Welcome back to Drill. I'm Amy Westerveldt. In our last episode, we mentioned the appearance of the Republican Attorneys General Association or RAGA in the big US youth climate case Juliana versus United States. Today, I want to dig into that organization a bit more and some other organizations that like to party with it, with one of the foremost experts on this topic, Lisa Graves.
My name is Lisa Graves, and I'm the executive director of True North Research, which is a watchdog group that focuses on corporate distortion of American democracy, and I previously led the Center for Media Democracy.
I'm still the president of the board over there.
And I've previously been Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Policy at the US Department of Justice, and the Chief Counsel Denominations for the US Senate Judiciary Committee, the Chief of the Article three Division of the US Courts, the Admistry off the US Courts, and I was the senior legislative strategist for the ACLU on national security issues.
So I am a researcher and a writer and someone who has looked deeply into some of these front groups or right wing groups that have been advancing pretty extreme agenda in a lot of different ways, both federally and in the States.
Lisa connects the dots on a right wing extremism and climate better than pretty much anyone I've ever talked to, So I'm really excited to bring you this interview today. I talked to Lisa last year in the process of working on the second season of the show This Land, which I highly recommend you check out if you haven't already.
It follows a series of constitutional challenges to the Indian Child Welfare Act, which has some surprising backers, and yeah, there is an oil and gas connection at any rate. Lisa has spent a lot of time looking at some of the specific lawyers and right wing fi involved in that, many of whom are the very same folks fighting against
climate action. That includes not just RAGA, but also the various Coke funded organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute and the Goldwater Institute, as well as a lesser known but equally powerful family foundation, the Bradley Foundation. It's a lot to unpack, and Lisa blew my mind in ways that I'm still thinking about a year later.
That conversation is coming up right after this quick break, So I'm curious to hear a little bit about your work on Goldwater in particular and what their big kind of driving force has seemed to be in recent years.
I had done a significant report about the Goldwater Institute in two thousand and thirty team to examine its activities, its funding, its influence on Arizona law, how it was able to use Arizona's weak laws on lobby disclosure to have an enormous effect on the legislature that was not entirely visible to ordinary people, in how it was advancing
Charles Cooke's agenda. Charles Cooke in many ways has used ALEC to operationalize his ideas at the state level, and Goldwater work to advance those ideas in the state legislature to push those proposals in addition to expand with litigation operations under Bullock, who's obviously now on the state Supreme Court.
That would be Clint Bullock. He's in Arizona Supreme Court justice today, but he built his reputation for decades as a public interest litigator for various conservative causes, particularly against affirmative action and for school choice.
So I've looked at them and I think it's it's interesting because there appears to be a confluence of interests.
Lisa said she saw this confluence of interest in the Indian Child Welfare Act cases that Goldwater started to bring beginning in twenty fifteen. Again, go and listen to this land for that whole wild story. But to sum it up, the primary argument being used in those cases is that the definition of Indian is race based and therefore violates
the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. That sort of argument has been a key part of the quote unquote reverse discrimination argument for conservative lawyers arguing against various civil rights laws for decades, and Clint Bullock, an early acolyte of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, has been pushing that argument for decades.
There is this component, obviously on the surface of the cases is involving claims about protection or about race specific remedies, and obviously Clarence Thomas, you know, has made assertions about that in his opinions related to this area of the law.
But I think it's about more than race. I think it's about possibly reshaping the law surrounding the relationship between the United States and tribes and sort of using this particular law as a way to perhaps change dramatically other laws that may well be implicated, and the ones that are most concerned to me of those other legal areas are, you know, the relationship between the federal government and the tribes and sovereignty issues involving oil and leasing and that
sort of thing. I just wonder, although I don't know, but I wonder whether, given some of the players, there is ultimately an oil, oil and gas angle here.
That's something that we've been looking at to The first Attorney general to sign on was in Texas, and the Texas AG's office has been very friendly to oil and gas for a long time. And then you know the fact that Gibson Doune is involved too, and the Koch brothers kind of tangentially, it seems like there's this financial motive from the oil and gas folks that dovetails with some like weird racial ideology.
So you have this Attorney general in a state that is, you know, particularly friendly and warm to coke and to the other oil and refinery industries, and it has very very few tribal holdings in the state. But Also it's the case that you know, something has happened over the last twenty years, and I had looked at this back
when I was working on the Senate Judiciary Committee. In terms of this the rise of RAGA, the Republican Attorney's General Association, where we know that it's a pay to play operation, we know that it has had enormously distorting effect on US law. It provides a mechanism for corporations to pass money through to help attorneys general in ways that they would not be able to individually solicit for their own campaigns given their role, their regulatory role over
those very industries. And that's been going on since RAGA was created back more than twenty years ago now, and it has accelerated under some of the attorneys general who have led it, like Scott Crewe was who was, you know, in my view, another corrupt individual, someone who was selaxed on ethical rules to say the least, and who was willing to do the bidding of the oil industry and attacking climate legislation and climate rules, even the very modest
cpp the Clean Power Plan rules to advance the of the funders of RAGA. And I say that knowing that Oklahoma obviously has you know, a huge amount of industry involved or you know, has has long relationships with these The oil industry even has an oil you know, a replica I think of a of an oil well on the Capitol grounds, and so I know that it's it's
a part of that state's history. But we do know that RAGA is a pay to play operation these Republican Attorneys General behave in general, they are operating most often we've seen at the behest of the industries that they're soliciting funds for to fund RAGA.
That's interesting Beyond RAGA.
Is funding the corporate funders of RAGA, we know that it now is receiving a substantial amount of money from one of the emerging big dark money operations, which is Leonard Leo's operation, which was funded through a group that's now defunct that has subsequently you know, basically been re ran and are renamed as Leo has re launched his operations after it was exposed by The Washington Post last year.
So RAGA now is not just a recipient of donations from big oil and big huge corporations, but it's also a major recipient of funds in which the source is completely unknown to anyone other than the person raising the money, Leonard Leo and his group of operatives.
That would be former head of the Federalist Society Leonard Leo. The Federalist Society is credited with getting hundreds of conservative judges appointed over the past couple of decades and picking the Supreme Court choices of any Republican president in that same timeframe. Leo left the Federalist Society and started a new organization, CRC Advisors in twenty twenty. They have continued
that work. One of the first projects he andnnounced under CRC was ten million dollars in funding for issue advocacy campaigning around you guessed it judge ships in twenty twenty.
And they've particularly targeted states and state AG's offices to advance Leonard's longer term agenda, which he described to the Council of National Policy and a speech to CNP last year, that America stands at the precipice of what he called the revival of what he described as the quote structural constitution.
And he told the CNP audience that no one alive in that room had seen the type of legal revolution that America was about to see based on the appointments to the Supreme Court and other courts to revive this so called structural constitution to the law as it existed pre New Deal. And you know, that affects a whole host of laws. It affects civil rights laws, that it will affect labor laws and labor rightsenvironmental regulation and more.
And it's an attempt in my view, to really limit the ability of Congress to pass laws, to limit the ability of agencies to regulate corporations, and to you know, sort of change the whole modern structure of government, basically in terms of the administrative agencies, but also the rights of citizens and the relationships between the United States as a as a government and other governments, which obviously would include tribal governments tribes in that speech, but it's an
attempt by Leo and an assortment of lawyers who are elite lawyers like Paul Clement and others who have been, you know, advancing some of these ideas.
Paul Clement is another lawyer involved in the Indian Child Welfare Act cases, but he's also been involved in a variety of pipeline disputes, and he was the Solicitor General of the United States under Bush. He's also a Supreme Court regular, with more Supreme Court appearances under his belt than any attorney currently practicing.
And now they have a Supreme Court that's increasingly receptive to what I considered be an extreme, radical, reactionary agenda to change our rights and limit our powers and our democracy through our representatives in ways that serve a very elite agenda, the agenda of the people who fund Leonard Leo and Leo's operations and fund the RAGA, the Republicantturney General's Association, and have been really attempting to work a legal revolution through offices that we would otherwise consider to
be independent. It would be nice to have attorneys general of states who were not so captive to advancing the interest of Charles Cooke, But unfortunately we are in an era in which those interests have been dominating these many of these state ags, including the Attorney General Texas, who's embroiled in other serious I mean, they've declared, you know,
this war on the so called administrative state. Obviously, there's roots of that in Reagan and some of the lawyers who were active then, who became judges and some of the people who are in the judiciary, like Silverman, who Paul Clement worked for, and who Amy Comingey Barrett clerked for. People who are in the judiciary who have been, you know, in my view, very partisan, very right wing, you know, sort of politicians and rogues who are attempting to restructure
the modern American state through judicial rulings. And so Paul, Paul and I overlapped a bit. When I was at the Justice Department. I was a career deputy Assistant Attorney
General in the Office of Legal Policy. Although I didn't work with him in the sg's office when he was coming in to take over that operation, but I was there for those first couple of months, and obviously, you know, observed his litigation as a citizen, but also when I was on the Senate Judiciary Committee to see his efforts and the way he was trying to change, you know,
the laws. And then you know his work since the end of that administration through the Obama administration in the private sector and the types of cases he's been involved in, including the attacks on the Affordable Care Act and this advance of sort of the supremacy of freedom of religion as a sword to strike down legislation and protections for you know, people's health and equal protection.
I'm curious what you think about his kind of driving force as a person. What is his ideology?
Well, I mean he to my in my view, he's he's one of the you know, doctrinaire ideologues on the right. You know, he's part of sort of that movement, the Federal Society movement. Although I think that gives it some sort of populous veneer that's not real. It's an effort to basically roll back most of the modern precedents. And you know, the presidents that are Brown, Post and Post Brown that a lot of the sort of the Leo
contingent dislikes. They now, I guess, have refashioned themselves as originalists in asserting that Amy Cony Bird is the most recent real originalists, when in fact, the reality is is that in my lifetime, if you look at the US Supreme Court, there have only been four appointees by Democratic presidents and sixteen appointees that by Republican presidents, and that
includes renquists twice because there's two different seats. But you know, eighty percent of the Supreme Court has been appointed by Republicans, and they just haven't been doctrinaire enough for these you know, very elite reactionaries like Leonard Leo and Clement and others, many of whom were named on Trump's list or shortlist for the Supreme Court, as Clement was. So I don't know him personally. I don't know what he's like personally. My personal view is, you know, everyone has a mom
who loves them and friends who like them. It's beside the point about whether or fair or whether they have an agenda that actually would hurt the interests of most people.
You know.
I think that the lawyers who are part of RAGA, the Attorney's General like Pruitt, who are advancing these sorts of attacks on you know, really reasonable legislation, legislation that's certainly within the power of Congress, like the CPP. These individuals, they dress in suits and ties, but they represent a pretty extreme ideology.
Lisa says that in recent years that extreme ideology always seems to come back to carbon and whether or not to regulate it.
One of my primary concerns about Leo's Structural Revolution is that it will be an attempt to use this so called structural constitution to take away the power of Congress to regulate carbon. You know, they have a longer standing attack on the existence of the EPA. We've documented, I helped document how on Charles Kocapo even the creation of an energy Department in the United States. There shouldn't be
any federal energy department. Some of these Hope type groups and LEO groups, you know, have a hostility to the idea of there being these sorts of agencies, and they're they're i think mounting a structural attack on them as well as you know, ultimately a question of whether we're
going to even have some of these agencies. As you know, there's been an attempt in a number of these presidential campaigns for Republicans to claim these are the five or four or three agencies they're going to eliminate, which you know inevitably include energy, the Energy Department, and perhaps the EPA.
Yeah, that's super interesting.
Okay, So in terms of some of the other players, Bradley, you know, has been a big funder of Goldwater for a long time. Paul Clement's now on their board.
When I wrote the report on Goldwater in twenty thirteen, they were in the process of basically expanding their litigation and they were marketing and I think that these documents are in the Bradley files, but they were you know, at the time, basically trying to become the litigation force for the State Policy Network groups across the country.
The State Policy Network is a group of organizations funded by the Coke Network that takes pro corporate sample legislation from the American Legislative Exchange Council or ALEC and works to get it passed in state legislatures. Several years ago, Goldwater launched its litigation center in Arizona under Clint Bullocks leadership, with the idea of being the litigator for all of these state policy initiatives.
They were trying to do that and then had that be a you know, a fundraising basis for them, and they would help coordinate with these other places. And obviously Clint you know, had a long standing record as a litigator you know, in attacking affirmative action and from my perspectives of rights laws, and so they had a team that they put in place. It felt that they could
you know, market beyond Arizona. But their real objective is structural litigation, Like they're not just taking pro bono cases for the sake of taking promono cases.
Their objective is structural change.
Structural change meaning fundamentally changing the law or government and how it works and what it's allowed to do.
I think, even though we may not know definitively the objective of either Clint Bullock and his successors at Goldwater or Paul Clement, one thing that is clear in their pattern of the litigation that they've engaged in is that
they do it to advance structural change. They're using litigation as part of a strategy for changing the law, Like for example, with the Goldwater litigation on licensure, it's actually a much broader attack on the idea that government should be having licenses for people in a whole host of areas where people would be demonstrably unsafe if these issues
weren't regulated from a health and safety standpoint. And we can see that in the way some of these groups, although I don't know that what Clement's position has been on COVID, but what we've seen through the ALE groups and the SPN groups has been this you know, push for improvident reopening, this attack on you know, closed and
closing businesses to protect public health, in this pandemic. So they're not actually that interested in public health, you know, in money and the economy, and that is a persistent driver of their agenda. Certainly is a driver of the
Goldwater Institute's litigation agenda overall. Is this notion that regulation is somehow incompatible with what they describe as this pre market, which is this sort of in their fantasy ideal world, one in which we don't have these regulations and companies can do that they want and the rich can do
what they want. Bradley is interesting obviously, it's it's sort of zombie money in the sense that there's no family member left on that board and the super wealthy people, uh like Pope Art Pope and uh Diane Hendricks, who are major GOP donors, and you know Pope has long saning ties to you know, he's been on a FP's board for a long long time or one of the
FP operations board. So you have these billionaires who are basically directing the the hundreds of millions of dollars of other you know, industrialists to advance uh these you know, some of these pretty extreme, uh, extremely reactionary groups. But Cearle, so the Bradley Brothers were super anti labor. You know, they were you know, sort of in my view, bad guys uh in a lot of ways. And now their money is continuing to do that bad That badness. Searle,
you know is the is that pharmaceutical fortune right? Uh?
That I think? I think? Uh.
I don't know that they made as much money on Ascertain, but ascertain was one of.
Their products opiately.
But Searle, you know, Searle is deeply embedded in sort of that right wing infrastructure.
Searle is the Seerle Freedom Trust. It's president and CEO, Kim Dennis, also heads up a giant pot of dark money that the Kochs put together. After the twenty ten Supreme Court case, Citizens United made anonymous political donations legal for corporations.
At one point, I actually wondered whether they were operating out of the American Enterprise Institute just qua AEI. But they have an address obviously that's in Chicago or something for Searle Freedom Press. But they're fully embedded in advancing this pretty extreme, extremely reactionary set of legal goals to you know, turn back the clock a century.
In the words of Leonard Leo Yeah, it does.
It's like, yes, I mean that seems so clear that it's like they really really do want to live in like the night, you know, yeah, pre new Deal.
Basically we're of Robert Barren is their glory era, and so I mean, I think it does raise that question about, you know, a rise of the sort of a Lockner, a new Lockner twenty first century.
Lockner Court Lockner was a really important early labor case. It happened in nineteen oh five. It's called Lockner versus New York and basically what happened was that New York State had passed a law limiting the amount of hours that bakers could work every week. So it was capped at sixty hours a week, and a guy named Lockner, who owned a bakery got caught allowing an employee to
work additional hours. He was fined and actually thrown in jail over this, and so he sued and said that this law was totally unfair and ridiculous and that it
was unconstitutional. The Supreme Court agreed, and that decision ushered in what's called the Lockner Era, which effectively rolled back a lot of the progressive reforms around both labor and various environmental issues, which you know, it was really only twenty thirty years after the very first regulations had even been passed on industry, so it was sort of the
first attempt to roll back regulation. Like a lot of other folks who've been watching the slow and steady corporate capture of the US judiciary over the years, Lisa Graves thinks the goal right now is to usher in another Lockner era, to take us back to the days when industry wasn't regulated at all.
That's going to be inventing theories that they claim our structurally, you know, structural constitutionalism, to strike down our power as a people through our representatives to regulate these corporations time when regulating carbon corporations is vital to our survival as a you know, people, human beings on this planet. And so I know that there are a lot of regulations and roles that would fall if they're successful in implementing
this so called structural constitution. But I think that it's clear to me that since some of the driving funders of some of the main groups are funded by oil and gas, that that's got to be part of the objective our ability to regulate those industries.
And particularly carbon.
Carbon is job one for coke industries and for the coke operations, and when they're involved in something, it's you know a lot of it ultimately involves making sure carbon is protected from regulation and limiting regulation of carbon.
Yeah, I know it's funny too. I think people don't necessarily understand. And this is like the thing I loved about Cokeland too, is like just that there it's almost like there's nothing too small or petty or seemingly unrelated for the cokes to go after. It's like it can be like the smallest little wind project in like rural Ohio, and they will like scorched earth burn it down, you.
Know, like what happened in it was at Tennessee.
When they attack the like the mass transit, it's like they're involved in trying to stop mass transit in a town, you know. I mean that was a major coke operation to block to block expanded mass transit, and you just you know, it just it just seems so petty and crazy in a way, like how much money do they actually lose? Does the does the coke board actually lose when there's a bus system, you know, or you know, even like like it just but they claim it's all
a matter of principle. But I think Chris's book showed how it's like quote just principle, it really is about
about their like basically endless revenue. And there's never enough of their endless revenue basically right, Yeah, you know, there's never like anything that limits them is somehow an attack or it limits like regulates the industry, amout an attack on them, when it's actually you know, good public policy that advances the public good and that allows people you know to commute or you know, like it's just absurd type the number of things they've tried to do, including
you know, in Colorado, those efforts to take over those school districts as AFP try to push through these candidates who were advancing this attack. And the thing for me in looking at the coachs and having looked at them for so long now and Charles you know, in particular, who's who was the real driver even you know, with David around is how much of his ideology from the
nineteen sixties and early seventies is just so fixed. He's you know, he's been very flexible in a sense in terms of trying new things like you know, he's really someone who has re engineered America just to try to remake it in his own image. Uh, in ways that have you know, deeply harmed our democracy and our economy and equality and the opportunity for you know, equal you know,
equal opportunity in the US. But he his ideas like the hostility of the public schools, the idea of public schools, like that's an early idea of his, This that he just embraced. And he's never given up on the idea of hostility to there being energy regulation. That's like he's in his early thirties and now he's you know, much older, and he's.
You know, still pushing that agenda.
He's someone who in some ways hasn't changed very much at all in terms of this very unyielding view of the world, which you know, that Freedom School operation that that really shaped him, that Bob La Fevra operation in the early sixties. You know, that guy was an an
archo capitalist. He described inself as an anarchist because they didn't want to say anarchists, but that was a view that the role of government should is limited to protecting property really right, and that government should get out of the way of corporations, and that freedom means that corporations and individuals can do whatever they want, and that included an attack on the very notion of public schools.
This is why I'll see all the same organizations that attack climate policy attacking the public school system as well. It's part of a broader move to privatize everything, to really bake in this idea that everybody gets to choose everything for themselves and there's no government involvement in any of it.
Publication was one of the great innovations of America that other countries, you know, not everyone, but you know, sought to aspire toward.
And that's not to say that schools are perfect.
You know, schools face a lot of challenges because our society faces a lot of challenges, and people face a lot of economic challenges that then affect you know, your your chances in school in terms of you know, do you have a place you can do homework, do you have a computer, do you have the Internet? Like there's like the economy affects our education. But the fact is that I've just been one of the things that has so stunned me h is the level of hostility to
the idea of public education and public highways. I did a deep dive. We never published it because it didn't it didn't end up happening. But like I did a deep dive into one of the main Coke guys who was in the Trump administration on on highways and infrastructure, and that guy was basically saying, you know, we shouldn't have public roads at all. And and they, you know, the course, have been behind a lot of the pulling efforts, you know, pushing toll highways and in fact they profit
from total highways. We just we just haven't just I just never published this research ship. But they, you know, they they they they are one of the culprits behind this. Other obviously other companies have benefited enormously, like CenTra and and one of the companies in Australia. But the fact
is that they've been behind this. And their main Coke operative who landed in the Trump administration in charge of infrastructure, Royal, is on record we found saying, you know, his ideal the ideal world is that basically you're told on every street corner electronically.
Wow, you know, so, I mean their view.
Of America is like, is really a dystopia. You know, no public schools. Every road is private, basically in your taxed by a corporation, a corporate tax, basically a toll every time you drive your car. But damn it, we're not going to regulate those industries. We're not gonna you know, we're not going to limit the polluters, Like how dare we? But they want to basically have corporate tax.
If they want to tax the shit out of individuals, and it won't be called the tax.
It's a toll, right, it's not a tax, it's a tool. But that and that toll is completely set by them with no democratic accountability. And their claim is, well, the democratic accountability is you just use it, you don't, which, you know, suggests that everyone has some sort of you know, cash reservoir to be told to death by corporations.
You know.
But like that was a shocking quote, Like who has that as their fantasy?
Oh?
The cooperative at the White House in charge of infrastructure, that's his fantasy. We're told we our cars are toll on every corner we passed, And for a while they couldn't even achieve it, right, because we didn't have the electronic capacity. So the tolls were these you know, clunky tolls where everyone complains when they go through a toll in Illinois or whatever, they're paying money to the to the state. No, that money is going to private corporations.
The state is just administering it. But you know, so they couldn't achieve their objective because they didn't have the Internet that we have now. But that guy literally was like, hey, the great The ideal scenario is, yeah, wherever you drive, we're collecting a toll and it's not the government connecting that toll to fund schools, it's corporations.
Wow. Anyway, they have.
Great silk suits and great silk ties and they look like, you know, upstanding normal individuals. But their agenda of many of these guys, including Charles Cooke, is truly extreme.
So you can imagine me sitting in front of a giant murder wall pinning threads together. After this conversation, go check out Lisa online. Her research firm is True North Research, and she's still on the board of the Center for Media and Democracy, which does incredible work. A lot of the Bradley documents that were leaked a few years ago have been analyzed and organized by CMD and you can find that work online at exposed by cmd dot org.
I also want to give a shout out to Documented and the reporters there, Nick Sergei and Jamie Corey who've done some absolutely phenomenal work on RAGA and coc network and Alec and Bradley. Go check them out. They're online at documented dot net. We've put together a tremendous resource there. Highly recommend checking that out. Okay, that's it for this episode. Next time you hear from me it will be for a new season. We're going to take Drilled back to
being a seasonal show. If you would like to continue to get weekly episodes and bonus content, please sign up for our Patreon at patreon dot com slash Drilled. Otherwise, we'll be back March forth with part two of our season on the gas industry. This one is called the New Climate Villains, and we're teckning how the gas industry is adjusting to its new role as part of the climate problem after pretty successfully marketing itself as part of
the solution for decades. Come back for that, Thanks for listening, and we'll see you soon.