By admin 
- Share on Facebook
- Share on Twitter
- Share on Bluesky
- Comments
Last June, the Supreme Court gave a gift to the fossil fuel industry, whose proceeds have not only lined the pockets of some of the United States’ wealthiest men, but which those men have in turn invested in the creation of a right-wing Supreme Court. In Diamond Alternative Energy v. EPA, seven justices made it easier for the industry to sue the government over regulations it dislikes, granting polluters access to the courts that the justices have routinely denied to ordinary Americans.
Read more The Iran War Isn’t Ending Any Time Soon
In a dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson didn’t let the apparent bias go unnoted. “The Constitution does not distinguish between plaintiffs whose claims are backed by the Chamber of Commerce and those who seek to vindicate their rights,” Jackson . “But if someone reviewing our case law harbored doubts about that proposition, today’s decision will do little to dissuade them.”
The case was a sleepy one, obscured in the maelstrom of consequential end-of-term rulings. But the fossil fuel industry, the Chamber of Commerce, and dozens of ideological allies were well aware of the opportunity it presented. They had petitioned the court to take the case in an unusually high 13 amicus curiae, or friend of the court, briefs. Once the court accepted the case, the same slew of groups returned, filing new amicus briefs pushing the justices to bestow what amounted to a special privilege to a favored industry.
As Jackson warned, it’s hard to view it as a coincidence that a Supreme Court majority built on fossil fuel money went out of its way to help the industry. Indeed, the case is emblematic of a broader distortion of American law. Billionaires and the industries they run have a well-monied thumb on the scales of justice, an oligarchic influence operation that, among other tactics, funds a flood of amici to push the justices toward a preferred outcome.
The number of these briefs has dramatically in recent years and now routinely tops 800 per term—an eightfold increase since the 1950s and about double the number from 1995. This uptick has also coincided with the court reducing its docket by about 35 percent since 1995. While the briefs, which present arguments from interested parties other than the litigants, are inherently something of a sideshow, academic researchers have found that the justices have been citing them more frequently and, according to plagiarism detection software, sometimes lift significant sentences, phrases, and ideas from amicus briefs without citation.
The amount spent on the briefs is likewise reaching new heights. To get a sense of that figure, True North Research, a progressive court watchdog, assembled IRS and FEC data on amicus filers in 25 major cases since 2022, including two consolidated cases. After vetting and supplementing their data, our analysis shows that a small number of conservative billionaires and funding networks have funneled $1.3 billion to 111 groups that filed 626 amicus briefs in just these cases. Not all that money funds legal budgets or those briefs, and some groups file many more than others. In that sense, our research captures the larger outflow of money from this small, ultra-wealthy cadre to the conservative legal ecosystem. However, the volume of amicus briefs filed by these groups demonstrates the Supreme Court’s central role in this movement. Our survey—which covers just a set of cases, counts only donations visible through public filings, and excludes the large and growing quantities filtered through certain dark money vehicles—is intrinsically a low-range estimate of the money that right-wing billionaires have spent to reshape the law to serve their ideological agenda and bottom lines.
“This is about really, really wealthy people who have very strong preferences for the direction of American law, and they don’t want to be out in the sunshine. They want to avoid any type of transparency,” says Paul Collins, a University of Massachusetts Amherst political scientist who studies the conservative legal movement. “It’s a multifaceted strategy,” he explains, with “the amicus curiae part of it as just a cog in a much larger machine.”
The amicus influence apparatus can be seen as a later phase of a decades-long, billionaire-funded operation to take control of the Supreme Court. It dates back to the George W. Bush administration, when, in late 2004, Federalist Society executive Leonard Leo convened a dinner in Washington, DC, whose guests included mortgage mogul Robin Arkley II and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Bush had just won his second term, and the goal of the meeting was to ensure he would be able to fill high court vacancies. At the restaurant, Leo seated Arkley next to Scalia—a taste of the access and influence the tycoon could have if he helped fund an effort to put more conservatives on the court.
Leo is a singular figure in American legal history; a friend to judges, billionaires, and corporations, with power and influence to pick Supreme Court justices and change the law through his extensive and well-financed right-wing network. The dinner sparked the creation of two groups that would spend millions to boost Bush’s nominees and later oppose President Barack Obama’s: the Judicial Confirmation Network and Judicial Education Project. They remain part of Leo’s now-expansive operation to install hardcore conservatives at every level of the state and federal courts, all funded by the deep pockets of America’s wealthiest tycoons. At the Supreme Court, Leo fought for justices who would shift the law in favor of business and the wealthy, overturn Roe v. Wade, and push conservative Christian values on all Americans. He was instrumental in orchestrating the confirmations of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito in 2005 and 2006, using JCN, which he had just helped establish with Arkley’s money.
During his first term, President Donald Trump brought Leo out from behind the curtain, entrusting him with drafting a list from which he would pick Supreme Court justices. And so we got Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. Since Leo had also helped secure Justice Clarence Thomas’ 1991 confirmation, it’s safe to say that Leo has played a key role in creating the court’s Republican-appointed majority—the six justices who ended the right to abortion, gave Trump criminal immunity, destroyed the Voting Rights Act, and allowed nearly two dozen illegal policies to move forward in Trump’s first year back in office.
The relationship among Leo, wealthy funders, and their favorite justices remained cozy, as reporting by ProPublica and others began to detail in 2023. Arkley hosted Alito at his luxury Alaskan lodge in 2008, and the justice flew there on a private jet provided by hedge fund billionaire and Republican megadonor Paul Singer. Three years earlier, Arkley had spirited Scalia to Alaska for a fishing retreat. Thomas used his connections to billionaires, including Harlan Crow, to pay for fancy vacations, his mother’s home, his great-nephew’s tuition, and films and monuments depicting his greatness. To memorialize the crew, Crow commissioned an oil painting that showed him sharing cigars with Leo and Thomas. Leo has also funneled money to Thomas’ wife. And he’s worked closely with the billionaire Koch brothers, even arranging for Scalia and Thomas to attend Koch donor network retreats. At a 2018 Federalist Society event, Thomas cracked himself up when he referred to Leo, who was also on stage, as the “No. 3 most powerful person in the world.” He probably wasn’t joking.
Leo’s campaign to shape the law didn’t stop at picking justices or showering them with luxury perks. Back in the 1990s, Leo had learned that even Republican appointees could fail to follow through on long-term conservative goals after joining the bench, including ending the right to abortion—Justice David Souter proved a particular disappointment—and decided it was pivotal to maintain a full court press. Leo was not the only conservative to reach that conclusion: The Rev. Rob Schenck, a former evangelical activist, has described crafting what he called a “Ministry of Emboldenment,” which included surrounding the justices with wealthy donors who wanted the court to overturn Roe, so that, suffused with encouragement, they would not balk.
“One wonders to some extent if those luxury vacations that Justices Alito and Thomas have been at the receiving end of would be as frequent if they weren’t such consistent conservatives,” Collins says. “When justices go to the Federalist Society galas, they’re treated like movie stars…It does perform that reinforcing factor.”
The flood of amicus briefs to the court can serve a similar purpose: They buoy the justices’ proclivities in an overwhelming sea of agreement—thanks, in large part, to Leo’s funding of an army of groups that file them. In 2020, Leo renamed the two organizations he had begun after that 2004 dinner. One became the Concord Fund, under the direction of his close ally Carrie Severino, a former Thomas clerk. The other became the 85 Fund. And whilethe news wouldn’t become public for another two years, at the same time, Leo was in the process of receiving possibly the largest political donation in American history: $1.6 billion from Barre Seid, a Chicago electronics manufacturer. The money went into a mysterious Leo entity called the Marble Freedom Trust, whose payments to the Concord Fund and 85 Fund were routinely first filtered through other dark money accounts.
Between 2017 and 2024, these and other Leo-tied funding vehicles dispersed $69 million to 36 groups filing amicus briefs in the cases examined by True North Research. Billionaire Charles Koch’s network, which Leo has long tapped, sent more than $1 billion to at least 61 amicus filers in those cases over the same period. (These numbers include donations that are visible on the funders’ IRS 990 filings; they do not account for the untold amount sent in dark money, but more on that later.) The briefs help manufacture the appearance of an outpouring of support for transforming the law.
All but one of the funders declined to comment on their financial backing of groups that file amicus briefs. “The Supreme Court’s decisions address critical questions,” wrote a spokesperson for Stand Together, a Koch-affiliated group. “It is a routine and well-established part of our federal legal system for organizations concerned with these issues to participate as amici before the Court. These briefs are publicly filed and their arguments available for review by anyone. Americans for Prosperity Foundation and Stand Together partners often join organizations across the ideological spectrum in advocating for free speech, separation of powers, protections for the criminally accused, and other issues. Any suggestion that participation in the amicus process is unique to a particular set of organizations or limited only to advancing the views of a specific political party is simply false.”
Critics say the conservative legal movement wields its well-funded amicus machine as part of a broader strategy that’s winning right-wing policy goals. “You had this concerted effort to get these judges confirmed to reverse the law, to change the law,” says Lisa Graves, executive director of True North Research. “And then you have these groups come in as the chorus, saying, ‘Yeah, change the law.’” (Graves is on the board of the Park Foundation, which has supported Mother Jones.)
“It’s an echo chamber within the court process where they’re throwing their voice through multiple groups. They are having a disproportionate impact,” Graves says. “Given the vast expansion of wealth disparity in recent years, it’s pennies on the dollar for them to have that kind of influence.”
Leo and Koch aren’t the only power brokers spending money to influence the justices. Billionaires Richard Uihlein and Jeffrey Yass, both major Republican donors, spent nearly $82 million and $26 million, respectively, through their own funding networks on groups filing amicus briefs in the 25 surveyed cases. (Again, these totals do not account for the millions flowing through dark money vehicles.) The Wisconsin-based Bradley Foundation, a major funder of far-right and anti-union activity, has poured $75.6 million into 62 groups.
The Leo, Koch, Uihlein, Yass, and Bradley Foundation funding networks combined to give $1.3 billion to the 111 groups filing amicus briefs on the conservative side in the sampled cases. That eye-popping number includes approximately $818 million in donations to Americans for Prosperity Foundation (AFPF), the centerpiece of Koch’s right-wing funding network, with the money coming largely from other Koch-affiliated groups. AFPF filed 10 briefs in the 25 sampled cases. That left half a billion dollars divided among the other 110 groups. Thirty-five groups filed six or more briefs and received a total of $136 million. A few of the largest recipients are conservative Catholic colleges and universities, including the Catholic University of America and the University of Notre Dame.
In recent years, the Roberts court has handed major victories to this well-heeled coalition. For the religious right—a major source of money for these amicus filers—the court has ended the right to abortion, allowed prayer and religious influence in public schools, permitted businesses to discriminate against LGBTQ people, brought back conversion therapy, and let states ban medical care for transgender minors. For corporations and the rich, the court has transformed the judiciary into an escape hatch from government oversight, empowering businesses to sue federal agencies and authorizing judges to strike down more regulations. At the same time, the court has repeatedly chipped away at the power of labor unions. It has also done the Republican Party many favors, inventing legal doctrines to knock down Democratic priorities, attacking the electoral power of Democratic voters, blessing extreme partisan and racial gerrymandering, and bailing Trump out of a criminal trial for his attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
The Supreme Court is not an innocent target of the billionaires’ influence operation; it loaded the gun. In 2010, the justices lifted spending limits on corporations seeking to influence elections, as long as they weren’t donating directly to a political party or candidate. Thus began our modern era of billion-dollar elections paid for by super PACs and shady nonprofits, bankrolled by billionaires like Koch and now-trillionaire Elon Musk. The court’s infamous Citizens United v. FEC decision led to unlimited donations to groups that purport to act independently of a candidate or party.The shift has been dramatic: According to the New York Times, in 2008, political donations from billionaires made up just 0.3 percent of all election contributions. In 2024, the figure was 19 percent, surpassing $3 billion.
The five justices who signed onto Citizens United rested this new era of massive political spending on two thin reeds of logic. First, they insisted it would not lead to quid pro quo corruption because the money would go to outside groups, not campaigns. Second, they argued any corrupting influence would be kept at bay because all the new spending would be subject to disclosure.
Both promises proved fanciful. Politicians are happy to reward super PACs’ donations with policies their patrons want, even if the money didn’t directly go into the lawmaker’s own campaign account. Musk’s $290 million contribution to Trump’s reelection by way of a super PAC was rewarded with a four-month White House perch from which he destroyed multiple federal agencies. (This term, the court is considering whether to allow more coordination between candidates and political parties, which would signal that the court itself no longer cares about the arms-length construct key to its Citizens United logic.)
Transparency was likewise fleeting. Political donors quickly began funneling cash through nonprofits that hid their identities, leaving American governance to be increasingly shaped by unknown spending. “Since Citizens United, we’ve seen so much money flow into politics,” says Michael Beckel, who researches political spending for Issue One, a nonpartisan group pushing pro-democracy reforms. “People figured out that you could put money into ostensibly charitable giving vehicles…and your name is never going to be attached to that contribution.”
Read more Elon Musk: The World’s Worst Trillionaire
The justices themselves have made an about-face on transparency. Whereas in Citizens United, they found that the First Amendment demanded limitless, but not anonymous, spending, in 2021’s Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta, the justices a plea for donor privacy from the behemoth Koch group—propped up by dozens of amicus briefs submitted by other Koch-funded groups. In ruling that the First Amendment may actually protect anonymous giving, Chief Justice John Robertsturned donor and membership privacy from a long-held exception to the new default.
“In deciding nonprofit donors’ alleged right to anonymity, the Court would directly impact the ability of dark-money donors to continue shaping judicial outcomes,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.)—the most prominent critic of what he’s called the right’s “flotillas of amicus briefs”—wrote in a Yale Law Journal essay in 2021. “The size of the AFPF flotilla also functioned as a signaling device: it told the ideologically aligned members of the Court that a ‘correct’ outcome in this case was more urgent than it might otherwise have seemed.”
When Roberts ruled for the foundation’s donors’ right to anonymity, he was protecting influence operations targeted at his own court. The same charity vehicles that allowed wealthy donors to scrub their fingerprints from political spending, including donor-advised funds (DAFs), now sustain the right’s amicus machine.
How the Money Moves
Explore the opaque right-wing funding networks that backed amicus briefs submitted in 25 Supreme Court cases.
Political funders on both the left and right place money in DAFs, which then dispense it, hiding the donor’s identity. “Donor-advised funds are absolutely black holes of money,” Beckel says. Leo and other conservative billionaires move money through explicitly conservative DAFs, including DonorsTrust, the National Christian Charitable Foundation, and the Bradley Impact Fund, as well as those administered by major financial institutions, including Charles Schwab and Fidelity. Their grants to groups filing amicus briefs have skyrocketed over the last five years. When we calculated the amount of money flowing from these DAFs to the amicus filers urging the conservative position in these 25 cases, the number we got was almost too high to take seriously; at nearly $3 billion, the figure certainly captured the larger spending on the conservative movement flowing from this small number of billionaires. It also likely captured some money that would be cycled back into DAFs before reaching its final destination, possibly leading to some double counting. To get a sense of the money flowing from DAFs to the groups frequently petitioning the court, we narrowed the donations to groups that had filed at least eight briefs in the 25 cases. Between 2017 and 2024, these 23 groups received $180 million.
The biggest receiver of DAF money, with $601 million, was the 85 Fund and the Honest Elections Project, Leo-controlled groups that filed just two briefs, but likely cycles some of that money to other conservative groups, possibly through more DAFs, including several groups that are frequent filers. A half a billion in DAF money went to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. While that almost certainly captures a swath of donations beyond legal activities, the Mormon Church did file amicus briefs in five cases we sampled. Some of the most frequent filers receive significant donations from DAFs and little or no traceable donations from major conservative funding networks. America First Legal Foundation, the Stephen Miller–created group, has taken in $57 million in dark money, routed through the Bradley Impact Fund and DonorsTrust, but no traceable donations from any of these funders. The Family Policy Alliance, which filed 10 briefs in the examined cases, and affiliates have taken in $14 million from DAFs. The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, Thomas More Society, Christian Legal Society, Liberty Counsel, and American Center for Law & Justice—all conservative Christian groups—contributed 45 briefs in the cases and took in nearly all their donations from these networks, $30 million that we tracked, through DAFs.
Two years ago, the Supreme Court decided a major case for the tycoons who sit atop American industry. In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the justices reversed a long-standing legal doctrine known as Chevron deference, whereby courts deferred to federal agency decisions in disputes in which the statutory text is ambiguous. The court’s 6–3 majority ditched the doctrine, declaring open season on federal regulations that businesses don’t like, a gift of incalculable savings to the billionaires who supported the bloc’s rise and embellished the lifestyles of a core of its members. The court received 59 amicus briefs urging the court to end deference to agencies in Loper Bright and a consolidated case decided alongside it. More than half—34—were signed by groups that have benefited from Leo, Koch, Yass, Uihlein, and the Bradley Foundation. The 34 briefs were double the number—17—filed by groups that don’t appear to be directly funded by these networks. The effect is an overwhelming show of support for a significant change in the law that is quietly funded, at least in part, by a small number of the superrich who will benefit from their newfound ability to roll back regulation. They will certainly benefit more than the amount they have given the groups behind these briefs since 2017: $196 million. This does not include hundreds of millions more to these and other groups from DAFs with connections to these funders.
Just three days later, the justices gave industry another big gift: Having made it easier for judges to knock down regulations, the court then shredded the statute of limitations for suing to overturn a regulation. Suddenly, regulations on the books for decades could be challenged. The groups that filed seven amicus briefs in this case, Corner Post v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, received $939 million from the conservative court megafunders, a towering number related to Koch’s Americans for Prosperity Foundation’s presence on the docket. The next year, the court took cases that again made it easier for corporations to get through the courthouse door to challenge regulations, which it did in both the Diamond Alternative Energy fossil fuel case and another in which the justices came to the aid of a tobacco industry challenge to the FDA.
Big business isn’t the only big winner at the court. These billionaire amicus funders are dedicated to taking away rights from women and disfavored minorities. In 2023, for example, the Alliance Defending Freedom, a far-right Christian legal group, represented a web designer who didn’t want to make wedding sites for same-sex couples. ADF, which received $105 million from the DAFs we tracked between 2017 and 2024 and another $1.7 million in Koch funding, spent years looking for a case to weaken public accommodation laws and allow businesses to discriminate. It finally hit the jackpot with the 6–3 majority Trump helped engineer in his first term with the case 303 Creative v. Elenis.
A whopping 58 amicus briefs were filed at the Supreme Court in support of ADF. According to True North Research’s data, more than a third of the briefs from groups in support of ADF came from groups that had received funding from the constellation of Leo, Koch, Yass, Uihlein, and the Bradley Foundation. The total amount those funders gave to the groups behind those briefs in the six years leading up to the case was nearly half a billion dollars. Just one year later, that number would reach nearly $714 million. This number, again, reflects the Koch network’s massive funding of Americans for Prosperity Foundation.
The year before, ADF had orchestrated the litigation that would finally overturn Roe v. Wade. Sixty-one briefs from groups urged the court to end the constitutional right to abortion; a third were signed by groups that had taken in $23 million in the preceding five years from the conservative funding networks. When the court ended affirmative action in higher education in 2023, the groups pushing that result through amici had received more than $44 million through 2022. The groups that won the fight to end medical care for transgender minors in 2025 got over $47.5 million. The groups pushing to end the Voting Rights Act this term took in $17.8 million.
In 2016, law professors Allison Orr Larsen and Neal Devins published “The Amicus Machine,” a paper detailing how the briefs are coordinated by elite lawyers who regularly practice at the high court. Counsel in Supreme Court cases, they found, often employ an amicus “wrangler” to find and coordinate groups and individuals to file, and an amicus “whisperer” to help shape the briefs’ arguments. Even at the time of the now-decade-old study, they found that amicus briefs were growing in number and influence. This wasn’t necessarily bad, the authors concluded; if the court was going to rely on amicus briefs, perhaps lawyers whose careers relied on good relations with the justices would responsibly shepherd the process.
But top litigators weren’t the only ones coordinating amicus briefs. In late 2014, a staffer at the Bradley Foundation reached out to Leo, according to emails that were later hacked and leaked, to ask whether there were any tax-exempt groups Bradley could route funds to in “support of two Supreme Court amicusprojects.” Leo responded that an amicus brief written by a top lawyer would cost $250,000 and that the money could be sent to one of his groups. Bradley ended up sending $150,000.
When Collins, the UMass political scientist, first heard about an amicus machine, “I thought we were sort of in conspiracy theory land,” he said. “I couldn’t really envision a world where hundreds of millions of dollars would be spent on these lobbying efforts. It just didn’t seem like it would be worth it to me. But then I started to see the evidence.”
“A lot of people who are critics of my own work say these briefs don’t matter,” says Larsen, a professor at William & Mary Law School. “But the justices are using them, and the money is paying for them.” That’s all the proof you need.