Partner, Lawson Davis Pickren & Seydel; Officer, United Nations Foundation; Director, Turner Endangered Species Foundation; Director, Better World Fund Inc.; Director, Emory University Law School’s Turner Environmental Law Clinic; Chair & Co-founder, Uppe
Founded in 1942, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, formerly known as the Allen-Bradley Foundation, seeks to support free enterprise and limited government in the Western world. The foundation was originally endowed by the Bradley brothers, who co-founded the Allen-Bradley Company, a manufacturer of factory equipment. It describes itself as dedicated to “strengthening the institutions, principles, and values that nurture and sustain the American Experiment and the West.”
The foundation’s Bradley Project on America’s National Identity is a collaborative effort by the nation’s foremost historians, economists, and political scientists to promote awareness of America’s founding ideals. Its June 2008 report, “E Pluribus Unum,” explored how multiculturalism (when taken to extremes) may endanger American unity.
In January 2009, the Bradley Project published an open letter to President Obama stressing the importance of strengthening national identity based on a foundation of civic education.
One of the Bradley Foundation’s most prolific programs is Encounter Books, an award-winning publisher of scholarly works that advance the study of democracy. Since its inception in 2000, Encounter has published more than 120 titles. It is headed by Roger Kimball, also the co-editor and publisher of The New Criterion.
Bradley Prizes
The Bradley Foundation is best known for awarding the “Bradley Prizes” every year to recognize the contributions of notable figures in the areas of the grantmaker’s funding priorities—including the promotion and defense of liberal democracy, democratic capitalism, and American ideas and institutions at home and abroad. Up to four Bradley Prizes, worth $250,000 each, are awarded annually by the foundation’s Board of Directors.
Nominations of qualified individuals are solicited from a panel of more than 100 leaders in academia, public-policy research, journalism, civic affairs, and the arts. Past recipients include the conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer, the political economist Hernando de Soto, and the war historian Victor Davis Hanson.
Other grantmaking
With more than $502 million in assets, the Bradley Foundation’s grantmaking priorities include improvements to public education (particularly teacher accountability and the expansion of charter schools and gifted programs); economic development; the revitalization of civil society; strengthening the private sector; the defense of freedom; and groups that advance the arts, education, community development, social services (in Milwaukee and throughout Wisconsin).
The Foundation has granted more than $530 million since 1985 to nonprofit groups that support limited government and a free market that sustains economic, academic, and cultural progress.
Among its most noteworthy recent grants was $3 million to the Charter School Growth Fund in Broomfield, CO; $1.1 million to the American Civil Rights Institute in Sacramento (to support public education about race- and sex-preferential policies and practices in the government); and $200,000 to the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, in Stanford, CA (to support the American Public Education Initiative).
Former Executive Vice President, the Open Society Institute; Past President & CEO, J. Roderick MacArthur Foundation; former program officer, the Ford Foundation
Former administrator, the Ford Foundation; Former employee, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund; Past President, the Council on Foundations; Author, Handbook on Private Foundations
President, National Arts Stabilization Fund; Former program officer, the Ford Foundation; Former Director, GATX Corp.
Board member, Environmental Working Group; program officer, the Ford Foundation; freelance grant proposal analyst
Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement (ICCI) was founded in 1975 to assist low-income Iowans with predatory lending, unscrupulous car dealers, home ownership, and personal money management. Since its founding, however, ICCI has discovered that real power in Iowa lies beyond the city limits. In the last decade, the organization’s priorities have shifted away from defending the urban poor to more politically lucrative attacks against what its activists term “factory farms.” In making this shift, the group also started charging dues for the first time. Once three-quarters urban in its membership, ICCI is now mostly comprised of rural Iowans seeking to hop on the pro-“family farm,” anti-“factory farm” bandwagon.
ICCI is comprised of just 2,000 Iowans, but the frequency with which they protest and lobby is intended by its professional leaders to create the public perception of a much larger membership. They are a tiny but extremely vocal minority who consistently push for sweeping regulations on Iowa’s 90,000 farms — except for the ones owned by ICCI members.
The problem with the “family” and “factory” farm labels is that ICCI writes the definitions itself. ICCI rural organizer Lisa Whelan offered a definition of a “factory farm” to the Council Bluffs Daily Nonpareil in 2004, defining them as farms that “need a permit to operate.” This might be an objective standard if ICCI didn’t proudly take credit for helping to change those same permit laws to suit its own agenda. In its 2002 annual report, ICCI boasted of its efforts to pass Iowa Senate File 2293, which lowered the permit threshold on pork farmers from 4,166 hogs to just 2,500. In most counties a farmer must raise nearly twice that number of animals just to earn the median household income in that county.
Not content with protest-augmented lobbying, ICCI has also pressured judicial officials to interpret the law in questionable ways. In the July 23, 2002 Fort Dodge Messenger, Humboldt County Attorney Derk Schwieger related how ICCI encouraged him to set aside his professional understanding of the law in favor of mob rule. ICCI, Schweiger said, wanted him to certify the legality of a countywide moratorium on new livestock farms, regardless of what the law actually said. In Schwieger’s words, “I was told by ICCI members that I should draft my [legal] opinion according to public opinion … that’s not how this works.”
In a Des Moines Register interview, ICCI executive director Hugh Espey admitted that he has never set foot in a large-scale livestock confinement, the kind of facility his organization decries on a daily basis. For a group that claims to combat threats that supposedly lurk next door, it is unusual that its most vocal agitator has never witnessed the “problem” firsthand.
“Local Control” Hypocrites
ICCI consistently clamors for “local control” of agriculture, which typically translates to the suppression of out-of-state investment in Iowa farms. The model for “local control” is Nebraska, where a law enacted via ballot initiative forbids non-Nebraskans and agricultural corporations from investing in farms there. Less farming capital, of course, means fewer jobs and depressed economic development, a bitter price to pay for satisfying anti-business activists. Even if this kind of out-of-state investment would allow an Iowan to continue farming and maintain a family tradition instead of selling off his land, ICCI considers this a bad trade-off.
The irony of ICCI’s “local control” proposals is that it receives the bulk of its money from large, out-of-state foundations (membership dues comprise the remainder of its budget). One-time ICCI vice-chairman Vern Tigges lamented in October of 2004 to the newspaper Carroll Today, “We don’t have money. All we have is people power, and that’s the name of the game.”
Actual people do indeed comprise ICCI’s membership, but the game has some other names, too: Ford, General Motors, and Standard Oil, to name a few. The giant philanthropies that bankroll ICCI (none native to Iowa) trace their considerable assets back to giant corporations. The Ford Foundation, the General Motors-powered Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, and the Standard Oil-fueled Belvedere Fund (a subsidiary of the Rockefeller Family Fund) all contribute substantially (see “Financials” section).
| Foundation | Home state | Corporate origin |
| Charles Stewart Mott Foundation | Michigan | General Motors Corporation |
| Rockefeller Family Fund, Rockefeller Brothers Fund | New York | Standard Oil |
| Belvedere Fund | District of Columbia | Standard Oil |
| McKnight Foundation | Minnesota | 3M |
| Ford Foundation | Michigan | Ford Motor Company |
| Educational Foundation of America | Connecticut | Prentice-Hall Publishing |
The Waterkeeper Alliance
ICCI is adept at blurring the lines between its corporate funding and its “grassroots” public image, but the group is more open about its ties with the Waterkeeper Alliance. Led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a lawyer with a lot of name recognition, Waterkeeper is dedicated to suing pork farmers into the ground in the hopes of scoring a tobacco-style legal settlement. In the July 25, 2002 Van Buren County Register, ICCI board member Garry Klicker declared that “Waterkeepers [sic] is one [group] I not only am happy to support, but have joined as well. Robert Kennedy’s strong statements are exactly on target.”
Kennedy’s statements include the 2001 bombshell he dropped in the Los Angeles Times, when he said that Waterkeeper “will march across this country and we will bring these kind of lawsuits against every single pork factory in America if we have to … Whatever it takes to win.” The Des Moines Register reported in April 2002 that Kennedy called pork farmers “a greater threat to the United States and U.S. democracy than Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network.” That same month he also told a television reporter that “the best thing would be if this [pork] industry did leave the country.”
At times ICCI’s hatred of modern animal agriculture drives the group to make some allies that livestock farmers normally avoid. As if the group’s support of the Waterkeeper Alliance wasn’t enough, the roster of speakers at ICCI’s 2002 convention included Michael Appleby, vice president of the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS). Appleby’s fellow HSUS spokespersons have advocated the abolition of all livestock agriculture.
Child Abusers and Serfs?
“I feel an obligation to society in general to stop these people – and I will,” ICCI board member Garry Klicker told the Burlington Hawk Eye in June 2002. Klicker’s rant reveals a dark side to ICCI’s fight against ordinary Iowa farmers:
[Klicker] also doesn’t believe that hog producers who contract with a corporation are true family farmers. “If they are not taking a market risk, they are not farmers — they are employees,” Klicker said. “I personally have problems with farmers getting paid — they are like serfs.” He also is adamant that putting animals in confined spaces is wrong. “My feeling is if a farmer is raising hogs in a confinement, they probably need to be visited by DHS [the Iowa Department of Human Services] because they probably have kids in the closet,” he said.
The Center for American Progress (CAP) and its parallel advocacy arm the Center for American Progress Action Fund (CAP Action) are two key cogs in the left-wing policy and message machine. Using the institutional imprimatur of CAP’s “think tank” and CAP Action’s blog ThinkProgress, CAP’s directors and funders — who include left-wing hedge fund titan George Soros — attempt to move national policy debates ever leftward.
Founded by the well-connected John Podesta, who was the former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, and Obama’s Presidential Transition director— the CAP empire was intended to serve as a counterweight to the conservative Heritage Foundation. However, credible allegations of anti-Semitism, reporting errors by ThinkProgress bloggers, and the alignment between both groups’ views and those of their donors, have hindered its rise to prominence.
According to Podesta, who served as president until 2012, CAP was founded in 2003 “to provide long-term leadership and support to the progressive movement.” CAP Action, now run by former one-term Democratic Representative Tom Perriello, is officially an “independent non-partisan education and advocacy organization.”
CAP officials, including Podesta, were deeply involved in the transition to President Obama’s administration in 2008-09. TIME characterized the involvement: “President-elect Obama has effectively contracted out the management of his own government’s formation to [John] Podesta.” POLITICO characterized the interrelationship between the transition team and CAP as “historically unique.”
In a feature article on the expansion of ThinkProgress, POLITICO illustrated how the site differs from a mainstream news organization. POLITICO reported:
ThinkProgress [… is] hardly just another media organization. […] Further, CAP Action Fund openly runs political advocacy campaigns, and plays a central role in the Democratic Party’s infrastructure, and the new reporting staff down the hall isn’t exactly walled off from that message machine, nor does it necessarily keep its distance from liberal groups organizing advocacy campaigns targeting conservatives.
CAP and ThinkProgress are well-funded: CAP alone raked in $36.5 million in 2010, the latest year for which tax records are available. CAP Action, which runs ThinkProgress, brought in over $9 million to fund its operations.
That money comes from a wide array of left-leaning ideological and big corporate interests. Although CAP and CAP Action exercise their legal rights as organizations structured under Sections 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code and do not disclose their donors, some donations can be identified through other required filings with the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Labor.
CAP receives money from multibillionaire hedge fund manager George Soros through two of his nonprofit groups, the Foundation to Support Open Society and the Open Society Institute. From 2005 through 2010, the two organizations gave CAP over $5.4 million. CAP receives money from other liberal-leaning foundations, including the Tides Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the foundation of Progressive Insurance chairman Peter B. Lewis.
Some of the organizations’ donations have been highly questionable. For example, Bermuda-based Atlantic Philanthropies donated $1.5 million to the CAP Action Fund, which operates ThinkProgress in 2010. (Bermuda is a British Overseas Territory.) United States-based foundations are forbidden by tax law from donating to organizations incorporated under Section 501(c)(4)—such as CAP Action—but as POLITICO reports, no such restrictions apply to foreign grant-makers.
This didn’t stop a ThinkProgress reporter from attempting to rescue flagging Democratic candidates with an “October Surprise” in 2010 by claiming that the United States Chamber of Commerce, a business association backing Republicans in that election, was using foreign funds to influence elections. He speculated that the Chamber’s activity might violate FEC regulations. *The New York Times *investigated the allegations and found no evidence the Chamber did anything illegal, noting, “The piece detailed the [C]hamber’s overseas memberships, but it provided no evidence that the money generated overseas had been used in United States campaigns.”
Labor unions are also major sources of funding for the Center and especially ThinkProgress. According to unions’ required filings to the Department of Labor, since 2009 unions have donated over $2.2 million to the two organizations. Unsurprisingly, The Center and ThinkProgress have provided fawning coverage of unions and endorsed policies the unions support, like the “card check” legislation and the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”). Additionally, the former Secretary-Treasurer of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Anna Burger, was named to the CAP Action board of directors in 2010. The SEIU has been one of the largest union supporters of CAP and its affiliates, with over $600,000 in total contributions.
Corporate Interests
Unions aren’t the only groups that benefit from contributions with mutually interested advocacy support. CAP and ThinkProgress have also faced scrutiny for their silence toward retail giant Wal-Mart, uncommon in progressive circles. Both the liberal newsmagazine The Nation and the conservative Weekly Standard have reported that Wal-Mart had donated to CAP, and CAP touted Wal-Mart as a partner in the healthcare reform debate. (The Washington Free Beacon estimated the donations at over $500,000 over a ten-year period, citing a Wal-Mart webpage that is no longer active.) Wal-Mart, which had been singled out for an employer mandate in some states, was a strong advocate of a national mandate on employers much smaller than the multibillion-dollar corporation.
ThinkProgress Staff Accused of Anti-Semitism
ThinkProgress was embroiled in a controversy in late 2011-early 2012 over language its bloggers used to characterize the United States’ relations with Israel. The controversy began with a report by Ben Smith, then of POLITICO, on dissension within the liberal ranks on the issue of what to do about a possible Israeli-Iranian conflict. Smith quoted a CAP analyst writing at a ThinkProgress sub-site, Middle East Progress, comparing Israel’s Gaza policy to “segregation in the American south.” Unnamed ThinkProgress officials were reported as saying that the Center’s goal was to open political space to President Obama’s left; CAP denied the reports.
The policy firestorm stirred by the article led ThinkProgress bloggers to cross the line between legitimate criticism of the policies of the governments of Israel and the United States into anti-Semitism. Then-ThinkProgress blogger Zaid Jilani wrote on Twitter: “So DC ‘liberals’ are going to spend a lot of time defending Obama against the charge that he’s not supportive enough of Israeli apartheid.” The American Jewish Committee (AJC) responded, telling The Jerusalem Post that “References to Israeli ‘apartheid’ or ‘Israel-firsters’ are so false and hateful they reveal an ugly bias no serious policy center can countenance.” Jilani left ThinkProgress within the month, according to the Post.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a usually left-leaning watchdog against anti-Semitism, also objected to the appropriateness of some ThinkProgress staffers’ comments. It warned against characterizing Americans who supported closer alignment with Israel as “Israel-Firsters.” ADL recognized a ThinkProgress blogger who had done so for apologizing for his misdeed. Additionally, the ADL called “troubling […] an accusation in a blog that the Israel lobby was marching America to war against Iran as it did with regard to Iraq.”
Egregious Reporting Errors
ThinkProgress has published a series of weakly supported, when not outright false, hatchet-jobs on opponents of CAP and Democratic policies. During the 2008 Presidential campaign, ThinkProgress published an allegation that 2008 Republican presidential nominee John McCain had plagiarized a Navy admiral in one of his speeches, only to retract the story within 24 hours. (McCain had used the disputed fragment in a speech before the admiral did, and the text was available on McCain’s Senate website.) POLITICO reporter Michael Calderone characterized the blog’s decision to publish the allegations without requesting comment from the McCain camp or accessing McCain’s publicly available Senate speech text as “remarkable.”
A different ThinkProgress blogger alleged that David Koch—a benefactor of free-market causes and former Libertarian Party nominee for Vice President—had resigned from the “NIH cancer board” under pressure from Greenpeace after using his position to block the listing of formaldehyde as a carcinogen. As conservative blog Powerline.com details, almost none of that is true. Koch was appointed to the National Cancer Advisory Board in 2004, and his term expired in 2010. The board on which Koch served has no authority over the listing of carcinogens. ThinkProgress was forced to retract the claim that Mr. Koch resigned under Greenpeace pressure.
Alliance for Justice is a group of over 100 progressive organizations focused on legal issues to advance the liberal causes of its members and donors. AFJ is best known for its Judicial Selection Project, which has turned federal judicial nominations into a highly partisan process. The Project encourages the rapid confirmation of Democratic-appointed judges while calling for Senate filibusters of Republican nominees. AFJ also provides legal assistance to left-leaning nonprofit organizations and foundations in order to help them in their advocacy and lobbying. AFJ has even advised its members to “take advantage” of the controversial Citizens United Supreme Court decision while simultaneously condemning the case in one of its First Monday films. Nan Aron, AFJ’s president, promised to engage in “scorched Earth” tactics to defeat a Republican president’s judicial nominees.
Alliance for Justice (AFJ) was founded in 1979 by its current president, Nan Aron. AFJ grew out of the Council for Public Interest Law, which was formed in 1975. The June 1975 issue of the American Bar Association (ABA) Journal explains that the project was meant to be a two to three year joint venture funded by the ABA, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation. One of the Council’s co-chairmen, Mitchell Rogovin, was at that time the general counsel for Common Cause, a liberal advocacy group. ??“Public interest” law firms began popping up in the 1960s to provide legal aid to underrepresented individuals and groups and to support environmental causes. The Council’s primary goal was to find more funding and support for these firms, thereby advancing liberal causes.
When Aron joined the Council in 1979, she pushed to change the organization. Aron’s original pitch to public interest advocacy groups asked if they would pay dues to become members of “an association devoted to representing their interests on issues affecting their funding or issues affecting the access of their clients to the courts.” One of the primary goals of the newly-formed Alliance for Justice was to block proposed reforms on payment of large attorney’s fees for public interest litigation brought by AFJ and its allies. The Wall Street Journal said that this funding scheme “could make the American taxpayer the largest single contributor to the ‘public interest’ movement.” AFJ succeeded in blocking the proposed reforms.
Over time, AFJ’s mission changed. Today, much of AFJ’s current efforts focus on the federal judiciary and the nomination process, as well as advocacy for nonprofit organizations.
Member organizations span a wide range of progressive causes, including nine environmental organizations, five abortion rights advocacy groups, three law school clinics, and two labor unions. AFJ took in over $3.6 million in 2011 and held over $5.4 million in total assets. AFJ has offices in Washington, DC and Oakland, CA.
Politicizing Judicial Selection
The Judicial Selection Project is probably the most well-known activity of AFJ. AFJ’s work in this area has helped make the U.S. judicial confirmation process more polarized and partisan.
AFJ’s Judicial Selection Project began in late 1984, when Newsweek reported that the AFJ-coordinated effort would “collect tips from local lawyers on possible candidates for the federal bench” and use the information “to mount full-fledged campaigns” against then-President Ronald Reagan’s appointees to the federal courts.
By 1987, AFJ had succeeded in turning the judicial nomination process into a political issue. Thanks to AFJ, “borking” is a widely known tactic in the judicial nomination process. The term is derived from AFJ’s scorched-Earth attack against D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Robert Bork, who was nominated to the Supreme Court by Reagan in 1987. Bork’s opponents bragged that they would engage in an “all-out frontal assault like you’ve never seen before.” Aron claimed that there would be a “mass mobilization,” a tactic that The Washington Post editorial board referred to as engaging in “a mud-pie contest.”
And mud-slinging was what AFJ did. Nancy Broff, then director of the Judicial Selection Project, claimed that “Bork is somebody, who, to sum it up very simply, would close the door to the courts for the poor and the powerless.” Aron claimed that in August of that year, AFJ was “in triple gear” and that AFJ “constructed much of the case” to oppose Bork. Aron even brought politics into the ABA’s rating process, telling The Washington Post that while at the association’s convention, “I think I’ve talked to every lawyer here.” And it paid off: the ABA, which founded AFJ’s predecessor group, split its vote in rating Bork “well-qualified.” The ABA panel rated him “exceptionally well-qualified” only five years earlier. A not-unanimous vote was rare and showed contention at the ABA, but nonetheless, Aron praised it as “wonderful news.”
The assault on Bork culminated with a statement by Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts:
Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is often the only protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy.
This coordinated outrageous and personal attack forever changed the tone of judicial confirmations. Bork was not confirmed to the court, and AFJ had its first scalp. Since then, judicial selection has been a highly partisan battle rather than an honest debate about a judge’s qualifications for office.
Aron stressed the importance of making judicial selection a political matter. As she told The Washington Post in October 1987, “We applaud the fact that the process is political, and with more modern technology it’s become even more so with even more opportunities for Americans to let their concerns be known. I don’t think this is cause for alarm or dismay.”
Guiding Advocacy Groups
Although not as prominent as the judicial nomination campaign, the advocacy program of AFJ actually commands the largest amount of its operating budget–almost $2 million in 2011. “Bolder Advocacy: Change the World with Confidence” educates nonprofit organizations and foundations on ways that they can create change. The program offers guidance on what is allowable lobbying under IRS tax code. “Advocacy coaches” provide training and workshops for member organizations and other groups. The website offers several resources and tools, including tips on starting your organization, influencing ballot measures, organizational assessments, and community organizing resources. The Charles Stewart Mott Foundation and The California Endowment helped to start the Resources for Evaluating Community Organizing (RECO) tools. Others who assisted in the project include individuals from the Ford Foundation, Movement Matters, the Virginia Organizing Project, Discount Foundation, Center for Community Change, and Woods Fund of Chicago.
Promoting Liberal Causes Through Documentaries
The First Monday Campaign began in 1994 and features a new short documentary each year on an issue about which AFJ believes is important to educate law students and the public. Although there are AFJ member organizations that push these issues, several AFJ projects correlate with foundation donors.
AFJ is also interested in “educating” law students through its First Monday documentary series. Each year’s crop of new students is another group of future lawyers that can be convinced to work for AFJ’s and its members’ left-leaning causes.
In 2001, the Surdna Foundation contributed $100,000 to AFJ “[t]o continue building a national network of well trained, youth-led efforts to combat gun violence.” In 2000 and 2001, AFJ released America Up In Arms and Deadly Business: How the Gun Industry and the NRA Market Mayhem to America, which discussed gun violence in America.
In 2009 AFJ received a grant of $40,000 from the John Merck Fund “To hold US officials who provided legal justification for torture accountable for their actions, to reform the government agencies that failed to prevent torture, and to engage the public in ongoing calls for accountability.” The First Monday film Tortured Law was released in 2009.
Lobbying for Liberal Agenda
The more direct lobbying done on behalf of public interest groups is accomplished by AFJ’s 501(c)(4) organization, Alliance for Justice Action Campaign (AFJAC). AFJAC, which was founded in 2004, engages in “lobbying and advocacy for a fair and independent judiciary, common-sense gun laws, and reasonable and efficient nonprofit tax and election laws.” In 2005 AFJAC received a $60,000 donation from the left-wing Tides Foundation. Because AFJAC is a 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization, AFJAC is not required to disclose its donors.
AFJ initially concentrated on ensuring that public interest legal groups could still obtain large legal fees from the government in order to pursue its causes. The group saw this as an important aspect of its mission to ensure “equal access” to courts of law. But AFJ did not find it sufficient to merely get a case before a judge with the help of taxpayer funds. Rather, the organization began to focus on those judges who would determine the outcome of their cases.
After its initial success in thwarting Robert Bork’s Supreme Court nomination, AFJ has continued its aggressive tactics to attack the judicial nominees of Republican presidents. In turn, AFJ also supports most, if not all of the Democratic nominees to the federal bench, and has been critical of any delays in their confirmation. During Republican administrations, AFJ is most concerned with questioning the qualifications, fitness for office, and judicial philosophy of the nominees to the federal courts. During Democratic administrations, AFJ finds ways to discuss the “crisis” of judicial vacancies.
As a corporation organized in compliance with Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, AFJ is not required to disclose its donors. However, some major donors can be identified from other required public filings. Left-leaning nonprofit foundations, including George Soros’s Open Society Institute, are some of the largest known benefactors to AFJ. This funding is sometimes given for general operating expenses, but may also be earmarked for specific projects. Since 2000, several foundations stand out in their support of AFJ.
More recently, in 2010 and 2011, AFJ has received its largest foundation contribution from The Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, which donated nearly $500,000. Other major donations include two $225,000 donations from the donor-directed Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program; just under $384,000 in total donations from The California Endowment; $282,500 from the Ford Foundation, $100,000 From the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; and $75,000 donations from the Arcus Foundation and the George Gund Foundation.
Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is only the second African American nominated to sit as a member of the highest court in America. But his July 1991 nomination to the Court stands out as one of the most contentious political and judicial battles in recent memory. Thomas was the target of a massive “borking” campaign by AFJ and its allies to keep him off the Court. AFJ worked directly with Senate Democrats in doing opposition research and in pushing sexual harassment rumors. The mud-slinging and callous treatment of Thomas even caused Arthur Kopp, president of People for the American Way, a liberal group that frequently worked alongside AFJ, to tell The Washington Post “I watch [the testimony] and I feel sick.” Kopp said “This process is going to poison the water for a long time… There is no one taking any joy in this.”
President George H.W. Bush nominated Thomas to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in 1990, and the Senate approved him, but not without threats of future challenges from AFJ. By the summer of 1991, George Kassouf, a top researcher for AFJ, had been researching Thomas for two years. Kassouf claimed to have conducted over 100 interviews and reviewed a millions of pages of documents on the future Supreme Court Justice. Carol Seifert, who was deputy director of AFJ, said that it had three people working on it, and tracked down leads from AFJ’s member organizations. Seifert said that AFJ would research Thomas, then “work with the [Senate] Judiciary Committee” to share the research on Republican nominees.
And when attacks against Thomas’s public record failed, allegations of sexual harassment by one of Thomas’s former co-workers, Anita Hill, would become the deciding factor in the confirmation hearings. In the racially-charged hearing that would follow, Law Professor Derrick Bell, credited as an originator of critical race theory, writing in Newsday, referred to AFJ as an “Orwellian interest group” and said that “[l]eft-liberals must save progressive politics” from groups such as AFJ.
There are several different accounts of how the Anita Hill story began to churn in the Washington rumor mill, but most all of them point to AFJ as the source. Articles in the ABA Journal, Newsweek, The Washington Post, and Newsday all stated that Aron received a call from one of Hill’s former Yale classmates and then passed along the information to the Senate Judiciary Committee—most likely to the staff of Senator Howard Metzenbaum. The May 1992 report by Senate Special Counsel Peter Fleming Jr. said that Aron passed the information to Judiciary Committee aides and that on October 2, 1991, three days before the media broke the story of Hill’s accusations, Aron called a Judiciary Committee aide and asked if Hill was ready to go public. The book Supreme Discomfort puts Kassouf front and center as being the first one to learn of Hill.
Contradictory on Citizens United
One of AFJ’s First Monday films, Unequal Justice: The Relentless Rise of the 1% Court, plays on the terminology of the “Occupy” movement to criticize the U.S. Supreme Court. The film proposes that the Court has taken “judicial activism to new levels” and favors businesses over individuals. One of the highlighted cases is Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), a controversial campaign finance law ruling that said unions and corporations have free speech rights and may spend money out of their own treasuries to make independent expenditures for or against candidates for office.
In the documentary, narrator Katrina Vanden Heuvel, editor of the liberal newsmagazine The Nation, explains that Citizens United is the “one case [that] stands alone as the most notorious Supreme Court decision favoring corporate interests.” The documentary shows video clips of protestors and explains that the decision is very unpopular. But the film leaves out two facts that would be important to AFJ members.
First, it fails to mention that unions receive the same First Amendment protections as corporations. As of October 2012, the National Education Association (NEA) and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), both labor unions, are members of AFJ. In 2011, SEIU gave AFJ a $10,000 donation and another union, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) made a contribution of $5,000 and another $10,000 contribution as an event sponsor.
Second, Unequal Justice also does not mention that certain nonprofit corporations also receive free speech rights. This is especially important information for the dozens of nonprofit members of AFJ. But a review of AFJ’s website and projects reveals that it is very interested in these changes. On its Citizens United issues page, AFJ explains that:
What gets less attention, however, is the fact that labor unions and nonprofit organizations focused on the social good were also affected by the legal changes triggered by Citizens United. The same doors that opened for increased campaign spending by business interests opened for spending by groups like the Human Rights Campaign, the Sierra Club, and NARAL Pro-Choice America.
Furthermore, in its materials on electoral advocacy in the wake of Citizens United, AFJ states:
More than ever, nonprofit corporations can and should actively participate in elections. Even if you think the case was wrongly decided, 501(c)(4)s and other nonprofit corporations (except for 501(c)(3)s) should take advantage of it—use it to strengthen democracy by increasing your public communications about the candidates and what’s best for the future of our country. [Emphasis added]
Aron’s recent article in The Nation is also critical of “the implications of Citizens United” that have led to “the current onslaught of political ads funded by secret right-wing donors.” But in April of 2012, AFJ submitted comments to the Senate in opposition to the DISCLOSE Act, which would require greater disclosure by section 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) organizations, even with some exceptions made for 501(c)(3) organizations.
Hypocrisy on Judicial Selection
“You name it, we’ll do it.”
-Nan Aron in USA Today, Nov. 1, 2005, on opposing the nomination of Sam Alito to the Supreme Court.
The Alliance for Justice has made it clear that it will stop at nothing to halt the confirmation of judges who do not agree with its progressive worldview. Amidst the Thomas hearings in 1991, an AFJ staffer told Newsday, “Let’s just say that we get stories all the time [about nominees] and then you give it to the [Judiciary] committee.” Although AFJ claims to support an independent judiciary, it really means that it only favors judges appointed by Democrats. Much of Aron’s and AFJ’s opposition to candidates appears to be based not on judicial qualifications but by party affiliation and personal political views. It is especially curious considering the judicial record of many of those nominees.
In 1975, as president of The Women’s Legal Defense Fund, Nan Aron opposed the nomination of John Paul Stevens, who was nominated by Republican Gerald Ford. Aron stated in a letter to the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee that she “urges [him to] re-examine the credentials of Judge Stevens as to his fitness to serve on the Supreme Court and further urges [him] to vote ‘no’ on his nomination.” But by 2010, when Stevens retired, Aron praised Stevens after he turned left. In an AFJ press release, Aron said that he was a “tremendous force for fairness” on the Court and was “one of the Court’s most vocal and eloquent spokespersons for individual liberties, separation of powers, and equal access to justice.” There was no statement on his subpar qualifications to be found.
AFJ similarly questioned the nomination of David Souter, nominated to the bench by Republican President George H.W. Bush, going as far to say that, “Our conclusion is that Souter’s opinions and legal briefs threaten to undo the advances made by women, minorities, dissenters and other disadvantaged groups” and was highly critical of the terms he used to discuss abortion. AFJ formally opposed Souter’s nomination and said that the Senate should “resist the drumbeat” saying that Souter is a moderate. Of course, Souter’s record on the Court led most observers to agree that he was a liberal justice. And in the end, Aron also praised Souter’s record.
But partisanship has been the name of the game since early on in the project. Susan Liss of AFJ told The Los Angeles Times in 1985 that the organization’s goal is forming a “watchdog unit” for Reagan nominees so “that the judiciary remain an independent third branch of government and not so directly reflect the political views of the President.” In 1987, a New York Times article described the process by which the Judicial Selection Project drew up a memo “supporting the view that the Senate should consider ideology” of judicial nominees. But in 1999, in the San Francisco Chronicle, Aron said that “President Clinton has a duty to fill judicial vacancies and appoint jurists who share his views.”
Compare that to what Aron told The Atlanta Journal Constitution in December 2000, that in the expected battle of president-elect George W. Bush’s judicial nominees, “It will be scorched Earth… We won’t give a lousy inch.”
AFJ issued a statement only 27 minutes after Bush nominated John Roberts and accused Roberts of writing legal policy that would “weaken school desegregation efforts, the reproductive rights of women, environmental protections, church-state separation, and the voting rights of African Americans.” Chief Justice Roberts, who according to AFJ was a right-wing stooge, ended up casting the deciding vote to uphold President Obama’s Affordable Care Act.
AFJ has provided direct research support to Democratic Senate offices. David Brock, founder of Media Matters for America, once noted that “if one compares the Alliance for Justice’s critique of Thomas’s record at the EEOC with [Senator] Metzenbaum’s, the similarities are too striking to be mere coincidence.” In a 2005 profile of Aron, a Washington Post article quoted a staffer of Senator Ted Kennedy telling AFJ “Just keep sending us research.”
AFJ has enjoyed superior access to members of the judiciary committee when Democrats are in power. During the nomination of Brooks Smith to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, Smith’s supporters were unable to supply their information to media, while AFJ handed out press releases. In the same hearing, it was reported that “a reporter accepting a pro-Smith press statement from a conservative group has her arm literally twisted behind her back by a male [Senator Patrick] Leahy aide who snarls ‘you can’t have that.'”
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AFJ has also been inconsistent in setting standards for professional and judicial experience. Perhaps the best example is the absence of this criticism with the nomination of Elena Kagan. Kagan told the ABA Journal in 2012 that her first appellate argument of any kind did not occur until she was Solicitor General and argued the Citizens United case in its second oral argument hearing before the Supreme Court. Kagan had no experience on the bench, limited appellate experience, and was a member of the Obama administration—which has actually caused her recusal from several cases. And as law professor Paul Campos explained, the entire body of Kagan’s academic work as a professor consisted of three law review articles, two book reviews, and some short essays.
Nonetheless, Aron praised Kagan’s nomination in an AFJ press release, saying that Kagan had “sterling academic and professional qualifications.” Compare this to President George W. Bush’s nomination of Harriett Miers, who was the first nominee tapped to replace the retiring Sandra Day O’Connor. AFJ set out several standards that Miers had to prove, in detail, in order to be considered by the Senate. Among these were judicial experience and independence (questioned because of her close relationship with President Bush as personal lawyer and White House counsel). Aron complained of Miers’s “sparse public record” and said that “Her record is so thin and her views so unknown that it is incumbent upon the senators to ask probing questions.”
In 2010, it did not take long for many to draw the comparisons between Miers and Kagan. Instead, Aron told FOX News that “She couldn’t be farther from Harriet Miers in my view. She has stellar academic and professional qualifications.”
AFJ’s support for use of the filibuster in the judicial confirmation process has waxed and waned over the years. In 2005, Aron consistently called for Senate Democrats “to stand up and say no” despite being in the Senate minority. Today, AFJ slams the “theater of the absurd” of Republicans filibustering or not approving judicial nominees made by President Obama. During the Clinton and Obama administrations, AFJ has argued that there is a “crisis” in the judiciary because of the delays in confirming those appointees.?
When activists swarm the private residence of a bank employee when their target isn’t at home — but his children reportedly are — they might be from a union-supported left-wing agitation group calling itself “National People’s Action.” The Chicago-based, union-associated, and George Soros-funded organization is somewhat notorious for radical, over-the-line campaigning tactics that resort to […]
