This is the comment I left on Barry’s site. You have no idea how much this upset me. We must stop this. Hugs
Hello Barry. I like this only because you are sharing it, not because I like what these bastards did to these children. This is abuse, child abuse, and detestable in every way imaginable. I am trying to write this through the tears running down my face. Barry what are the next steps, what about the appeals? This must be taken to the highest levels of the US government and to the US congress. Are any organizations raising money and fighting to get this changed? When you first mentioned this to me, I had no understanding how bad it was! I doubt many in our community of blog readers do. I am going to reblog this to my Playtime. I know you left the link, that is how I got here, but by my dogs that love gravy this must be fought and stopped. As a person who suffered child abuse, I hate this with every fiber of my being. There has to be better, more humane, more educated ways to care for these children. Shocked for wetting the bed, WTF, there are many reasons people wet the bed even as adults! To be punished for doing it as you’re being punished is sadistic! I belong to a survivors forum and read of sadistic bastards like my childhood was filled with who would get off on doing this to a kid, to me! Sorry Barry, did not mean to get so upset or so … in your comment section. But to do this to children that can not help how they are born … Sorry I have to go, or I will say things you will have to censor. Best wishes, Scottie
I got a comment I want to answer on the post I made about this. I used The Washington Post article but when I went to reread it I no longer had access to the article. So I found another report on what the Social Security hearings are like. I have been through them. The report is telling the truth. It is ridiculous the way they try to prevent disabled people from getting much needed government assistance. Hugs
He had made it through four years of denials and appeals, and Robert Heard was finally before a Social Security judge who would decide whether he qualified for disability benefits. Two debilitating strokes had left the 47-year-old electrician with halting speech, an enlarged heart and violent tremors.
There was just one final step: A vocational expert hired by the Social Security Administration had to tell the judge if there was any work Heard could still do despite his condition. Heard was stunned as the expert canvassed his computer and announced his findings: He could find work as a nut sorter, a dowel inspector or an egg processor — jobs that virtually no longer exist in the United States.
Nut sorter job description from Dictionary of Occupational Titles
“Whatever it is that does those things, machines do it now,” said Heard, who lives on food stamps and a small stipend from his parents in a subsidized apartment in Tullahoma, Tenn. “Honestly, if they could see my shaking, they would see I couldn’t sort any nuts. I’d spill them all over the floor.”
He was still hopeful the administrative law judge hearing his claim for $1,300 to $1,700 per month in benefits had understood his limitations.
But while the judge agreed that Heard had multiple, severe impairments, he denied him benefits, writing that he had “job opportunities” in three occupations that are nearly obsolete and agreeing with the expert’s dubious claim that 130,000 positions were still available sorting nuts, inspecting dowels and processing eggs.
Every year, thousands of claimants like Heard find themselves blocked at this crucial last step in the arduous process of applying for disability benefits, thanks to labor market data that was last updated 45 years ago.
The jobs are spelled out in an exhaustive publication known as the Dictionary of Occupational Titles. The vast majority of the 12,700 entries were last updated in 1977. The Department of Labor, which originally compiled the index, abandoned it 31 years ago in a sign of the economy’s shift from blue-collar manufacturing to information and services.
Social Security, though, still relies on it at the final stage when a claim is reviewed. The government, using strict vocational rules, assesses someone’s capacity to work and if jobs exist “in significant numbers” that they could still do. The dictionary remains the backbone of a $200 billion disability system that provides benefits to 15 million people.
It lists 137 unskilled, sedentary jobs — jobs that most closely match the skills and limitations of those who apply for disability benefits. But in reality, most of these occupations were offshored, outsourced, and shifted to skilled work decades ago. Many have disappeared altogether.
Since the 1990s, Social Security officials have deliberated over how to revise the list of occupations to reflect jobs that actually exist in the modern economy, according to audits and interviews. For the last 14 years, the agency has promised courts, claimants, government watchdogs and Congress that a new, state-of-the-art system representing the characteristics of modern work would soon be available to improve the quality of its 2 million disability decisions per year.
But after spending at least $250 million since 2012 to build a directory of 21st century jobs, an internal fact sheet shows, Social Security is not using it, leaving antiquated vocational rules in place to determine whether disabled claimants win or lose. Social Security has estimated that the project’s initial cost will reach about $300 million, audits show.
“It’s a great injustice to these people,” said Kevin Liebkemann, a New Jersey attorney who trains disability attorneys and has written extensively on Social Security’s use of vocational data. “We’re relying on job information from the 1970s to say thumbs-up or thumbs-down to people who desperately need benefits. It’s horrifying.”
Obsolete jobs
In 2022, it is not easy to find a nut sorter (code 521.687-086) in the national economy who “observes nut meats” on a conveyor belt and picks out broken, shriveled, or wormy nuts. How many workers in America inspect dowel pins (code 669.687-014), searching for flaws from square ends to splits, then discard them by hand? And even if Heard were qualified to remove virus-bearing fluid from fertile chicken eggs for use in vaccines by sawing off the end of an egg and removing its fetal membrane, that work is largely automated today.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is part of the Labor Department, has built a new, interactive system for Social Security using a national sample of 60,000 employers and 440 occupations covering 95 percent of the economy. But Social Security still has not instructed its staff to use it.
“They regularly tell us they plan on using the data,” Hilery Simpson, the labor bureau’s associate commissioner for compensation and working conditions, said of Social Security officials. The data collection and estimation “have gone through extensive testing and use the best-in-class statistical methods,” he said. The survey is available to the public on the labor bureau’s website.
Social Security has not explained why it has yet to implement the labor bureau survey.
Acting Social Security commissioner Kilolo Kijakazi declined to be interviewed. In a statement, she said, “To date, the best available source for occupational information has been the Dictionary of Occupational Titles. We have enlisted vocational experts to provide more detailed and current information about the jobs available in the national economy, while we continue to work on creating our own occupational data source informed by [the Bureau of Labor Statistics] that best reflects the current job market.”
A spokeswoman for the agency declined to answer questions about a timeline for putting the modern data into use.
Social Security’s delays in updating the database of job titles are rooted in conflicting political considerations, shifting leadership, and the drift that can bedevil large federal projects, according to current and former officials, auditors and disability advocates.
A modern list of occupations would create new winners and losers in the application process — posing political sensitivities for a program that has long drawn judgment that the government is either too generous or not generous enough. Over two decades, Social Security has been led by six acting commissioners and just three Senate-confirmed leaders, leaving power vacuums at the top that can delay costly projects. Many advocates believe the agency is motivated to delay the project so it can deny more claimants benefits.
“The scandal is that everybody wants this data discussed in terms of who will be hurt and who will be helped,” said David Weaver, a former Social Security associate commissioner who helped lead the early effort to modernize. “But a lot of money has been spent. You have the gold-standard of federal data, and Social Security is not producing anything.”
Congress continues to approve more than $30 million per year for the survey of modern jobs without asking hard questions about why the data sits unused, congressional aides and former Social Security officials said.
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) called on Social Security to move forward.
“Occupational definitions used by the federal government need to reflect the reality of the work Americans are doing today,” Wyden said in a statement. He warned that data on modern jobs “must be handled with care to ensure that nobody is wrongly denied their earned benefits.”
Federal courts, meanwhile, keep sending denied claims back to Social Security to redo its decisions, raising alarms that the government is shortchanging disabled Americans with arbitrary judgments that put it at legal risk.
“Does anyone use a typewriter anymore?” Richard Posner, a judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, asked in a 2015 decision reversing an administrative law judge’s denial of benefits to a disabled man the judge claimed could work as an “addresser” — one who “addresses cards” by hand or typewriter. Posner called a vocational expert’s claim that 200,000 such jobs still exist today a “fabrication.”
Others have not been as fortunate. Few claimants without attorneys are aware that the jobs used to deny them benefits have been pulled from obscurity. And many lawyers representing them lack the expertise and resources to take a case to federal court, say advocates, vocational experts and judges who rule in these cases.
“Every day we made decisions we don’t necessarily agree with,” said George Gaffaney, an administrative law judge in the Chicago area. “It’s troubling.”
A need to modernize
The Dictionary of Occupational Titles was first published in 1938 to help a country pulling out of the Great Depression match workers with jobs. Each entry contained the time to train for the job, the aptitude required, physical demands, the work performed — but not any recognition of which jobs match with the cognitive impairments common among the disabled today.
With its benefit decisions hinging largely on whether someone’s impairment limits them from doing past jobs or other jobs, Social Security needed a resource with accurate information about available work. But by the time the Labor Department retired the red hardcover book three decades ago, it was already stocked with jobs that, if not already gone, were quickly vanishing from the economy: elevator operators, thaw-shed heater tenders, window shade ring sewers. And it did not include a host of emerging information-economy jobs, from web designers to employment recruiters.
Inside Social Security, the publication’s 1991 demise set off a decade of hand-wringing. Workgroups, panels and committees of experts formed — all while the agency continued to rely on the outdated jobs list. By 1998, the Labor Department had developed a new database of jobs and what was required to do them. Social Security brought in another round of experts to determine whether that system, dubbed O*NET, could serve its disability program.
It took until 2008 — a full decade — to reach consensus: the agency needed to develop its own vocational information because existing federal data lacked enough characteristics of jobs disabled people could do. So in 2012 Social Security signed a contract with the Bureau of Labor Statistics to design a modern system that would help make accurate disability determinations.
The same year, the Government Accountability Office began questioning the project’s cost estimates and schedule. After three years of tests, field economists began their surveys in 2015. When that data was delayed, government watchdogs began warning that the project was in danger of becoming a case study in the challenges of large federal investments.
In 2018, the agency’s inspector general wrote in an audit, “It remains crucial that [Social Security] leadership commit to ensuring appeal applications receive fair and consistent treatment.” In response, a Social Security official set a target of fiscal 2020 to put the modern data into use and wrote, “we continue to work diligently to avoid delays in its implementation.”
The labor bureau now says it will finish a second wave of data collection next year. A third is planned.
“We thought we could do it in 10 years. It might take 20 years,” said Byron Haskins, who worked on the project as a branch chief from 2010 to 2016. “In the meantime, we’re not standing on solid ground on these decisions.”
When New York art collector and apparel company investor Andrew Saul was confirmed as President Donald Trump’s Social Security administrator in June 2019, his team drew up plans to start using the modern jobs data, concluding that disabled people, particularly older Americans, could learn new skills in an economy with more sedentary, skilled jobs. The new survey could tighten eligibility for benefits, Saul believed — a White House priority.
“It was going to make the system fairer,” Saul said in an interview. “People who deserved disability would get it, and those who didn’t would not.”
But the plan set off a furor among advocates, who opposed a provision that would have made it harder for older workers to qualify for benefits. The Biden administration quickly shelved it and the president fired Saul in 2021.
Old data
Even so, advocates and opponents agree on one thing: A disability system that relies on obsolete jobs to decide claims is gambling with taxpayers and with the courts.
“It’s never really been blessed by Social Security,” said David Camp, president of the National Organization of Social Security Claimants’ Representatives, reflecting the view of many advocates. “The agency won’t take the step to clean up the system because they know we’ll win more cases.”
Mark Warshawsky, deputy commissioner for retirement and disability policy under Saul, described the antiquated vocational policy as “an arbitrary system.”
“How hard is it for the federal government to make change?” he asked. “That’s not a political thing. Spending almost $300 million with nothing to show for it is embarrassing.”
The current system is leading thousands of disability claims per year to be denied that would otherwise have a good chance of approval, data suggests. The inspector general’s 2018 audit showed that from fiscal 2013 through 2017, occupational information was used to decide more than half of all initial claims and in four in five decisions at the hearing level when decisions are appealed. The data does not show if it was the deciding factor.
But a 2011 study commissioned by Social Security found the 11 jobs most commonly cited by disability examiners when denying benefits. The top job was addresser, used in almost 10 percent of denials. Twelve years later, little has changed, advocates say.
Estimates by Social Security’s experts of how many of these outdated jobs remain in the economy are also widely off the mark, courts have found.
The U.S. Supreme Court held in 2019 that Social Security judges could uphold agency decisions even when vocational experts refuse to provide data on how they come up with job numbers. But the decision led to a blistering dissent from Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, who cited dubious expert claims that 120,000 “sorter” and 240,000 “bench assembler” jobs are available to the disabled without clear evidence.
Earlier this year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit noted a similar problem while overturning a Social Security judge’s denial of benefits to a Wisconsin man.
“All three judges on this panel, assisted by very talented law clerks, read the transcript of the [vocational expert’s] testimony multiple times,” the court wrote. “And yet nobody can explain with coherence or confidence what the [vocational expert] did to arrive at her job-numbers estimate. … There has to be a better way.”
The expert claims can be equally baffling to claimants.
At his hearing before an administrative law judge in Pennsauken, N.J., in July 2019, Sean Dooley described the chronic pain and limited stamina from diabetes, thyroid issues and degenerative disk disease that had kept him from working as a jewelry salesman for three years.
His mother testified that at 400 pounds, her son struggled to sit, stand, bend over and lift. Yet a vocational expert said Dooley could work as an order clerk, an addresser or a call-out operator — a job he had never heard of. An expert whose software is used by many vocational experts has calculated that 2,000 addressers are left in the U.S., 2,060 call-out operators who compile credit information and 424 order clerks.
In a written decision three months later, Judge Lisa Hibner Olson denied Dooley benefits, overruling his lawyer’s arguments that the jobs were obsolete.
“It was like I’m hit with a torpedo,” recalled Dooley, 46, who is living on his mother’s meager retirement savings in his sister’s garage in Pennsville, N.J. “With these goofy jobs, there was no way they were ever going to approve me. If I could work, I would be working.”
Dooley’s denial was overturned by a U.S. district court and remanded to the same Social Security judge, who has scheduled a new hearing for January.
The problem is not limited to appeals heard before judges. State offices that first decide disability claims place blame for a historic backlog exceeding 1 million cases in part on the obsolete jobs system, which requires expertise most do not have.
“We’ve heard the message from Social Security, ‘We’re working on vocational policy changes,’ for 10 years,” said Jacki Russell, director of Disability Determination Services in North Carolina and president of the National Council of Disability Determination Directors. “ ‘It’s very sensitive,’ they say. Meanwhile, we’re over here trying to make the best decisions we can with a massive backlog.” Russell’s office of 600 employees has just two vocational experts.
In Maryland last spring, Larry Underwood quit in despair after 25 years testifying for Social Security as a vocational expert. He had concluded that there was no valid method to determine what work a disabled claimant could still do, and that it was impossible to project jobs in that field.
“I realized that a lot of vocational experts, including myself, have been giving false testimony for years,” Underwood said. “The numbers are not accurate. I decided I can’t do that anymore.”
A few advocates with expertise in vocational evidence have begun training disability attorneys, warning that if they aren’t savvy enough to rebut the job claims, they will lose.
Laura Parsons — a former medical assistant from Fortescue, N.J., with a connective tissue disorder known as Ehlers Danlos syndrome — saw that problem firsthand at her hearing in April 2021, in which a vocational expert testified that she could get jobs as an addresser or document preparer. The judge ended the hearing without allowing Parsons to testify.
“They want me to get a job addressing envelopes that doesn’t exist anymore,” Parsons said.
Social Security plans to ask the labor bureau to refresh its occupational information every five years. The next wave is scheduled to start in 2023 at a cost of $167 million, auditors found. Congressional staff have not been briefed on the project in at least three years, aides said. It is not clear if they have asked for a briefing. Meanwhile, courts continue to overturn denials based on the old data — even pleading with Social Security to modernize its system.
“It’s not our place to prescribe a way forward,” the Court of Appeals concluded in the case of the Wisconsin man who had been denied benefits. “Perhaps the Commissioner will read this opinion as an invitation to bring long-awaited and much-needed improvement to this aspect of administrative disability determination.”
DeathSantis is a Christian nationalist who believes the myth spread by Christian liars that the US is founded as a Christian nation by and for Christians. His version of religious freedom is total control by the Christians so that they can force their views on everyone else. His idea is to have the public pay for Christian schools and force Christian doctrines / moral standards on public school students. He doesn’t seem to understand that there are non-Christians religious people along with people of no religious views. He also buys deeply in to the myth that Christians are discriminated against and unfairly treated in the US. This man and his kind must never be allowed to have authority and control over the government. Hugs
Republican candidate vows to restore ‘full religious freedom’ in the US if elected president
Republican presidential candidate Florida Governor Ron DeSantis speaks at the Pray Vote Stand Summit at the Omni Shoreham Hotel on September 15, 2023, in Washington, D.C. The summit featured remarks from multiple 2024 Republican Presidential candidates making their case to the conservative audience members. | Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images Republican presidential candidate Florida Governor Ron DeSantis speaks at the Pray Vote Stand Summit at the Omni Shoreham Hotel on September 15, 2023, in Washington, D.C. The summit featured remarks from multiple 2024 Republican Presidential candidates making their case to the conservative audience members. | Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
WASHINGTON — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis highlighted the vital role faith in God plays in leadership as he explained how he will advance the cause of religious liberty if he becomes the 47th president of the United States.
DeSantis, a candidate for the Republican nomination for president in 2024, addressed the crowd at the Family Research Council’s Pray, Vote, Stand Summit Friday, where he discussed his faith in God and outlined how he would protect religious liberty if elected president.
“I don’t know how you could be a leader without having faith in God,” he said. “When you stand up for what’s right in this day and age, that is not going to be cost-free. You are going to face blowback, you’re going to face attacks, you’re going to face smears. And it’s the faith in God that gives you the strength to stand firm against the lies, against the deceit, against the opposition.”
DeSantis credited his faith in God with giving him “the foundation to know that all the insults, all the nonsense they throw at you ultimately doesn’t matter because you are aiming higher.”
After expressing concerns about the current state of affairs in the U.S., DeSantis lamented that “we do have a spiritual decline in this country.”
The candidate cited the practice of “forcibly closing churches and denying people their right to worship as they see fit” during the coronavirus lockdowns as one example of the spiritual decline engulfing the U.S. “The liquor stores were open, the strip clubs were open, but yet they shut the door on the people of faith,” he recalled.
“I believe that reviving the spirit of America is essential to helping reverse America’s decline. And this revival is going to begin in our religious institutions, our places of work, each of our households, all the institutions that make up the bedrock of society,” he declared.
DeSantis warned of “threats to religious liberty the likes we have not seen throughout most of American history” and highlighted the need for “people to be able to live their faith in all aspects of their life” as “faith has been treated as secondary to secular concerns in culture.”
“Attempts have been made to wipe our Judeo-Christian religious symbols from our national heritage and national culture. The Left, you know, they talk about saying you can’t be involved in religious practice if you’re in government because it would represent [an] ‘establishment of religion,’” he added.
The presidential candidate refuted this argument, saying, “First of all, that’s not true. But second of all, they’re the ones that want to establish a religion. They just don’t want to establish traditional religions. They want political leftism to be the established religion of this country.”
DeSantis insisted that the effort to establish political leftism as the established religion of the country has led those who want to practice their faith in public to find themselves “only being able to do that up until the point it conflicts with [the leftist] agenda.” He pointed to the treatment of coach Joe Kennedy, a Washington state high school football coach who lost his job because of opposition to his effort to pray on the field after the game, as an example of how violations of religious liberty have become commonplace.
The governor noted that Kennedy’s victory at the U.S. Supreme Court was “hailed as a victory for religious liberty” while suggesting that “the fact that it even had to go to the U.S. Supreme Court shows us that religious liberty is not flourishing the way it should in our country.”
He then outlined how he would work to advance the cause of religious liberty if elected president.
“As your president, I’m going to get to work on restoring full religious freedom in this country,” he vowed. He pointed to nominating and placing “constitutionalist judges on the courts of appeal and on the U.S. Supreme Court” as an important step in achieving that goal, assuring the audience that “my nominees will reflect the jurisprudence of justices like Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito Jr.,” whom he referred to as “the two greatest justices on the court.”
DeSantis also announced his intention to “end once and for all religious discrimination” by abolishing “all government regulations that force groups to choose between government funding and their faith.” He maintained that “instead, we’re going to actively incorporate the faith community in our administration.”
“We will make sure that the faith community has a seat at the table as we work to do the business of the country,” he added. “We will also do what we’ve done in Florida. We have universal school choice in the state of Florida, and we need it nationwide. On day one, we’ll issue an executive order that ensures funding available to private non-religious schools must also be available to private, faith-based schools.”
He continued: “We will stop the federal government from targeting men and women on the basis of their faith. Religious schools should not be pressured to violate the tenets of their faith. There will never be a question about whether a faith-based charity that serves the poor deserves First Amendment protections. We will seek the repeal of the Johnson Amendment, which suppresses the speech of our religious leaders.”
DeSantis detailed how his administration would “ensure that the Judeo-Christian tradition and values that our nation was founded on are respected and are preserved.” Specifically, he expressed a desire to “create divisions of conscience and religious freedom in the Departments of Education, Labor, and [Health and Human Services] to protect religious liberty against all agencies of government.”
“Even when God-fearing citizens have won in court, they have been forced to go through the time-consuming and invasive processes,” he lamented. “My Department of Justice will investigate and prosecute attacks on faith-based [crisis pregnancy] centers and pro-life activists, which the Biden administration is ignoring and they’re letting this go on.”
DeSantis repeatedly discussed his record as Florida governor in his remarks and concluded his speech by describing his state as “the place where woke goes to die.” He told the audience, “As president, we are going to leave the woke mind virus in the dustbin of history, where it belongs, once and for all.”
If you can’t separate church and state you can’t govern and ultimately you wont survive as a country, Christianity is not the only existing religion in America Bootsie.
Actually, I’d much prefer a leader who understands that no invisible man in the sky is coming to save us, and we need to fix the laundry list of problems we have ourselves.
I’d love to see presidents and prime ministers who are openly atheist, and quite a few being openly LGBTQ+, and quite a few being ethically nonmonogamous. And, of course, all of them being progressive and genuinely committed to making their nations and the world better for ALL the people.
I don’t really care if they believe in god. I don’t but I do care about how they govern others that don’t believe as they do. That keep their beliefs private and separate from their policies.
I am sick to death of the Bible thumpers who keep acting as though non-believers have no right to leadership in America and who treat secularism and humanism as dirty words. They are full of bullshit. We are Americans. We are decent people. We do not need to be led by superstitious fools.
We have a memorial in Salem here to show that this religious terrorism has always been part of the fabric of America. In that case, it cost a number of women their lives.
The first smallpox insufflation clinic in Boston in the 18th century was firebombed by a mob shouting that it was the devil’s work.
And American culture in general is violently prudish compared to Europe, with the Puritan roots never escaped from as the reason why.
So I cannot agree that America is better. It never escaped its horrific roots to this day.
“At the time Ron DeSantis became Governor of Florida, the Florida Retirement System (FRS1) was already in serious financial trouble, with “unfunded pension liabilities” exceeding $30 billion. Under his administration, that shortfall has risen to $36 billion, and losses continue to mount. DeSantis’ politically motivated decision to promote an Anti-ESG2 investment strategy for FRS investments is increasing that funding shortfall. This is placing the retirement savings and pensions of career state employees at risk, unless Florida taxpayers are forced to pay for the shortfall, to keep the FRS from failing.
“The massive FRS shortfall is only the tip of the HB3 iceberg. Governor DeSantis’ anti-ESG political campaign has negatively affected a number of Florida financial systems. Counties and municipalities are paying higher interest on bonds; Florida is walking away from billions in potential investments and tens of thousands of good-paying jobs in renewable energy; Florida is finding itself at a competitive disadvantage in attracting new investments and businesses. And, just like the captain of the Titanic, Governor DeSantis didn’t see it coming.
He’s pretty stupid, our taxes are paid to the county here for schools and fire, police and emergency and sanitation services. There is no mechanism in place since there is no state income tax to take it from Florida residents
Very informative how conservative and fundamentalist religious leaders have been attacking the public school system with disastrous results. She does talk rapidly but the CC is pretty good for YouTube. Hugs
Public education is under attack from all sides in this country, typically at the hands of a few wealthy and powerful conservatives who stand to benefit from the failure of public education at the expense of children and teachers.
At Tuesday’s council meeting, Prattville residents affiliated with Clean Up Alabama, which began as Clean Up Prattville, pleaded with the council that their solutions were a “common sense” approach to inappropriate materials for minors.
But the local goals are just one part of a three-prong plan that Clean Up Alabama has to push the issue across the state, according to meeting minutes included in an email to subscribers.
The minutes detailed the group’s local goals, as well as its goals with the Alabama Public Library Service, primarily to dissociate from the American Library Association. Gov. Kay Ivey has sent a letter to APLS Director Dr. Nancy Pack expressing concerns that closely follow Clean-Up Alabama’s push over LGBTQ materials in library spaces intended for minors.
But the meeting also included three state legislative goals, which go much further than simply severing any ties with the ALA or asking librarians to move books to an adult section.
Here’s what the group plans to do:
1. “Amend the Anti-Obscenity Law that exempts public libraries from criminal punishment when it comes to the distribution of material harmful to minors.”
Under Section 13A-12-200.5 of the Code of Alabama, it is a misdemeanor “for any person to knowingly or recklessly distribute to a minor, possess with intent to distribute to a minor, or offer or agree to distribute to a minor any material which is harmful to minors.” The section does not classify which level of misdemeanor that would be, but the charge would carry a fine of up to $10,000 and up to one year in county jail.
Currently, “material harmful to minors” is defined under the code to mean:
“a. The average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the material, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest of minors; and
“b. Material that depicts or describes sexual conduct [this will come into play later], breast nudity or genital nudity, in a way which is patently offensive to prevailing standards in the adult community with respect to what is suitable for minors; and
“c. A reasonable person would find that the material, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value for minors.”
However, Section 13A-12-200.10 specifically exempts “libraries and their employees or agents” from the criminal provisions of the act.
On Aug. 16, Clean Up Alabama posted on X (formerly Twitter) that this rule could allow public libraries to give sex toys to children without criminal punishment.
“Did you know that Alabama library employees can legally display sex toys, and possibly give them to kids without prosecution?” The post says.
At this time, APR has not heard any reports of any public libraries displaying sex toys for adults or children.
2. “Possibly add the libraries onto current law passed pertaining to woke ideologies in schools; and increase from 5th grade to 12th grade like Florida was able to do”
This appears to be in reference to Alabama’s version of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which Alabama passed in the 2022 session in a bill sponsored by House Majority Leader Scott Stadthagen, R-Hartselle. The bill originally only dealt with school bathrooms, requiring students to use the bathroom that aligned with their birth sex.
In a last-minute amendment by Sen Shay Shelnutt, R-Trussville, the bill suddenly became much more, barring instructors from leading “classroom discussion or classroom instruction regarding sexual orientation or gender identity in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.”
In the last session, Rep. Mack Butler, R-Gadsden, filed a bill to expand that to the eighth grade.
While Clean-Up Alabama suggests extending that to public libraries, it is not clear what that language would be and whether it would apply to the content of books or instructional programs held at the library,
3. “Considering HB401 that never made it out of committee and assure the language in it matches the harmful materials we have found in the libraries and that it includes public libraries.”
HB401 drew a lot of attention last session as it would have prohibited drag performances in public spaces where minors may be present—and some argued the language was so vague it could have applied to any transgender person in a public space.
The bill led to a massive pushback from the LGBTQ community with a march of hundreds on the state capitol.
Stadthagen has vowed to bring the bill back in the next session, and in the same conversation, praised Clean Up Prattville’s fight against LGBTQ books in the library.
Without an understanding of how that law was written, one might be confused exactly what Clean Up Alabama’s plan is to co-opt libraries into the law.
The way HB401 was written, it added drag performances into the definition of “sexual conduct,” which itself is a term included in the definition of “harmful to minors.” (Re-read that section earlier in this article to see how it plays into the code).
When Clean up Alabama says they want to ensure the language “matches the harmful materials we have found in the libraries,” it seems apparent that they mean adding LGBTQ+ content to the definition of “sexual conduct,” thereby changing the meaning of the definition of “harmful to minors” to include LGBTQ+ content.
If Clean Up Alabama were to succeed in these goals, the combination could result in librarians facing up to a year in jail and a fine of up to $10,000 just for having a book like “The Pronoun Book” on the shelf.
Under the current law, the first prong of the three-prong definition of material harmful to minors would rule out books like The Pronoun Book from ever being considered “harmful to minors,” as the word “prurient” is defined as “marked by or arousing an immoderate or unwholesome interest or desire.” But HB401 as it was written last year would break apart those three prongs; instead of requiring content to meet all three elements to qualify as “harmful to minors,” the law would only require the content to meet any one of the three prongs.
Might the plan gain support?
At least four state representatives have been supportive of Clean Up Alabama publicly in some manner: Rep. Susan Dubose, R-Hoover, has begun beating the drum for the group’s goal to keep the ALA from influencing Alabama libraries in any way. Fellow first-term state representatives Rick Rehm, R-Dothan, and Bill Lamb, R-Tuscaloosa, joined Dubose in support of the group as it listed its grievances at last month’s meeting of the APLS.
Stadthagen, as aforementioned, has given his stamp of approval to the efforts of the group.
Ernie Yarbrough, R-Trinity, worked in the last session with DJ Parten, a member of Clean Up Alabama, who wrote the failed legislation that would have allowed abortive women to be charged with homicide.
And Ivey’s letter to Pack references the Prattville books challenged by the group, although her letter shares concern about APLS policies and nothing comparable to this state legislative plan.
Finding information about homosexuality from a public library saved my life. I was eight years old and the only help a librarian gave me was to teach me how to use the main card catalog. I told her I wanted to look up dinosaurs. Librarians are so gullible when you mention dinosaurs…
This dinosaur learned (when he was going to SF State in the 60’s) that the 4th floor library men’s room was generally like a gay men’s meet and greet most evenings. But since it was in a library everyone kept it quiet.
Correct, you’d think there would be some sort of pushback from the opposition party aka the Dems on these bills coming forward. Where are they? Even AL dems are silent.
We have no clear message on this? On jailing librarians? No opposite group to the Moms for Liberty group? How about Moms for Libraries? NOTHING from our party?????
These fascists will continue to move forward when there is no opposition to their authoritarian rule.
They desperately need us to disappear. Without their power of the closet they have come to realize they don’t control the narrative any longer. I remember when I was young knowing that two men could be thrown in jail for doing stuff. (I didn’t know what stuff was, but why should a child know these things) I also knew that there was a place where some boys were sent when they couldn’t stop acting like a sissy. I knew where it was and I knew that ECT was involved. They have lost an enormous amount of power and they see their own children rejecting their hate and their religion. So they are having a temper tantrum because that’s all they know.
That’s the end result they want. But it’s a slippery slope, and on the way, they will want to jail anyone who advocates for homosexuality, which will then be interpreted as anyone who merely mentions it, and that will include any media mention of LBGTs. Eventually, they will want a complete prohibition on the certain words, such as gay, lesbian, and will prohibit anyone from stating that they are so. They want it back like the 1950s, when it was not just a taboo, but a criminal sanction.
I’ll answer it anyway: It’s a white supremacist theocratically-aligned autocracy, imposed by a small minority of citizens with power far in excess of what their numbers normally would allow in a democratic republic.
Great to see the decent accepting people fighting back against the red state haters, the anti-LGBTQIA jerks, the ones trying to remove anyone who is not cis straight gender role conforming from public view and society. We need more of this open fighting back. Hugs
The law is a direct rebuke to national efforts to erase LGBTQ+ identities from schools.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) is about to sign a law that would forbid schools from banning LGBTQ+-inclusive books. The law also requires schools to have trained staff to help queer kids and reiterates protections against forcibly outing LGBTQ+ students to their possibly unsupportive parents.
The law, known as Assembly Bill 1078, is a direct rebuke to anti-LGBTQ+ book-bans, “don’t say gay” laws, and other nationwide efforts to discriminate against queer students. Newsom has long opposed anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination in education and other areas. Once signed, AB 1078 will go into immediate effect.
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California just became the first U.S. state to establish Transgender History Month
“I believe that as Californians our strongest defense against the anti-trans agenda is just to tell the truth.”
“California is the true freedom state: a place where families — not political fanatics — have the freedom to decide what’s right for them,” Newsom wrote in a Twitter post announcing his intention to sign the law, known as Assembly Bill 1078. “With the passage of legislation to ban book bans & ensure all students have textbooks, our state’s Family Agenda is now even stronger.”
The law prohibits “the governing board of a school district, a county board of education, or the governing body of a charter school” from “refusing to approve or prohibiting the use” of any book on the basis of an individual’s or group’s diverse racial or cultural characteristics. Any school that bans such books could lose state funding. Existing state law requires social sciences classes to include contributions of diverse groups, including, among others, LGBTQ+ Americans and members of other ethnic and cultural groups.
“Restricting access to classroom and library materials because they feature LGBTQ people or were written by LGBTQ authors discriminates against LGBTQ people and constitutes censorship in violation of California law and policy,” the law states. “Similarly, efforts to categorically exclude topics related to race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or other protected characteristics, or of present or historical discrimination based on protected characteristics, from school library collections, curricula, or classroom discussions constitute censorship that violates California law and policy.”
Additionally, the law reminds state officials and agencies that they have the authority to enforce federal and state laws protecting students from unlawful discrimination and harassment that create an inequitable learning environment.
This reminder is likely connected to three California school districts — the Murrieta Valley, Orange, and Chino Valley Unified School Districts — which recently passed policies forcing educators to out trans and nonbinary students to their parents. California Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) filed a lawsuit against the Chino Valley United School District, and a judge blocked its policy from going into effect.
The law also reiterates that schools may offer “peer support or affinity clubs and organizations, safe spaces for LGBTQ or other at-promise pupils, counseling services, staff who have received anti-bias or other training aimed at supporting these pupils or who serve as designated support to these pupils, health and other curriculum materials that are inclusive of, and relevant to, these pupils, [as well as] online training” and complaint procedures developed to assist LGBTQ+ students with their learning experiences.
Right-wing groups have said that anti-LGBTQ+ educational policies are needed to prevent schools from “secretly” encouraging students to change genders without their parents’ knowledge or to stop the “indoctrination” of “gender ideology” onto students. These policies are often promoted by anti-LGBTQ+ groups who also oppose the expansion of queer civil rights in other non-educational areas of public and private life.
As more and more of these studies get done and made public, it is getting harder for the NTI-TRANS haters to deny the good that gender affirming care does. It also shows the lie that these red state anti-trans care laws are to protect the children. That fact is they hurt children! Hugs
A landmark new study has found that access to gender-affirming care halves suicidality among transgender people. (Getty)
A new landmark study has found that access to gender-affirming healthcare significantly reduces rates of depression, gender dysphoria, and suicidality among transgender people.
While it’s no secret that providing gender-affirming care to transgender individuals who ask for it can greatly benefit their well-being, an increase in transphobic rhetoric and bans on gender-affirming healthcare has prompted thorough medical studies into the impact of such care.
Now, brand new research conducted in Melbourne, Australia, has found that allowing transgender people to access the care they’re after can reduce suicidality by a stunning 55 per cent.
As part of the first-ever randomized controlled trial (RCT) on gender-affirming care, researchers took 64 transgender and gender-diverse adults who had been looking to start testosterone therapy and randomly split them into a treatment group and a control group.
While the treatment group was allowed to begin hormone therapy that week, the control group waited three months for their treatment to begin.
The RCT trial noted a 55 per cent drop in suicidality among transgender individuals who received gender-affirming care. (Getty Images)
Before the study began, both groups were evaluated on depression, gender dysphoria, and suicidality. Three months later, the two groups were evaluated again.
RCTs for medical care can often be hard to conduct due to practical and ethical concerns. However, researchers of this study found a way to hold an RCT for this study by incorporating a shorter follow-up period. Rather than giving the control group a placebo drug, or no treatment at all, they were simply given a longer wait time.
The results showed a notable decrease in gender dysphoria, depression, and – most significantly – suicidality.
The group that received gender-affirming care right away saw a 55 per cent reduction in suicidality compared to a 5 per cent drop within the control group.
Depression scores in the treatment group decreased by half, while gender dysphoria rates also significantly decreased.
Breaking down their findings, researchers Brendan J. Nolan MBBS, Sav Zwickl, PhD, and Peter Locke wrote: “There was a statistically significant decrease in gender dysphoria in individuals with immediate [access to gender-affirming care] compared with delayed initiation of testosterone therapy.
“A clinically significant decrease in depression and a decrease in suicidality also occurred with immediate testosterone therapy.
“The findings of this trial suggest that testosterone therapy significantly decreases gender dysphoria, depression, and suicidality in transgender and gender-diverse individuals desiring testosterone therapy.”
The results showed a notable decrease in gender dysphoria, depression, and – most significantly – suicidality. (Jama Network)
Of course, this isn’t the first time that research has shown significant drops in depression and suicide rates among transgender individuals who receive gender-affirming care.
A 2022 medical study showed that young transgender people who have access to puberty blockers are 73 per cent less at risk of suicide and report improved well-being.
But, as anti-trans activists advocate for further bans on gender-affirming care, one of the key arguments is that the evidence in support of the care isn’t up to scratch with GRADE (Grades of Recommendation, Assessment, Development, and Evaluation) standards.
So research like this landmark RCT is so significant to the transgender community and its allies as the fight for their healthcare rights rumbles on.
A supreme court justice and his wife plot how to get more wealth and increase the control of the super wealthy over politicians. The justice helps push the over turning of laws limiting how much money the wealthy can use to buy / control politicians while his wife and the religious fundamentalist Christian nationalist pushing the courts to be filled with fundamentalist Christian nationalist start a new organization, a super PAC, to use the new power of the Citizens United decision pushed by her husband. Insidious. But it shows how corrupt some members of the SCOTUS are. This article is very long but informative. Joe My God has a shorter version he posted a few days ago. Hugs
Thanks to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, a trove of so-called “dark money” was about to be unleashed. Two activists prepared to seize the moment.
Leonard Leo’s role as the central figure in the conservative legal movement has long been known, culminating in his acquisition last year of what many believe to be the largest political donation in history. | POLITICO illustration/Photos by AP Photo, Getty Images
Heidi Przybyla is a Washington, D.C. journalist. You can find her on Twitter @HeidiReports.
The Supreme Court’s decision in the 2010 Citizens United case transformed the world of politics. It loosened restrictions on campaign spending and unleashed a flow of anonymous donor money to nonprofit groups run by political activists.
In the months before the ruling dropped in January of that year, a group of conservative activists came together to create just such an organization. Its mission would be to, at the time, block then-President Barack Obama’s pet initiatives.
The activists included Federalist Society leader Leonard Leo and his ideological soulmate, a hard-edged activist named Virginia Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
“Ginni really wanted to build an organization and be a movement leader,” said a person familiar with her thinking at that time. “Leonard [Leo] was going to be the conduit of that.”
She also had a rich backer: Harlan Crow, the manufacturing billionaire who had helped Thomas and her husband in many ways, from funding luxury vacations to picking up tuition payments for their great-nephew.
At the time, the Citizens United ruling was widely expected, as the court had already signaled its intentions. When it came, it upended nearly 100 years of campaign spending restrictions.
The conservative legal movement seized the moment with greater success than any other group, and the consequences have shaped American jurisprudence and politics in dramatic ways.
From those early discussions among Leo, Thomas and Crow would spring a billion-dollar force that has helped remake the judiciary and overturn longstanding legal precedents on abortion, affirmative action and many other issues. It funded legal scholars to devise theories to challenge liberal precedents, helped to elect state attorneys general willing to apply those theories and launched lavish campaigns for conservative judicial nominees who would cite those theories in their rulings from the bench.
The movement’s triumphs are now visible but its engine remains hidden: A billion-dollar network of groups, most of which are registered as tax-exempt charities or social welfare organizations. Taking advantage of gaps in disclosure laws, they shield the identities of most of their donors and some of the recipients of the funds. Among those who’ve been paid by the groups are leading thinkers and individuals with close personal ties to Leo — including a whopping $7 million to a group run by a close friend and his wife. They also include a for-profit business for which Leo himself is chairman and which received tens of millions of dollars from his nonprofit network.
Leo’s role as the central figure in this movement has long been known, culminating in his acquisition last year of what many believe to be the largest political donation in history. Few are aware of the extent to which the movement’s baby steps were taken in concert with Ginni Thomas.
Two months before the Citizens United decision, but after the justices had signaled their intentions by requesting new arguments, attorney Cleta Mitchell — later to play a role in Donald Trump’s false claims about the 2020 elections — filed papers for Ginni Thomas to create a nonprofit group of a type that ultimately benefited from the decision. Leo was one of two directors listed on a separate application to conduct business in the state of Virginia. Thomas was president. She signed it on New Year’s Eve of 2009, and Crow provided much of the initial cash. A key Leo aide, Sarah Field, would come aboard to help Thomas manage the group, which they called Liberty Central.
After Liberty Central went public, it provoked an outcry over a Supreme Court justice’s wife promoting causes like overturning Obamacare that were before her husband’s court. Leo and Thomas changed gears. His network reactivated a dormant group, the Judicial Education Project, which would go on to become a major supplier of amicus briefs before the nation’s highest court. She created a for-profit consulting business using a similar name — Liberty Consulting — that enabled her to perform consulting work for conservative activist groups.
The Judicial Education Project supplied some of her business: Documents indicate Leo ordered at least one recipient of his groups’ funds, Kellyanne Conway, to make payments to Ginni Thomas for unspecified work, according to a Washington Post story earlier this year.
Now, Liberty Consulting is a focus of interest from congressional committees probing the Supreme Court’s ethics disclosures. Senate Democrats have demanded that Leo and Crow provide a list of “gifts, payments, or other items of value” they’ve given Thomas and her husband.
Meanwhile, Leo’s network of nonprofits — whose annual donations have skyrocketed into the hundreds of millions of dollars — is the subject of an investigation by the Washington, D.C., attorney general, POLITICO reported last month. The probe followed a POLITICO report in March that raised questions about whether Leo’s groups were enriching him and his friends by hiring their businesses and donating to their nonprofit groups.
Together, the probes have combined to raise the question of whether Leo’s groups have taken advantage of lax disclosure laws to send additional business and funds to Ginni Thomas, among other activists. That would be legal as long as Thomas was providing services commensurate with the payments.
“The real question then is, ‘what is Ginni Thomas qualified to do, what did they pay her to do, and was it fair market value?’” said Laura Solomon, a Pennsylvania tax attorney who represents hundreds of charitable and other tax-exempt organizations and philanthropists.
Leo, Thomas, Crow and Conway did not respond to questions about their financial relationships, and whether Leo’s groups continued to ask contractors to work with Thomas.
Asked how much money overall Leo has directed to Thomas, when the payments began and if they ever stopped, a Leo spokesman responded: “No comment.”
Thomas’ representative, attorney Mark Paoletta, did not respond to questions.
In a July 25 letter to Congress, Leo’s lawyers said his advocacy work is protected under the First Amendment and that any congressional inquiry into his relationships with Supreme Court justices is “politically charged” and tantamount to harassment.
In a July interview with The Maine Wire, a conservative outlet near his home, Leo spoke about his efforts to “defend the Constitution” and why his nonprofit groups don’t reveal their donors.
“It’s not to hide in the shadows,” he said. “It’s because we want ideas judged by their own moral and intellectual force.”
Launching a Movement
Many people trace the start of the conservative legal movement to 1982, the year of the founding of the Federalist Society, which provided a forum for law students and professors with conservative ideas to incubate their theories.
But the movement that has had such a profound impact on the courts today — one that involves money and politics, more than legal theories or principles — gained steam in the wake of the Citizens United decision.
The case followed a highly unusual path — one blazed by a five-justice conservative majority who seemed determined to strike a blow against campaign finance restrictions.
Initially, the dispute centered on whether a conservative nonprofit’s unflattering documentary on former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton violated campaign finance laws. Instead of resolving the case along the lines argued by the lawyers, the justices took the unusual step of asking for re-arguments based on a sweeping question — whether they should overrule prior decisions approving laws that limited spending on political campaigns.
The re-argument took place on Sept. 9, 2009. Two months later, on Nov. 6, Mitchell filed an IRS application on behalf of Ginni Thomas to form the group that becameLiberty Central Inc. Paperwork Thomas signed on New Year’s Eve listed Leo, then the Federalist Society’s executive vice president, as one of two directors. Field, one of Leo’s right-hand people on state courts at the Federalist Society, came aboard to help Thomas in her new endeavor.
Neither Field nor Mitchell responded to requests for comment.
The application was approved seven days before Clarence Thomas joined the 5-4 majority on a decision that wouldopen the door to a new era of major spending on groups like the one his wife was forming. After putting up $500,000, the lion’s share of her nonprofit’s seed money, Crow held an event for Ginni Thomas at his palatial home in Dallas. The group later made clear its goal was disassembling President Barack Obama’s agenda, mainly the Affordable Care Act.
Justice Anthony Kennedy, a Ronald Reagan appointee, assumed in his majority opinion in Citizens United that donations and spending around such groups would be transparent. Justice Thomas, in his concurring opinion, argued against “forcibly disclosed donor information,” which could “pre-empt citizens’ exercise of their First Amendment rights.”
The Citizens United decision — which extended free speech rights to corporations, nonprofits and unions — effectively curbed efforts to rein in political spending, while paving the way for follow-up rulings from courts and the Federal Election Commission that would unleash additional billions of dollars in donations. Those donors would spawn a boom in tax-exempt “charitable” and “social welfare” groups as vehicles for spending on political activity.
A key part of the attraction to these groups was that they could shield the identity of donors, many of whom are reluctant to invite scrutiny of their own agendas.
Speaking out
Just five weeks after the decision, on Feb. 18, Ginni Thomas took the stage at CPAC, an annual gathering of the nation’s most prominent conservative activists. Wearing a white T-shirt emblazoned with a Liberty Central logo, Thomas introduced herself as an “ordinary citizen from Omaha, Nebraska” who felt “called to the front lines” of a battle against “arrogant elites” who “think they know how to manage our lives from cradle to grave.” She evoked the passing of “patriots,” including her 91-year-old mother and Barbara Olson, who had perished in the plane that hit the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, as her inspiration.
“When she was gone, I knew I had to work harder,” Thomas said of Olson, whose widower, Ted, had been a lawyer for Citizens United.
Thomas did not credit Crow, Leo or the Citizens United decision for her new grassroots initiative. That year, she was paid $120,500 from Liberty Central, according to tax records.
The group was destined to have only a short lifespan, thanks in part to a misstep by Thomas. In October, she left a voicemail for Anita Hill, the woman who had accused her husband of sexual harassment during his confirmation hearings in 1991. In it, Thomas demanded an apology for the 19-year-old accusations.
“I would love you to consider an apology sometime and some full explanation of why you did what you did with my husband,” Thomas reportedly said, asking Hill to “pray about this.”
The ensuing news reports drew unwanted attention to Thomas’ new nonprofit, which by then was expressly targeting Obama and his agenda. The news led many ethics specialists to question whether it was appropriate for a Supreme Court justice’s spouse to be leading such a political effort, especially with the court preparing to consider a high-profile challenge to Obama’s health care initiative.
Incorporation records show Thomas had already pivoted to form her own for-profit consulting firm in the state of Virginia. On Nov. 16, Thomas’ “expedited service request” to incorporate her consulting business was approved. And Leo turned to another vehicle he could use to pay her with no apparent paper trail. The Judicial Education Project, a tax-exempt charity that had been founded by three of Leo’s associates in 2004 but soon became dormant, was reactivated and began receiving donations in 2010.
And far from retreating, Thomas merely moved her networking behind the scenes.
“She remained active in the [conservative legal] movement for sure,” said the person who had attended early meetings about her plans and who was granted anonymity to discuss private meetings. “People just always assumed she had to stay below the radar.”
She was a frequent attendee at major coordinating events among conservative nonprofits and was considered “a very popular activist figure,” the person said.
Thomas’ brief run as president of her own nonprofit had given her a taste of a lifelong dream. Thomas grew up tagging along with her mother, a Nebraska GOP Party activist. A 1986 Good Housekeeping article that mentioned the young Virginia Lamp said she aspired to run for Congress, but her biggest challenge was “finding a husband who’ll be supportive of a woman in public life.”
Liberty Central had been explicit about its intent to assist “citizen activists,” launching an “activism how-to website” in August and an ad campaign a month before the 2010 midterm election in which challenging Obamacare was the conservative movement’s primary objective.
Thomas continued her activism after leaving the nonprofit, with Leo helping to send money in her direction.
According to the documents obtained by the Post, Leo told Conway he wanted her to “give … another $25K” to Thomas and that the records should have “no mention of Ginni, of course.” At Leo’s behest, Conway’s polling firm billed the Leo-affiliated JEP $25,000 that day as a “Supplement for Constitution Polling and Opinion Consulting,” the documents show.
In all, Leo arranged for between $80,000 and $100,000 to go to Thomas through Conway for unspecified work in 2011 and 2012, according to the documents.
Limiting disclosures
There is no direct paper trail for JEP’s spending on Conway’s business, let alone Thomas.
The IRS requires that nonprofits must identify only their top five highest-paid contractors making more than $100,000 annually, but that leaves many contractors off the list. True North Research, an investigative watchdog group, found at least $25 million of the $240 million that JEP has spent on grants and expenses since 2010 — including salaries and contractor fees — went to people whose identities were not revealed.
“This money could have gone to anyone,” said Lisa Graves, the leader of True North Research and former deputy assistant attorney general in the Clinton administration.
In its filings for the year after Leo asked Conway to give money to Thomas, the JEP reported spending a total of $150,000 on “polling,” which could have covered the payments, but Conway’s firm, The Polling Company, was not listed on its paperwork. A spokesman for Leo said JEP used “multiple polling contractors” and that he is “unaware” of any connections between Thomas and those contractors.
In 2011, the judiciary’s policy-making body, a panel overseen by Chief Justice John Roberts, received a complaint from a sitting judge after a watchdog group revealed that Clarence Thomas hadn’t reported hundreds of thousands of dollars earned by his wife.
Clarence Thomas filed amended reports, explaining that his wife’s income was “inadvertently omitted due to a misunderstanding of the filing instructions.” No formal review was conducted, though the panel asserted there was no “willful” wrongdoing by the justice.
The filing requirements themselves were porous enough, however, that justices could effectively omit naming any of their spouse’s clients or the amount of money they were receiving. Thus, in subsequent disclosures, Clarence Thomas would go on to simply list that his wife had received money from her consulting business, without detailing how much or from whom, or whether any of the people paying her had interests before the Supreme Court.
Likewise, gaps in disclosure requirements for nonprofits were large enough that no one could keep track of who was funding Leo’s network. In some instances, the gaps were exacerbated by irregularities. In 2011, JEP reported to the IRS having received no more than $50,000 in donations, even though another Leo-aligned entity, the Wellspring Committee, reported having given JEP $136,000 that year. A spokesman said JEP took in more than expected and accounted for the surplus in a subsequent reports.
The lack of a requirement to report donors became more noteworthy as JEP’s revenue began to grow.
In 2012 — the year Leo asked Conway to direct payments to Thomas through Conway’s polling business — the formerly inactive nonprofit reported receiving $1.5 million. The next year, Thomas’ former law clerk, Carrie Severino, became one of the group’s three directors; by 2014, the nonprofit’s annual revenues were up to $9 million from nothing reported just five years previously, according to tax filings.
Severino did not respond to questions through the Judicial Crisis Network, another Leo-aligned group which she heads.
Pushing an agenda
Meanwhile, JEP was becoming a major vehicle for filing amicus briefs on behalf of the conservative legal movement seeking to influence the Supreme Court. More than just expressions of support for one side or the other, these briefs often encompassed extensive fact-finding and analysis, spanning scores of pages. The goal was to offer conservative justices arguments that they could incorporate into their opinions.
The lead attorney on the first amicus brief JEP joined was former Thomas law clerk John Eastman, who would later advise Trump on theories for overturning the 2020 election. The brief argued that Obamacare’s provision requiring minimum coverage was an “oppressive mandate” and that it was “tainted” by “abuses of the legislative process.” With the support of Roberts, the court ruled against JEP’s position. ClarenceThomas, along with the other conservative justices, joined a dissent that would have found the individual mandate unconstitutional. In later years, the mandate would be effectively ended by Congress repealing its tax penalties.
Many of the JEP’s subsequent briefs listed Severino as counsel of record.
In 2013, JEP filed a Severino-authored brief arguing in favor of striking down a Massachusetts law that made it a crime to stand within 35 feet of entrances to abortion clinics. The state claimed the law was necessary to prevent clashes between demonstrators. JEP, however, argued that abortion clinics provide “incomplete and misleading information about the abortion procedure” and that the law interfered with the rights of “sidewalk counselors.” The court unanimously struck down the law, though a five-justice majority rejected JEP’s contention that the law was aimed at curbing the rights of anti-abortion protesters.
In 2014, JEP weighed in on the landmark case of Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, in which the court decided that companies can opt out of contraception coverage for employees based on the owners’ religious objections. The opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito and joined by ClarenceThomas, adopted many of the arguments JEP made in its Severino-authored brief, mainly that Obamacare’s coverage requirements burdened the Hobby Lobby owner’s right to free exercise of religion.
In 2015, JEP filed a brief in support of a petitioner challenging a University of Texas affirmative action program, which it called a “back-door” and secretive process. Clarence Thomas and Alito agreed it was “categorically unconstitutional.” The court’s majority disagreed, but later, in 2023, a more conservative court would adopt the position advocated by JEP.
Curbing oversight
Efforts to determine who was funding such advocacy, and whether they had direct interest in the cases, are complicated by gaps in disclosure rules and oversight of nonprofit groups. The rules governing such groups were designed for traditional charities such as Kiwanis Clubs or PTAs. But once activist groups started organizing under the same tax provisions, the IRS was forced to become the arbiter of what constituted politics and what did not.
Since JEP was registered as a charity, “the [IRS] limitations are very clear that you can’t do anything engaged in politics” and cannot organize a nonprofit for the benefit of any private interest or individual, said John Koskinen, a former IRS commissioner from 2013 to 2017 who reviewed the paperwork provided by POLITICO. Though such groups can engage in advocacy and limited lobbying, they are prohibited from participating in campaigns for or against political candidates.
Those who claimed the IRS wasn’t properly scrutinizing such groups quickly ran into a powerful countermovement claiming the opposite.
Mitchell, the lawyer who had helped Thomas set up her own ill-fated nonprofit, began championing a public relations offensive to combat IRS scrutiny of the same nonprofits her allies were erecting. She claimed that the tax agency, then overseen by the Obama administration, was disproportionately targeting conservative groups and called for an independent counsel.
The agency “is so corrupt and so rotten to the core that it cannot be salvaged,” Mitchell said in 2014.
A two-year investigation by the Department of Justice “found no evidence that any IRS official acted based on political, discriminatory, corrupt or other inappropriate motives” and closed with no charges. It did find “substantial evidence of mismanagement, poor judgment and institutional inertia” as IRS officials cut corners to deal with an explosion of Tea Party-aligned nonprofit applications similar to Thomas’ group. But it also found that some progressive groups experienced similar processing delays and extra scrutiny.
Thereafter, the division that polices such nonprofits was effectively neutered by budget cuts. Audit rates plunged as the division became overwhelmed by hundreds of new nonprofits supposedly doing charitable and educational work but actually doing mostly political work. Clawing back funding for the IRS remains a top demand of conservative lawmakers in annual congressional budget negotiations.
The timing of the campaign against the IRS was no coincidence, said Koskinen, the former IRS commissioner who was in office during that period in the Obama administration.
“It shouldn’t surprise anyone that some of the people attacking the IRS and supporting cuts to its budget after 2010 were the same people pushing the envelope of how to move ‘dark money’ around to maximize its political effect,” Koskinen said. “The fewer auditors the IRS had, the lower the odds of being caught.”
Backing Trump
The election of Donald Trump in 2016 opened the door to countless new opportunities for the burgeoning conservative legal movement.
Leo himself had played a strong role in ensuring Trump’s election. When conservatives expressed doubts about the surprise GOP nominee, Leo helped reassure them by persuading Trump to commit to choosing Supreme Court nominees from a list that Leo himself drafted.
Then, after Trump’s victory, Leo worked hard to ensure that the president followed through.
When Conway joined the White House as an adviser to new president, with a hand in judicial nominations, Leo helped facilitate the sale of her polling firm to a Virginia company where he is now chairman.
Leo’s closeness to the White House sparked a fresh surge in donations to his network. In 2020, he announced JEP was being rebranded as the 85 Fund, and its annual fundraising skyrocketed to $65.7 million.
That year also marked the ultimate triumph of the conservative legal movement, as the confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett established a 6-3 majority of justices aligned with Leo’s Federalist Society. Leo used his dark-money groups to fund campaigns urging the confirmation of those justices, including Barrett.
Then, as Trump approached a difficult re-election campaign in 2020, the 85 Fund created a subgroup, The Honest Elections Project, dedicated to amplifying claims of Democrats cheating in elections and pushing for voting restrictions.
Since Trump’s defeat, the Honest Elections Project has seized on momentum created by his unfounded claims of a stolen election to push anti-fraud measures that critics say will make voting harder for everyone.
“Tens of millions of voters harbor grave doubts about the future legitimacy of the democratic process,” the group says on its website. “They expect voting to be secure, accessible, and honest — even in a pandemic. What they got was an election marred by dysfunction, hundreds of agenda-driven progressive lawsuits that undermined voting safeguards, and a system that in many places failed to deliver prompt results. That is not how elections are supposed to work.”
A growing network
The Honest Elections Project is now just one limb of Leo’s fast-growingoperation, fortified by what is believed to be the largest political donation in history: $1.6 billion from 91-year-old manufacturing magnate Barre Seid.
But with that immense war chest has come further scrutiny of the network’s spending. In March, POLITICO reported that since Leo became chairman of the for-profit CRC Advisors in 2020, the JEP and another Leo-affiliated group has paid the firm at least $43 million. A few weeks later, a progressive watchdog group filed a complaint with the D.C. attorney general and the IRS requesting a probe into what services were provided and whether Leo was in violation of laws against using charities for personal enrichment.
The probe is ongoing, and a lawyer for the Leo-affiliated groups involved called the complaint “sloppy, deceptive and legally flawed.”
Leo did not respond previously over multiple weeks to requests for information about what services the public relations firm provided to his nonprofits.
He wasn’t alone in declining to do so.
Other Leo allies have nonprofits and have declined comment to POLITICO on what services they provided in exchange for millions of dollars, including Ronald Cass, a Boston University law school dean emeritus who runs a nonprofit registered to his home address in Virginia called The Center for the Rule of Law.
Leo was best man at Cass’ wedding and, in 2018, when Cass’ daughter was a debutante featured at one of the nation’s most exclusive galas, Leo and his wife Sally were among the attendees. Cass was also a longtime friend of Justice Antonin Scalia. In a sign of the family’s proximity to the Supreme Court, Cass was the master of ceremonies at a July 2016 dinner honoring Scalia’s memory. (Leo and Cass both sat at ClarenceThomas’ VIP table according to a seating chart.) Cass’ daughter is slated to clerk for Alito.
Cass’ group, described as an independent “center of international scholars analyzing rule of law issues,” doesn’t have much of a footprint. His wife, Susan, is the only other principal officer listed on paperwork filed in Virginia.
Between 2013 and 2021, Cass’ nonprofit took in nearly $7 million from JEP, according to tax filings. Yet POLITICO did not find a record of the annual paperwork the IRS requires of grantees detailing revenues and expenditures. Further, the group’s tax-exempt status had been auto-revoked by the IRS in 2011, the documents show.
Unless an exception is granted, the IRS requires such organizations to file the forms to keep their tax-exempt status, and all charitable grantors like JEP are required by federal and state laws to ensure grantees are using funds for charitable or educational purposes.
If Cass were running a charitable organization, as indicated on JEP’s annual filings for several years, it should have been filing the IRS forms. If not, it should have paid tax as a for-profit entity, said Koskinen.
Ronald and Susan Cass did not respond to multiple emails seeking comment about whether their organization paid tax, a record that is not subject to public disclosure.
In addition, Cass and Leo have both declined to comment on the nature of Cass’ services since POLITICO first reported in March about sizable payments received by his Center for the Rule of Law.
“Mr. Cass is a recognized expert across a wide variety of legal topics such as administrative law, antitrust, constitutional law, intellectual property, international trade and the legal process,” said the Leo spokesman. “Any organization would be fortunate to work with Mr. Cass and his wealth of knowledge.”
Pushing for answers
Philip Hackney, an expert on tax law and charities who worked in the Office of the Chief Counsel at the IRS under former Presidents George W. Bush and Obama, said he thinks the payments to Cass’ group merit further investigation.
“It’s not a small amount of money going to an organization that lost their tax-exempt status, and they started paying them after they lost their tax-exempt status,” said Hackney, who is now a professor at the University of Pittsburgh. “This is not a good look.”
Ellen Aprill, a tax law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who reviewed the same documents, called the filings “especially odd,” while cautioning further facts are needed before judging whether they are “inconsistent with the rule of law.”
Such potential IRS filing inconsistencies, JEP’s reactivation at the time when Thomas’ own nonprofit experiment fell apart and the large sums JEP has taken in and paid out make a compelling case for a closer look at how much money Thomas may have received from Leo-affiliated sources, said Eric Havian, a San Francisco attorney who has represented whistleblowers for more than 25 years and reviewed tax records at POLITICO’s request.
Whatever the state of their financial dealings, the personal and professional relationship between Thomas and Leo clearly remains strong.
Last year, Thomas came under fire over text messages revealing she pressured the Trump White House to challenge the 2020 election, a move that put renewed scrutiny on her husband, who had participated in cases related to the election. A day before the news broke, the Judicial Crisis Network, another part of Leo’s nonprofit constellation that is headed by Severino, launched a $1.5 million ad buy entitled “Misunderstood” that promoted Clarence Thomas and his judicial record.
Leo’s firm CRC Advisors has reportedly been the registered agent for several web domains related to ClarenceThomas and was responsible for promoting a PBS documentary on his life and audio and Kindle releases of his memoir.
In 2017, a conservative news site published remarks from what was supposed to be a private confab of conservative luminaries attending an awards ceremony honoring “heroes of liberty.” Ginni Thomas presented the newly created awards, including one to her one-time nonprofit business partner.
In introducing him, Thomas said Leo has “single-handedly changed the face of the judiciary,” and described him as a “disciplined strategist,” “wonderful father” and “mentor to me.”
Thomas also gave a nod to Leo’s role as a behind-the-scenes player.
“He has many hats,” she said. “That isn’t even all he does. He doesn’t really tell all that he does.”
Photo: YouTube screenshot
