REVEALED: New documents show the Federalist Society has lied about its mission -- and could blow up
REVEALED: New documents show the Federalist Society has lied about its mission — and could blow up on sitting judges
By Matthew Chapman at Raw Story
https://www.rawstory.com/2019/08/revealed-new-documents-show-the-federalist-society-has-lied-about-its-mission-and-could-blow-up-on-sitting-judges/
"SNIP....
“Federalist Society documents that one of us recently unearthed, however, make this position untenable going forward,” they continued. “The documents, made public here for the first time, show that the society not only has held explicit ideological goals since its infancy in the early 1980s, but sought to apply those ideological goals to legal policy and political issues through the group’s roundtables, symposia and conferences.”
The newly discovered papers resided in the Library of Congress with the records of the late Judge Robert Bork, President Ronald Reagan’s failed Supreme Court nominee. In one private grant proposal to a prospective conservative donor in 1984, for example, Federalist Society President Eugene Meyer promised that the Federalist Society would promote “the formation of groups of conservative lawyers in the major centers for the practice of law, who feel comfortable believing in, and advocating, conservative positions.” He also suggested the group would advocate against environmental, banking, and employment regulation, and recommend judges for appointments.
All of this could have significant consequences. Earlier this year, the Code of Conduct for United States Judges was modified to prohibit judges from participating in conferences held by groups “generally viewed by the public as having adopted a consistent political or ideological point of view equivalent to the type of partisanship often found in political organizations.”
In light of these documents explicitly revealing the political goals of the Federalist Society, that means that sitting judges may be in violation of the Code if they attend Federalist Society seminars — something conservative judges at all levels of the court system do routinely to exchange ideas and proposals. (The Code is not binding on the Supreme Court, but is on appeals and district court judges.)
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= new reply since forum marked as read
if it was believed a judge's known political leanings could bias their case?.......
On February 16, 2009, Fowler told conservative radio talk-show host Mark Levin that his work toward revoking the Fairness Doctrine under the Reagan Administration had been a matter of principle (his belief that the Doctrine impinged upon the First Amendment), not partisanship. Fowler described the White House staff raising concerns, at a time before the prominence of conservative talk radio and during the preeminence of the Big Three television networks and PBS in political discourse, that repealing the policy would be politically unwise. He described the staff's position as saying to Reagan, "the only thing that really protects you from the savageness of the three networks—every day they would savage Ronald Reagan—is the Fairness Doctrine, and Fowler is proposing to repeal it!" [9] Instead, Reagan supported the effort and later vetoed the Democratic-controlled Congress's effort to make the doctrine law.
In one landmark case, the FCC argued that teletext was a new technology that created soaring demand for a limited resource, and thus could be exempt from the Fairness Doctrine. The Telecommunications Research and Action Center (TRAC) and Media Access Project (MAP) argued that teletext transmissions should be regulated like any other airwave technology, hence the Fairness Doctrine was applicable (and must be enforced by the FCC).
In 1986, Judges Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit concluded that the Fairness Doctrine did apply to teletext but that the FCC was not required to apply it.[10] In a 1987 case, Meredith Corp. v. FCC, two other judges on the same court declared that Congress did not mandate the doctrine and the FCC did not have to continue to enforce it.[11]
In August 1987, the FCC abolished the doctrine by a 4-0 vote, in the Syracuse Peace Council decision, which was upheld by a different panel of the Appeals Court for the D.C. Circuit in February 1989.[12] The FCC stated, "the intrusion by government into the content of programming occasioned by the enforcement of [the Fairness Doctrine] restricts the journalistic freedom of broadcasters ... [and] actually inhibits the presentation of controversial issues of public importance to the detriment of the public and the degradation of the editorial prerogative of broadcast journalists," and suggested that, because of the many media voices in the marketplace, the doctrine be deemed unconstitutional.
These 6 Corporations Control 90% Of The Media In America
I'm pretty sure she did, but she may not have had access to Robert Bork's private papers. "Dark Money" is awesome by the way, it's a virtual Who's Who (and what they did) of the nasty ultra-wealthy rightwingers.
