Meet Leonard Leo: The capo behind the Supreme Court coup

With so much focus on the corruption of the Supreme Court lately, we thought our readers would like a little bit of background on just how this happened— and who’s driving it. Here’s our issue of the Hightower Lowdown on Leonard Leo, the man behind the curtain who you may have never heard of. — Ed.

With so much focus on the corruption of the Supreme Court lately, we thought our readers would like a little bit of background on just how this happened— and who’s driving it. Here’s our issue of the Hightower Lowdown on Leonard Leo, the man behind the curtain who you may have never heard of. — Ed.

It's generally assumed that autocrats are brutes who operate with no subtlety, seizing power through jackbooted actions, imperious edicts, media lockdowns, and such. Yes, many are brutes, but actually it's even more common for anti-democratic power grabbers to be well-heeled sophisticates who make their play not by violent raids, but by advancing on little cat feet, noiselessly closing in on an unsuspecting democratic public. In many countries today, for example, wannabe autocrats, plutocrats, and theocrats have hit on a surprising channel for achieving their despotic ambitions: Supreme Courts.

While these top judicial bodies purport to be bulwarks of justice, most are secretive, aloof chambers of absolute governmental authority run by a mere handful of unelected judges. Obscured from the public, media, and lawmakers, they are susceptible to capture by quick political strike or by patient, stealthy schemers. And the prize is worth the effort, for these high and mighty judges can both enact measures of autocratic control and apply a patina of legality to emerging autocracies. Put plainly: Own the judicial robe and you own the law.

No surprise, then, that Hungarian despot Viktor Orban moved quickly to remake his country's courts, which subsequently sanctioned a rigged election that cemented one-party rule and maintained the oxymoron he calls an "illiberal democracy." Or that Vladimir Putin recently used his control of Russia's Supreme Court to arbitrarily kill the nation's most important human rights organization. Thus, with one court ruling--POOF!--Putin disappeared a major political force opposing the fabrication that his regime is a continuum of Russian glory under strongman rule. Well, yes, you might think, that happens in Russia, China, Venezuela, and places like that ... but not here, where We the People are on-guard, and no one, not even a president, can pull off anything as huge--as seemingly impossible --as a Supreme Court coup.

You've probably never heard of Leonard Leo, but this obscure, far-right ideologue is a major capo in the tight little world of the anti-democracy extremists who hold an iron grip on today's Republican leadership. A lawyer, Leo is a fanatic devotee of the plutocratic fiction that our Constitution was intended not as a founding document for democracy, but as a legal structure for enshrining property rights as supreme over all others and protecting the wealthy from the democratic majority.

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