Leonard Leo is triggered and tech fascists take a big loss

While voter suppression takes a new form

Welcome to a Tueaday edition of Progress Report.

Just a note before we start: It’s time for Democrats to move on from calling Republicans weird.

Republicans are actually vicious little freaks, soft cry babies, and perverts, and Democrats should not hesitate to say so.

OK, lots of news today. Let’s do it.

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Seeing the light: It took four years and a series of catastrophic rulings that have pushed the United States to the brink of Christofascism, but the Biden administration on Monday finally proposed several major reforms to the scandal-plagued Supreme Court.

“I have great respect for our institutions and the separation of powers,” Biden wrote in a Washington Post op-ed presenting his proposals. “What is happening now is not normal, and it undermines the public’s confidence in the court’s decisions, including those impacting personal freedoms. We now stand in a breach.”

The proposals include limiting justices to a single 18-year term on the bench and requiring that they follow a strict and enforceable code of ethics. Justices would have to disclose gifts, avoid politics, and recuse themselves from cases where they or their spouses have a clear conflict of interest.

Biden also called for a constitutional amendment to roll back the court’s recent decision to grant the president broad immunity for crimes committed while in office.

The reforms together seek to interrupt the culture of corruption and embrace of fringe ideology that have transformed the court into the leading vehicle for the far-right’s hostile takeover of American society. Within hours, the architect of that far-right takeover of the judiciary, Federalist Society co-chair Leonard Leo, issued an indignant response to the president’s proposed reforms.

“Let me be clear: If Democrats want to adopt an across the board ethics ban for all branches, I am in favor of that: no jets, no meals, no speaking honorariums, no gifts for anyone from anyone for any reason in any branch, starting with Congress,” Leo said. “Until they support that, let’s all be honest about what this is: a campaign to destroy a court that they disagree with.”

Is there any better example of this classic Clickhole meme?

Unfortunately, I don’t think he actually meant what he said today.

An extraordinarily wealthy right-wing crank who has spent the past three decades talking exclusively with even wealthier right-wing cranks, Leo has so internally normalized corruption that he views cutting off lobbyist and donor gifts to Congress as a farce, beyond the realm of possibility. In reality, it’s something that a vast majority of Americans would actually support but would be disastrous for his many corporate and Wall Street patrons.

Leo is of course responsible for many of the trips and gifts that justices like Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have received over the years, some directly and some though the matchmaking service he runs for judges and selfish donors. The guy gets rattled anytime anyone so much as questions him or his impact on the Supreme Court, which is reason enough for Sen. Dick Durbin to wake up from his nap and put even a modicum of effort into enforcing the Judiciary Committee subpoena that Leo has flatly ignored.

Biden still wasn’t willing to call for court expansion, but he’s still finally made the Supreme Court’s corruption into a full-on campaign issue, as I’ve been begging for years now. It’s time for Durbin to step up and do whatever it takes — refer the subpoena to Capitol police! Hold hearings with reporters who discovered the corruption! Actually investigate! — to further the public’s understanding of just how deep the rot goes, make an already unpopular court a true liability for Trump and the GOP, and position major reform as a necessary and inevitable public priority.

Georgia: The Secretary of State’s office on Monday launched a new online tool that allows voters to automatically cancel their registration — or, as is far more likely to be the case, cancel the registration of other voters.

The tool was touted by Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger as a way for citizens to help keep voter rolls accurate and up-to-date, but the opportunity for abuse is obvious. All it takes is a bit of personal information — a driver’s license or Social Security number, which are easily obtainable on the dark web and elsewhere — to send in a request to delete a voter’s registration. And nothing about what Georgia Republicans or their psychotic rules panels have done since 2021, including on voter challenges, suggests that simplifying bureaucracy is the real objective.

I’m working on a longer reported piece about this, so look for that in the days to come.

Louisiana: Incensed that a federal judge forced the addition of a second Black-majority Congressional district in a state that is nearly one-third Black, a coalition of Republican AGs filed a lawsuit on Friday claiming that what remains of the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional.

Their argument is based on a single footnote in the judge’s decision, underscoring how unserious these people are — not that obvious misapplication of the law generally matters to these people.

An institutionalist president putting his support behind Supreme Court reform doesn’t just mainstream the idea, it also delivers a shot across the bow to the sitting conservative justices. Political pressure and challenges to their legitimacy seem to be the only way to sway these justices away from indulging their worst instincts, and so Biden’s introduction of concrete reforms could prove crucial.

California Forever: There are plenty of ways to win an election, but it turns out that suing dozens of community members to the brink of financial ruin, destroying families, operating in secret, and making obviously hollow promises to people you clearly disdain is not one of them.

Shocker, right?

Former Goldman Sachs banker Jan Sramek and a squad of Silicon Valley billionaires last week finally conceded temporary defeat in their effort to bludgeon and bribe the people of Solano County, CA into green-lighting their plans to build a privately owned utopian city on 17,500 acres of farmland. There was no other choice: California Forever spent well over $9 million to entice locals with ads, billboards, and gobs of cash to local nonprofits in an effort to convince people to vote to rezone the farmland for private development, but they simply could not overcome grassroots opposition.

Dire polling numbers and a devastating economic impact report from the county convinced Sramek and his backers to pull the ballot initiative, and now they’ll spend the next two years working with the county to adjust their plans and win approval from voters in 2026.

I was out in Solano County last month to report on this story — video to come! — and rarely have I seen such fervent cross-partisan alignment on what could have been a divisive issue.

There was a wide array of reasons why people opposed the plan — the so-called “affordable housing” promised by developers would have been far too expensive for most people, it would have drained resources from existing cities actively seeking development, and there is absolutely zero infrastructure or public transportation. But most of all, people simply didn’t trust Sramek and his posse after they spent six years buying up their land with hardball legal tactics, often under false pretenses. California Forever somehow spent $900 million on people’s land and still wound up pissing off a whole county.

Last year, California Forever filed a $510 antitrust lawsuit against farmers who refused to sell their active farmland, accusing them of collusion and overwhelming them with legal fees until they had to tap out and give up the land that had been passed down through their families for more than a century. If Sramek and company want a reset, they should really rethink their refusal to drop the lawsuits. They already own 66,000 acres, making them the biggest landowner in Solano County, so their ongoing pursuit of these lawsuits only sow more distrust and loathing from the community.

As big of a deal as this is for Solano County, there’s a lot at stake here for all of us. Some of the project’s investors are heavily involved in the Network States movement, a fantasy libertarian city project being pursued by crypto-addled, Rand-obsessed billionaires with the means to exploit international corruption and weak regulation at the expense of local residents and entire economies. Marc Andreessen, now a prominent Trump backer, is one of those investors, and the group’s interest in alternatives to democracy both here and abroad is clear and present danger.

Arizona: Ballot initiatives and amendments are always subject to a lot of litigation in Arizona, and this year is no exception.

On Friday, the Arizona Restaurant Association filed multiple lawsuits seeking to disqualify petition signatures gathered in support of a ballot initiative to raise the state minimum wage to $17-an-hour and end the lower minimum wage for tipped workers.

The lobby is challenging the registrations of both the voters who sigbed the petitions and the people who collected their signatures, not because there’s any evidence of fraud or malfeasance, but because Arizona uses a uniquely stringent and somewhat random petition validation system.

The campaign gathered around 100,000 more signatures than required, so they have a bit of breathing room. Speaking with people involved in the Raise the Wage Arizona coalition, there’s a sense that there is a 50/50 chance that they will survive the legal process with enough signatures to get on the ballot. They will be hustling hard either way this fall, working to defeat a referendum sponsored by the Restaurant Association that would further lower the tipped minimum wage. RWA is filing its own lawsuit against that initiative, claiming that its title, the Protect Tipped Workers Act, is willfully deceitful.

On that note, a judge in Arizona just ruled against the GOP legislature’s decision to use the term “unborn human being” in the summary of the state’s abortion rights amendment in a pamphlet sent to voters. The Maricopa County judge said that the language violated the law by injecting bias into the nonpartisan pamphlet.

Oregon: Voters will officially have the opportunity to weigh in on a proposed basic universal income program. Oregon’s Secretary of State certified that petitioners had collected enough signatures to qualify the referendum, which would initially provide $750 to every eligible resident, paid for by a 3% tax on companies with over $25 million in profit. The annual outlay would increase with inflation and corporate revenue.

Florida: A new poll finds support for the proposed constitutional amendments to legalize recreational marijuana and abortion easily exceeding the 60% of the vote required to pass. The Florida Democratic Party may be in shambles, but this is proof that some of its flagship priorities are popular. Now supporters just need FDP leadership to steer clear and avoid poisoning public perception.

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