Leftist Pro-Court Packing Group Pushing Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson for SCOTUS Got Soros Money

Joseph Vazquez
March 23rd, 2022 4:29 PM
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A leftist dark money group funded by liberal billionaire George Soros is closely connected to efforts to push for confirmation of President Joe Biden’s Supreme Court nominee.

Demand Justice, which has advocated for radical left-wing reforms like packing the Court, has aggressively pushed for the nomination of District of Columbia Circuit Court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson for at least around two years. Demand Justice’s shortlist for Court nominees includes Jackson. The group even included her on a shortlist as far back as September 2020. Soros gave at least $1,337,000 and possibly as much as $3,837,000 to Demand Justice between 2018 and 2020, according to Open Society Foundations and Open Society Policy Center records respectively. 

Demand Justice is notorious for advancing extremism, from packing the Court, attacking conservative justices and fighting to preserve the constitutionally dubious pro-abortion ruling of Roe v. Wade (1973). The group even railed in 2021 that packing the Court would be a necessary measure to continue the government-sanctioned killing of unborn children: “Anyone who cares about the bodily autonomy of pregnant people in the country – and about the legitimacy of our judiciary – must support Supreme Court expansion.” 

But perhaps as concerning: White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki served as a Demand Justice senior advisor prior to her appointment to the Biden administration. In addition, Senior Counsel to the President Paige Herwig also previously served as deputy chief counsel for Demand Justice. The group is “slated to lead the fight on the left” to secure Jackson’s confirmation, according to Axios. 

Demand Justice announced it was launching a $1 million ad campaign to support Jackson’s nomination and is reportedly “prepared to spend much more.” This is par for the course. The group reportedly pledged to spend $5 million to fight Justice Brett Kavanaugh and $10 million to fight Justice Amy Coney Barrett during their respective nominations in 2018 and 2020. The fact that senior staff from the radical Demand Justice now serve in top-tier positions in the Biden administration reveals a key reality. It underscores the significant influence the group wields on Biden’s choice to nominate what former clerk for late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia Ed Whelan referred to as the “apparent favorite” of Demand Justice to sit on the high court. As Americans for Public Trust Executive Director Caitlin Sutherland reportedly said of Herwig’s White House position in 2021: Demand Justice now has “an insider in the White House to help usher these judicial nominations through that fit Demand Justice’s criteria.” The group tweeted in March 2021 that Americans should “Learn her name. You're going to be saying it a lot. Ketanji Brown Jackson is just getting warmed up.”

Soros’s Open Society Policy Center (OSPC) directly funded Demand Justice to the tune of $1,337,000 between 2018 and 2020 through the left-wing dark money group Sixteen Thirty Fund, according to Open Society Foundations records. In addition, OSPC records suggest that it may have given another $2.5 million to Demand Justice through the fund between April 1, 2018 and June 30, 2018. The billionaire also spent at least “$29 million in funding” through his “personal network of political action committees (PACs)” to help elect at least 23 leftist district attorneys spread throughout the country. Jackson’s confirmation to SCOTUS would fit right in line with the overarching leftist goals of Demand Justice and Soros.

Demand Justice’s actions to reshape the Court into a pro-abortion bulwark and its connections to Soros have gone largely ignored by the liberal media. A Nexis search revealed that the group’s involvement in Jackson’s nomination received no coverage by the ABC, CBS and NBC broadcast networks from her Feb. 25 nomination to March 20. 

Demand Justice is extremely leftist. The organization’s “‘charitable’ arm” Demand Justice Initiative supported the pro-abortion extremist “Rise Up for Roe Tour” in 2018 with leftist NARAL Pro-Choice America and the radical Planned Parenthood Action Fund. 

In a press release headlined “Badass Feminist Leaders And Activists Across The Country Rise Up For Roe! Through National Tour,” Demand Justice celebrated: “Handmaids, Celebrities, Senators, feminist thought leaders and thousands of women Rise Up For Roe through 10-City, 14-Day national tour to call out Brett Kavanaugh’s threat to abortion rights.” In addition, the group fawned how “the more than 200 events in all 50 states made this day the largest single day of protest against a Supreme Court nominee in history.” [Emphasis added.]

Demand Justice’s support for Jackson coincides perfectly with Jackson’s history on abortion-related cases. Jackson was the “lead attorney” for one of abortion advocacy group NARAL’s “state chapter[s] and a consortium of other self-styled women’s and reproductive health groups filing a friend-of-the-court brief in favor of a Massachusetts state law” against pro-life protestors, according to a Washington Examiner analysis. “The law prohibited anti-abortion protesters, but not pro-abortion counselors, from coming within six feet of someone near an abortion clinic ‘for the purpose of passing a leaflet or handbill to … or engaging in oral protest, education, or counseling’ — presumably to dissuade that person from securing an abortion.”

Demand Justice started in 2018 as a project of the Sixteen Thirty Fund. The fund dumped a whopping $410 million into unseating former President Donald Trump and winning the Senate for Democrats in 2020. Sixteen Thirty Fund “financed attack ads against Trump and vulnerable Republican senators and funded massive get-out-the-vote and issue advocacy campaigns amid the coronavirus pandemic,” according to a tax filing obtained by Politico. Soros also funded the Sixteen Thirty Fund with $33,523,483 between 2016 and 2020, revealing the depth of Soros’s connection to Demand Justice efforts to influence the fabric of the American judiciary system.

The Sixteen Thirty Fund is “part of a massive dark money network managed by D.C.-based consulting firm Arabella Advisors, which was founded by Eric Kesser, a former Bill Clinton appointee and member of the Clinton Global Initiative,” according to Fox News. “In 2019, Arabella was paid nearly $34 million for administrative, operations and management services to manage the four funds in Arabella’s vast dark money network.”

Demand Justice announced it was going to be formally separating from the Sixteen Thirty Fund to become its own entity in May 2021. 

Demand Justice was involved in a campaign to pressure Justice Stephen Breyer to retire. “On a book tour last fall, he promoted his belief that politics should not intervene with the judiciary,” The Washington Post reported. “During one stop in early October, held at the Smithsonian in Washington, Demand Justice organized a small group of hecklers to disrupt the event and hold signs calling on him to retire.” 

Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts said in a press release on Jackson’s nomination that she was “the most radical judge ever nominated for a seat on the Supreme Court,” adding: “Her limited judicial record reveals that Jackson has consistently ignored the Constitution, twisting the law to favor certain outcomes.”

The fact that Demand Justice is directly financed by Soros is also telling, since the billionaire waged his own campaign to elect radical district attorneys across the country to reshape U.S. law into a leftist manifesto. 

If that’s not bad enough, one of Demand Justice’s reported board members as recently recorded attacking the U.S. constitution as garbage.

Reported Demand Justice board member Elie Mystal recently made headlines for excoriating the American constitution as a relic of racism on ABC’s The View. “It’s certainly not sacred. Let’s start there. The Constitution is kind of trash,” Mystal griped. “It was written by slavers and colonists and white people who were willing to make deals with slavers and colonists.” Demand Justice Executive Director Brian Fallon, who is also a CNN and MSNBC contributor and former Hillary Clinton campaign spokesman, appeared to cheer Mystal’s comments, tweeting: “Give Elie a show.” The group reportedly did not respond to either The Daily Caller's or The Daily Wire’s requests for comment on whether Mystal’s views on the constitution represent the views of the organization.

 

Mystal has advocated for court packing. As he stated during a December 2018 Demand Justice event following the confirmations of Justice Neil Gorsuch in 2017 and Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018, “The reason why we need to think about having more than nine justices is because we only have seven legitimate justices on the Supreme Court as it stands.”

Reported Demand Justice member Mystal went on the March 19 edition of MSNBC’s The Cross Connection to bash Hawley as “trying to get [Jackson] killed. He is trying to get violence done against a Supreme Court nominee.” 

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) recently slammed Jackson for “‘letting child porn offenders off the hook.’” Legacy media fact-checkers attacked Hawley for his claims. But a hack opinion piece by leftist Vox correspondent Ian Millhiser, admitted, perhaps unintentionally, that Hawley was correct in one sense. Millhiser suggested in Jackson’s defense that the issue of judicial experts being soft on “child pornography offenders” is more widespread. Looks like Millhiser said the quiet part out loud.

Demand Justice apparently wields so much pull that members in Congress are now reportedly trying to distance themselves from the group altogether. Politico reported that “Democrats are distancing themselves from a prominent outside group backing Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson.” [Emphasis added.]

Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), in particular, reportedly downplayed his ties to the group in a statement to Politico. “I honestly don’t know that much about them,” Politico quoted the senator as saying. “If you pick the ACLU, or the [Center for American Progress] those are groups that we’ve worked with.” But Booker’s history contradicts his statements. Demand Justice posted a video in 2018 of an event it led alongside the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Both Booker and then-Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) were featured as key speakers at the event to rail against former Trump judicial nominee Thomas Farr with a large “Demand Justice” banner standing behind them.

Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) Speech at 2018 Demand Justice Event Attacking Trump’s Judicial Nominee Thomas Farr (689 seconds)

Former Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) Speech at Demand Justice Event Attacking Trump’s Judicial Nominee Thomas Farr (361 seconds):

Demand Justice Fights to Turn SCOTUS into a Left-Wing Political Machine

Demand Justice head Fallon called Jackson a “slam-dunk pick.” Jackson’s nomination and the group’s vigilance fit right along with the Soros leftist agenda to transform the American  justice  system. 

Demand Justice joined seven other groups in 2020 to form a left-wing coalition called “Unrig the Courts” to galvanize progressives to support packing the Supreme Court:

In order to undo the damage that Republicans have done — from stealing a Supreme Court seat in 2016, to confirming a credibly accused sexual assailant, to ramming through Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s replacement just eight days before the end of the ongoing presidential election — progressives must get serious about expanding the number of seats on the high court.

Demand Justice tweeted an ad promoting packing SCOTUS and attacking the conservative majority just a day before the Nov. 3, 2020, elections. The ad said “[w]e need to add seats to un-rig the illegitimate majority on the court.” The ad even accused: “[W]ould [the conservative majority] be prepared to help Republicans steal elections given the chance? They already have.”

“[T]oday there is … huge news to celebrate,” Psaki, a former Demand Justice advisor, tweeted Feb. 25. “We can't wait to see you on the Supreme Court--Judge Kentaji Brown Jackson.” Government oversight group Americans for Public Trust (APT) noted in an April 2021 Twitter thread that Biden made Herwig his “point-person on judicial nominations.” It gets worse: “Then, without warning, the Biden Admin told the American Bar Association that it will not allow the ABA to have [a] hand in vetting potential judicial nomination. Herwig remarked this would allow the White House to ‘have a freer hand to consider a wide range of nominees.’”

Here was another eye-opening part of APT’s thread: 

[U]nder the direction of Page Herwig, the Biden Administration announced their first slate of judicial nominations. All with a Demand Justice seal of approval, saying: The nominees are ‘exactly the kind of judges we need to rebalance our courts.’

Jackson was listed first in the original Biden administration lineup of judicial nominees when she was considered for the judgeship at the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals, for which she would later be confirmed.

Demand Justice Received Soros Cash While It Targeted Kavanaugh and Barrett Nominations

Demand Justice aggressively fought against Trump nominees Kavanaugh and Justice Amy Coney Barrett as it received Soros money between 2018 and 2020. Politico reported in 2018 that Demand Justice “projected a video of Christine Blasey Ford accusing Kavanaugh of assault on the side of a truck outside a Washington gala where Kavanaugh was speaking.” In a press release on its public relations attack on Kavanaugh, Deputy Chief Counsel Katie O’Connor called Kavanaugh a “‘credibly accused sexual predator.’” Politico noted that “Demand Justice spent millions of dollars on TV ads as Democrats tried to prevent Kavanaugh from being confirmed to the Supreme Court in 2018.” 

A 26-page May 2019 Demand Justice document headlined, “The Case for a Kavanaugh Investigation,” demanded Congress launch a full-scale investigation into the dubious “sexual assault allegations” hurled at Kavanaugh during his tumultuous confirmation process. The Demand Justice document called the FBI investigation of Kavanaugh, which failed to corroborate “sexual assault” allegations against him, a “[s]ham.” The document’s full premise surfaced in the first paragraph, decrying Kavanaugh’s “deep-seated hostility toward Roe.” The wording might suggest that liberals’ political concerns about Kavanaugh’s position on the Roe v. Wade (1973) SCOTUS ruling motivated the group to call for the probe. 

Demand Justice also launched a seven-figure ad buy in October 2020 in an attempt to slam Barrett’s nomination. One ad painted Barrett as a “threat” to in vitro fertilization. Fallon even reportedly threatened to “ensure Republicans pay a price if they move forward with this nomination before the election, not just this cycle but in the years to come.”

 

Following Barrett’s confirmation to SCOTUS, Demand Justice tweeted that it was “outraged” at the action and used the event as a pivot point for an anti-Trump propaganda ad calling for expanding the Court. Demand Justice railed that the “illegitimate far-right majority” on SCOTUS was appointed through “hyper-partisan political schemes.” Demand Justice’s pontificating is hypocritical given its ties to a notorious left-wing billionaire trying to turn the American justice system into a hub for left-wing activism.

MRC Business reached out to Open Society Foundations three times and Demand Justice for comment about Soros’s funding, but received no response as of the publication of this article.

Conservatives are under attack. Contact your congressional lawmakers and demand they call out Demand Justice’s involvement in Jackson’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court.

 

 

 

 

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