An index on the dark money behind the campaign to reverse Roe V. Wade
Rank of Brett Kavanaugh's 2018 appointment to the U.S. Supreme
Court among the reasons there's a new push to ban abortion in state
legislatures across the South and elsewhere: 1
In the fiscal year before it spearheaded Kavanaugh's
confirmation, amount the Judicial Crisis Network (JCN) — a secret-money
501(c)(4) "social welfare" nonprofit that promotes conservative
judges — received in anonymous donations, according to a tax return recently
obtained by campaign finance watchdogs: $22 million
Size of a single anonymous donation JCN got during the period
between July 2017 and June 2018, when abortion rights-protecting Justice
Anthony Kennedy resigned, opening the door to Kavanaugh, who was backed by anti-abortion
groups: $17 million
JCN's spending in 2017 to support the confirmation of President
Trump's other Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, who has also shown hostility to the Court's
1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion: $10 million
Year in which Carrie Severino — a former law clerk for Supreme
Court Justice Clarence Thomas and spouse of Catholic anti-abortion lawyer Roger
Severino, who now runs the Department of Health and Human Services' Office of
Civil Rights and opposes contraceptive access under the
Affordable Care Act — took the helm of JCN: 2014
Among JCN's top funders, rank of the Wellspring Committee,
a secretive nonprofit that serves as a conduit for anonymous contributions to
conservative causes and is led by hard-line Opus Dei Catholic Ann
Corkery and her husband, Neil Corkery, who has served as JCN's treasurer: 1
According to the newly released tax return, amount JCN paid that fiscal year to the BH Group, a Virginia limited liability company connected to Trump advisor Leonard Leo, who's also the executive vice president of the Federalist Society, an influential conservative legal organization whose current or former members include five sitting Supreme Court justices: $241,000
Decades for which Leo — also reportedly an Opus Dei member who
plays a key role in hiring at George Mason University's law school in
Virginia — has worked to push the judiciary to the right in order to
enable an abortion crackdown: 3
According to conservative commentator Ed Whelan, number of
people "more dedicated to the enterprise of building a Supreme Court that
will overturn Roe v. Wade" than Leo: 0
Month in which Leo told a gathering of conservative activists in
Florida that they had to mobilize in "very unprecedented ways" to
finish their transformation of the U.S. Supreme Court: 2/2019
Between 2014 and 2017 alone, amount Leo and his allies raised
for JCN and other secret-money nonprofits to carry out their court-transforming
agenda: more than $250 million
Year since JCN has also been funneling millions of dollars to
state supreme court races, money that has bought misleading or even libelous ads: 2012
(Click on figure to go to source.)
Sue Sturgis is
the Director and regular contributor to the Institute for Southern Study's
online magazine, Facing South, with a focus on energy and
environmental issues. Sue is the author or co-author of five Institute reports,
including Faith in the Gulf (Aug/Sept 2008), Hurricane
Katrina and the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement (January
2008) and Blueprint for Gulf Renewal (Aug/Sept 2007). Sue
holds a Masters in Journalism from New York University.