges).
>
>This recommending committee is firmly in the hands of the
>Federalist Society, controlled by Deputy Attorney
>General Larry Thompson, a society member, and others.
>Sources add that some 70 judges have so far been
>interviewed, a quarter of them recommended by the
>Federalist Society.
>
>The society was founded 20 years ago with a mission to
>beat back what it saw as a liberal orthodoxy permeating
>public policy and the courts since the Civil Rights
>movement.
>
>Society members propelled the attempted impeachment of
>President Clinton over the Lewinsky scandal.  Prosecutor Kenneth Starr was
an active member, as were many of his
>team.
>
>Its major benefactor is the Scaife Foundation, controlled by
>billionaire conservative magnate Richard Mellon Scaife,
>who deploys his fortunes to advance right-wing causes.
>Among those causes was the 'Arkansas Project', initiated
>by Scaife at a cost of $24 million to mount the suit by Paula
>Jones - and eventually Lewinsky - against the
>President.
>
>The first meeting between Scaife and the 'Arkansas Project' was chaired by
Theodore Olson, who steered it and is
>now Solicitor General of the US, the country's most
>influential lawyer, head of the Federalist Society's
>Washington chapter, based in the White House.
>
>Olson cut his teeth under Starr in the Reagan
>administration, and was counsel to Reagan during the Iran-
>Contra affair. He was himself investigated (but not
>indicted) by a special prosecutor for lying to Congress, and
>went on to become chairman of the American Spectator
>magazine, which 'broke' the Paula Jones story. His wife
>
>Barbara is a pivot of the Washington right-wing social
>circuit, herself chairwoman of a conservative women's
>organisation funded by Scaife.
>
>From this background, Olson emerged into the public glare
>as George Bush's knight and mouthpiece, triumphantly
>arguing the President's case against the Florida recounts in
>the Supreme Court and ultimately winning him the
>election.
>
>The Federalists' other channel to power has been through
>clerkships at the Supreme Court under sympathetic
>judges Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy - and Chief Justice
>William Rehnquist.
>
>Many saw Bush's victory as a watershed moment when the
>judges put politics above the law. But it is to the future
>of the court over the next four years - and thence a
>generation - that the Federalists are looking.
>
>The backgrounds of the Supreme Court's main conservatives are contentious:
Justice Rehnquist was author of the memo during the historic Brown vs.
Board of Education case in 1952 supporting racial segregation, saying: 'It
is about time the court faced the fact that white people in the South don't
like the coloured people'.
>
>But Rehnquist and the court's other conservatives have
>always toiled in counterpoint with liberal appointees and
>moderate Republicans. However, only this week, a 5-4
>verdict on an apparently innocuous case about driving
>licences in Alabama cut a major inroad into the 1964 Civil
>Rights Act, ruling that individuals cannot now sue federal
>agencies over discrimination cases.
>
>In the hands of Bush's legal team now are two possible
>appointments during his term of office which could swing
>the court decisively to the right.
>
>The Federalists are not the only group taking care to ensure
>a conservative federal judiciary. Three right-wing organisations funded by
the Scaife Foundation have organised a series of junkets so that judges can
attend
>political seminars on the advantages of deregulation in
>environment, labour and civil rights law.
>
>They are the Law and Economics Centre, the Liberty Fund
>and FREE - the Foundation for Research on Economics and
>the Environment, which funded all-expenses-paid trips,
>some lasting as long as two weeks, to luxury venues,
>featuring golf and horse-riding for the justices.
>
>As well as money from the ubiquitous Scaife family, both
>the FREE and the LEC trips for judges are bountifully
>funded by oil giants Shell and Exxon, and Philip Morris
>cigarettes.
>
>Many of the judges who enjoyed them failed - by their own
>admission - to disclose these junkets on their annual
>financial reports, as required by their own federal ethics
>laws, according to the Washington-based watchdog group
>Community Rights Counsel.
>
>The CRC found that judges' attendance at the junket
>seminars 'increased significantly between 1992 and 1998'
>with a record 88 judges taking trips in 1998. With 800
>active judges at any time, this means that about 10 per cent
>of the federal judiciary takes a trip each year.
>
>An exhaustive study by the CRC of seminars and
>subsequent verdicts by judges who attended them finds
>'doctrinal shifts' and 'considerable evidence that the
>education judges receive' has led to 'a strand of judicial
>activism that is distinctly pro-market, clearly hostile to
>federal environmental regulations and decidedly in keeping
>with the curriculum of FREE seminars'.
>
>
>Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001.
>
>
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"Teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom"

                Psalm 90



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