Opinion | Every Supreme Court Justice Should Be Matched With a Billionaire Buddy
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You have set your sights on the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary writ large. You have made it your mission to bring the court back to first principles or at least your first principles.
You did the hard work of political transformation and institutional change. You cultivated allies, created networks of like-minded individuals, recruited aspiring judges and politicians to the cause and most important, you won elections. After more than a decade of struggle, despite the occasional setback, you had all the pieces in place: a conservative majority on the Supreme Court and a chance to undo Roe v. Wade.
And then it all fell through. Your conservative justices weren’t as reliable as you thought. They weren’t a single bloc. And three of them voted, against your hopes and expectations, to protect the constitutional right to an abortion. Yes, they might have opened the door to new limits, but what mattered most in 1992 — after 12 years of conservative rule — was that Roe still stood.
But this was just a battle — you could still win the war. So you regroup. You work and wait in anticipation of the time when you can replace your sometime friends on the court with more reliable conservatives. You won’t rely on a sense of mission or commitment to ensure loyalty among the judges and justices, no, you’ll resist the drift toward judicial independence by strengthening the ties between the men (and occasionally the women) and the movement. You’ll hold lavish events in their honor, give them awards, fund schools in their names, help their spouses find work and pair them off with a donor or two so they can have a taste of the high life.
This isn’t quid pro quo — no one is trading favors or taking cash for judicial decisions — it’s like-minded people enjoying one another’s company and friendship. It is showering the most important allies you have with prestige and, crucially, the esteem of their peers. It’s creating a web of personal and emotional bonds in addition to political and intellectual ones.
Your beneficiaries are already on your side, of course — otherwise they wouldn’t be in the club in the first place — but they might be a little less willing to buck the views and prevailing sentiments of their fellow travelers. And if all this social scaffolding means that your justice is a little more likely to cast the right vote in the right case at the right time, then it is money well spent. Even better, there is more where that came from: more billionaires, more influence and more perks for the justices to enjoy while they attend to the work they were appointed to do.
Our hypothetical activist here is a mishmash of figures — Leonard Leo is too young to have been involved in the first phase of the conservative legal movement, leading up to the partial defeat of Planned Parenthood v. Casey. But Leo, who is responsible for at least a third of the membership of the current Supreme Court, is our pioneer. He is the one who figured out the solution to the problem of the independent justice.
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