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 Table of Contents

Introduction 3

SECTION ONE
The Corporate Court 4

Corporate Media Camouflages The Corporate Court 5

John Roberts Is Following Corporate America’s Long-Term Plan 9

The Supreme Court Just Gave Corporations A License To Steal 14

How Lobbyists Are Protecting The Corporate Court 19

The Supreme Court Is A Corporate Star Chamber 23

Trump’s Pal Just Used John Roberts’ Get-Out-Of-Jail Free Card 26

Another Supreme Court Corporatist Would Be A Disaster 29

Roberts Started A Revolution, Dems Enabled It 34

Q&A: How A New Supreme Court Could Forever Change America 42

Q&A: The Fossil Fuel Industry Wants Its Money Back 50

SECTION TWO
Legalizing Corruption 53

Dark Money Led To This Moment 54

Roberts Is The Man Behind The Curtain 61

Why Big Money Wants Barrett On The Supreme Court 67

How Pro-Business Interests Pushed The Courts Right 72

We Still Don’t Know Who Is Paying For Trump’s SCOTUS Seats 77

The GOP's Dark Money Court Machine 81

How Dark Money Bought A Supreme Court Seat 84

Group That Led Kavanaugh Confirmation Got $15.9 Million From One

Mystery Donor 87

Koch Machine Pressing Supreme Court To Crush EPA 89

Q&A: The Supreme Court Just Legalized Corruption… Again 93

1
 SECTION THREE
The Roe Disaster 97

Dems Stalled Abortion Protections In A Committee 98

The Anti-Abortion Crusade For The Filibuster 102

Why Are Dems Boosting An Anti-Abortion Candidate? 108

The Roe Disaster — And What To Do About It 111

Q&A: Colorado’s Opportunity To Lead On Abortion Access 119

SECTION FOUR
Countering The Roberts Revolution 125

FDR’s Lesson About The Supreme Court Rampage 126

Other Resources 131

Thank You 133

Contact Us 134

2
 Introduction

In 2005, a U.S. Chamber of Commerce lawyer who had helped George W. Bush
steal an election was nominated to be chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. An
archconservative lauded as “the go-to lawyer for the business community,” John
Roberts was confirmed by a huge bipartisan Senate vote.

Since then, Roberts has been widely billed by corporate media as a thoughtful and
pragmatic “moderate” earnestly fighting against other conservative justices to
preserve the court’s legitimacy. But as The Lever’s reporting has documented, this
tale is a ruse.

Roberts is no victim — behind his soft-spoken persona and his sunny smile is the
perpetrator of a judicial coup that has commandeered the government. This
far-reaching jurisprudential revolution is repealing the 20th century and laying
waste to America.

In the first of our new Lever Reader series, we review four aspects of the Roberts
Revolution and its judicial coup:

1. The Corporate Court: How the Roberts Court has turned the judicial branch
into a corporate weapon crushing workers, consumers, retirees, and the
environment.
2. Legalizing Corruption: How John Roberts legalized rampant corruption, in
the process building a political system that routinely delivers the extremist
laws and rulings that culminated in the judicial coup.
3. The Roe Disaster: How the Roberts Revolution fulfilled the American right’s
50-year crusade to repeal federal protections for reproductive rights — and
how Democrats have refused to use their power to counter this revolution.
4. Countering The Roberts Revolution: How Democrats could counter the
Roberts Revolution — if they decided to use their power.

Each of these sections include The Lever’s original reporting that tracked the rise
of the Roberts Revolution and the judicial coup. We also include Q&A discussions
with key experts explaining what’s happening.

​NOTE: Lever Readers are free to all supporting subscribers of The Lever. If you are
not currently a subscriber and wish to become one, please click here.

3
 SECTION ONE

The Corporate Court

Almost all of the media coverage of the Supreme Court is about
high-profile social issues, but in truth the court is mostly dealing with
business cases. Under John Roberts, the court has methodically used
those cases to empower corporations to crush workers, consumers,
and retirees.

Since we first launched, The Lever has extensively covered the court’s
transformation into a corporate star chamber that delivers ruling
after ruling to rig the economy against the non-rich. This is all part of
John Roberts’ long-term plan.

4
 Corporate Media Camouflages The Corporate Court
Supreme Court justices are being portrayed as moderate as they rig America’s laws
against workers and shareholders.

Jun 24, 2021 • David Sirota

Photo credit: AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite

This week, The New York Times reassured liberals that when it comes to the
Supreme Court, don’t worry, be happy.

“The arrival of Justice Amy Coney Barrett in October seemed to create a 6-to-3
conservative juggernaut that would transform the Supreme Court,” the paper
declared. “Instead, judging by the 39 signed decisions in argued cases so far this
term, including two major rulings on Thursday, the right side of the court is badly
fractured and its liberal members are having a surprisingly good run.”

The Times published the rosy report about this supposed “good run” in a week
that saw the high court effectively legalize American corporations’ profit from
child slavery abroad, shield Wall Street firms from securities laws, and limit a key
form of union organizing among the nation’s poorest workers.

So far in this term, the court has sided with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — the
major corporate lobby group in Washington — in seven separate cases, and only
defied the Chamber in two cases.

5
 This tracks with the current court siding with the Chamber 70 percent of the time
overall, according to data compiled by the Constitutional Accountability Center.

The Supreme Court Is A Corporate Star Chamber

The Supreme Court’s transformation into a corporate star chamber is rarely
mentioned by an elite media owned by corporations and billionaires — but it is a
story The Lever has been reporting on since we launched.

Business-related rulings typically are not framed on a liberal-conservative

continuum, and in many cases the bloc of putatively liberal justices are siding
with corporations against workers, shareholders, and anyone else in society who
is not rich and powerful. Indeed, two of the three aforementioned cases this week
were 8-to-1 rulings.

Even the Times admitted that “the court’s three Democratic appointees have
voted with the majority 73 percent of the time in divided cases” — although the
paper casts this as proof of jurisprudential moderation rather than a reflection of
corporate capture or bipartisan conservatism.

A good example of this bait-and-switch — and of how the analysis of corporate

influence is written out of most legal coverage these days — was the media
portrayal of the recent Affordable Care Act (ACA) ruling as alleged proof that the
current Court is moderate.

That ruling, which let the ACA stand, was certainly better than the alternative. But
the decision was also a win for corporate power, in that it preserved a law that
fortifies and subsidizes the private insurance industry.

​An Emblematic Ruling Illustrates The Long Con

When Chief Justice John Roberts was appointed to the Supreme Court almost two
decades ago, he was billed as the “go-to lawyer for the business community.” His
appointment was enthusiastically endorsed by the Chamber of Commerce, an
organization he had represented as a corporate attorney.

Since then, Roberts, his fellow conservative justices, and business interests have
been playing a long game to try to shield corporations from accountability — and
one of this week’s rulings illustrates how that game has unfolded.

6
 Thirty years ago, casino magnate Donald Trump helped create a dangerous legal
precedent that made it far harder for investors to sue Wall Street firms when
those firms use fine print to mislead them with rosy financial projections and
promises. In that case — which revolved around assurances that Trump’s
company made to investors before they lost their money — Trump secured a
landmark ruling from future Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito.

Two decades later, Goldman Sachs was telling clients in investment documents
that it has “extensive procedures and controls that are designed to identify and
address conflicts of interest.” But then the firm was exposed for betting against
the mortgage investments it was selling its clients. During a congressional
hearing on the topic, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) grilled a top Goldman executive
about the fact that he had pushed investments on clients that he had referred to
in an email to a colleague as a “shitty deal.”

Goldman investors led by Arkansas’ teachers pension fund sued — and this week,
the Supreme Court effectively solidified the original Trump doctrine. In an
opinion written by Justice Barrett, the high court tossed out the class action
lawsuit that aimed to hold Goldman accountable.

“The plaintiffs said that when they bought Goldman shares they relied upon the
bank's statements about its ethical principles and internal controls against
conflicts of interest, and its pledge that its ‘clients' interests always come first,’”
Reuters reported. “Goldman argued that these ‘aspirational’ statements were too
vague and general to have had any impact on the stock price.”

The Supreme Court agreed to send the case back to a lower court — delivering a
huge victory to Goldman and Wall Street firms aiming to limit their exposure to
shareholder lawsuits.

The ruling was the latest in a series of decisions that don’t merely side with the
Chamber of Commerce, but that deny basic standing to plaintiffs that bring cases
against big companies. Rather than rule on the issues at hand, the high court has
often either ruled that cases cannot move forward, or that lower courts must
impose higher thresholds on plaintiffs that seek redress from big companies.

As the Constitutional Accountability Center put it: “Chief Justice Roberts’s legacy
when it comes to access-to-courts issues will be one of closing the courthouse
doors as much as possible.”

7
 In this long game, the objective is to foreclose on even the possibility of justice.
After all, once the courthouse doors are nailed shut, courts throughout the
judicial system won’t even have to decide whether to side with corporate interests
— because they won’t even have to hear the complaints brought by workers,
shareholders, and anyone else who doesn’t have political power.

8
 John Roberts Is Following Corporate America’s
Long-Term Plan
When Roberts was nominated in ’05, few focused on his business fealty, but he was
appointed because he represented corporate clients aiming to transform the court —
which is exactly what he's doing.

Jul 2, 2020 • David Sirota

This week, the Supreme Court dutifully handed another victory to the U.S.
Chamber of Commerce, siding with the corporate lobbying group by invalidating
the law that protected one of the nation’s chief financial regulators from White
House meddling. It was another step towards making the Roberts Court the most
corporate-compliant judicial body in modern American history.

In the ruling, the court struck down provisions that said a president could only
fire the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for cause. The decision
did preserve the agency’s right to exist, but as dissenting Justice Elana Kagan put
it, the ruling “wipes out a feature of that agency its creators thought fundamental
to its mission — a measure of independence from political pressure.”

Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren put it more bluntly, saying the Roberts Court
“just handed over more power to Wall Street's army of lawyers and lobbyists to
push out a director who fights for the American people.”

9
 The result is a hypocritical standard that favors the financial industry: a corporate
president can instantly fire a CFPB chairman who assesses fines against Wall
Street conglomerates that bankroll his political machine, but a future progressive
president is still barred from firing a Federal Reserve chairman who doles out
hundreds of billions of dollars of bailouts to corporations.

The CFPB ruling exemplifies the court’s sharp shift to right — a shift that relatively
few even know about because media headlines about the court typically focus on
social issues.

In an age when our public memory typically lasts about 15 minutes or less, even
fewer seem to remember that this society-changing judicial shift is part of a
longer-term plan that Roberts and his corporate allies have been methodically
catalyzing for 15 years.

That may sound like hyperbole, but it is an understatement: In 2005, Roberts was
nominated and appointed to the court precisely because he was seen by the
business lobby as the most likely to engineer a jurisprudential shift in favor of
corporations. He earned that reputation after a career in private practice
representing the Chamber and the major corporate clients that he would go on to
faithfully serve as chief justice.

The Lost History of A Corporate Chief Justice

If you only followed major rulings on social issues like abortion or immigration,
or if you only followed Roberts’ public pronouncements, you might conclude that
he is a moderate justice. But as this newsletter showed last week, he has presided
over a court that is a corporate star chamber. Roberts himself reflexively sides
with the U.S. Chamber in most cases that the corporate lobbying group weighs in
on.

That is exactly what the Chamber had hoped for way back in 2005, when Roberts
was nominated to the court by President George W. Bush. In a span of just 5 years,
Roberts would go from little-known corporate lawyer pitching in on the GOP’s
effort to pilfer the Florida 2000 election to chief justice of the country’s highest
court.

Weeks before Bush plucked Roberts out of obscurity, the Chamber launched what
was billed as its first campaign for a Supreme Court nomination, including paid

10
 media, grassroots outreach, and lobbying (this kind of campaigning is now
routine, and powered by a well-financed GOP machine).

The Los Angeles Times reported that as part of its inaugural public campaign for a
Supreme Court justice, the Chamber “forwarded to the White House its review of
federal judges from each circuit, with ratings of each judge based on rulings that
concern business.”

The Times noted that while liberals tended to focus on social issues, business
groups had come to understand that the court wielded tremendous power over
the economy:

The head of the National Assn. of Manufacturers, former Michigan Gov. John
Engler, a Republican, has long argued that business should pay more
attention to the courts.

“We can’t sit on the sidelines with the third branch of government” making so
many decisions affecting business, he has said.

Patrick Cleary, a vice president of the manufacturers’ association, calculated

that 80% of a federal judge’s civil cases “concerns issues that we care about”
— liability, contract and employment law.

“All the hard-fought gains business has made in the executive and legislative
branches could be lost” by the decision of a single judge, Cleary said.

Roberts was soon nominated to the high court despite having barely two years of
experience as a judge.

“He Was The Go-To Lawyer For The Business Community”

Upon Roberts’ nomination, the Chamber publicly endorsed him in a glowing
press release — one that notably did not mention that Roberts had represented
the Chamber “in a battle over a Maine law designed to lower drug prices for state
residents who lacked insurance coverage,” according to the Associated Press.

11
 That wasn’t the only Roberts client with big business before the government.
In a story headlined “A Resume Strong on Business,” the Los Angeles Times noted
that “while in private practice, Roberts represented numerous companies —
Chrysler Corp., Litton Systems, Toyota Motor Corp., WellPoint Health Networks,
and NBC.” In addition, he helped major corporations circumvent the Americans
With Disability Act, the Endangered Species Act, seatbelt laws, affirmative action
statutes, and antitrust strictures.

The Times noted that Roberts was nominated specifically because he would carry
the water for corporations.

“He was the go-to lawyer for the business community. They are very comfortable
with him,” Washington lawyer Thomas Goldstein told the newspaper. “He
definitely is a friend of the chamber. Of all the candidates, he is the one they knew
best.”

“Businesspeople are very enthused,” added C. Boyden Gray, a former White House
counsel for Republican President George H.W. Bush. “I think the reason is he
understands business issues… He has been immersed in them in private
practice.”

Fast forward 15 years, and Roberts has delivered for his old corporate clients — his
court sides with the Chamber far more than the previous two courts, which were
already fairly conservative.

12
 Of course, Roberts’ understated tone and his occasional swing vote on
non-corporate issues give him the patina of moderation. But it is all part of
Roberts’ long con. As The Nation’s legal analyst Elie Mystal compellingly argues,
Roberts may occasionally shy away from some of the most extreme opinions of
his conservative colleagues on the court, but it is only to maintain the image of
judicial legitimacy as his court systematically tears up the social contract with
understated-but-radical rulings that get little public attention.

“Unlike his conservative colleagues, Roberts, who is only 65 years old,

understands that he will wield power for another decade or more,” Mystal writes.
“Roberts rules like a man who plans to be here when Donald Trump is off
somewhere hawking ‘America Used to Be Great’ hats at the ‘Donald J. Trump
MOST Presidential Library and Bigly Golf Course.’ His rulings do not reflect a
moderation of his philosophy; they reflect an unwillingness to be caught up by the
lawlessness of this moment.”

Mystal rightly concludes: “John Roberts is not a failure of the conservative

movement. He’s not a ‘squish’ or a RINO. He’s a rock-ribbed Republican jurist who
is doing the long and patient work of defending corporate America and the white
male patriarchy.”

That work is not the scheme of one lone rogue jurist — it is part of a long-term
blueprint crafted by the most powerful corporate forces in Washington.

13
 The Supreme Court Just Gave Corporations A License
To Steal
The courthouse door was just slammed shut on workers and retirees whose pension
plans get bilked.

Jun 24, 2020 • David Sirota

In the 1987 classic film Wall Street, pension funds make a brief but important
appearance, as Gordon Gekko hatches a plan to steal 6,000 airline workers'
retirement savings. An angry Bud Fox asks Gekko: “How much is enough?” — a
question warning the audience about unbridled greed and the financial vipers in
our midst.

Thirty-three years after the release of Wall Street, it seems the U.S. Supreme
Court saw the film as a guidebook rather than a cautionary tale: In a landmark
ruling last week, Brett Kavanaugh and his conservative cadre undermined
workers and retirees who might try to stop Gekko’s scheme at their own
companies.

In the process, the ruling may have short-circuited a separate case that Wall
Street was fearing.

Some background: In the last two decades, class action lawsuits have forced large
employers to pay out more than $6 billion in cases alleging fraud and

14
 mismanagement of workers’ retirement savings. At the same time, financial
firms hired to manage that money have been skimming hundreds of billions of
dollars of fees off the pension funds, while delivering subpar returns. Last week,
one report found that private equity firms — which manage pension money —
have raked in more than $230 billion of performance fees in 10 years, while
delivering returns that did not substantially beat a low-fee stock index fund.

Preventing employers and financial firms from robbing workers’ pension funds is
critical, because the consequences of inaction can be devastating. The more
stealing, the more fees and the more underperformance, the more pressure there
is to cut millions of workers’ promised benefits or have companies declare
bankruptcy. In the case of public pension systems, benefits can be slashed or
taxes can be raised on everyone to backfill the losses.

Enter the Supreme Court’s Thole v. U.S. Bank ruling.

In that case, the plaintiffs were two retired employees of the bank who alleged
that the company engaged in self-dealing and inappropriately invested workers’
pension money in ways that allowed bank executives to pay “themselves
excessive management fees… manipulate accounting rules, boost their reported
incomes, inflate their stock prices, and exercise lucrative stock options to their
own (and their shareholders’) benefit,” according to Supreme Court documents.

When the scheme produced a loss of more than $1 billion during the Great
Recession, the plaintiffs sued to force U.S. Bank to pay $750 million back to the
pension fund — a sum that they argued was the amount of losses that was above
and beyond what a standard investment formula would have produced in the
same time period.

Now here’s the punchline: Rather than weighing in on the allegations of theft,
Kavanaugh and the other conservative justices slammed the courthouse door on
the plaintiffs and every other plaintiff like them, thereby creating the conditions
for an undeterrable crime spree.

“The Court’s Reasoning Allows Fiduciaries To Misuse Pension Funds”

Writing for the majority, Kavanaugh declared that “the plaintiffs themselves have
no concrete stake in the lawsuit” and therefore have no standing to bring a case
because they themselves did not (yet) see their own pension benefits reduced.

15
 In other words, even if the plaintiffs can prove that the pension fund itself was
illegally fleeced, the majority ruled that the plaintiffs have no right to sue unless
and until they can prove their own promised retirement payments were reduced
because of the wrongdoing.

This may sound superficially logical — after all, if someone’s retirement benefit
wasn’t cut, how can they sue for losses?

But drill down a bit and you realize that in practice, the ruling creates a license for
employers and financial managers to steal up to a certain level.

The court precedent effectively says that workers and retirees cannot sue for
damages as long as an employer or a financial firm managing pension money
steals less than an amount that totally bankrupts a pension plan to the point
where current retirees get their benefits cut. They have no standing to sue, even if
the theft has destabilized the pension system for the long haul.

That’s like saying that if your local bank manager is slowly draining your savings
account, you can’t sue him until there’s literally no money left in your account,
because up until that point, you still at least have enough cash in there to pay your
monthly bills.

“The Court’s reasoning allows fiduciaries to misuse pension funds so long as the
employer has a strong enough balance sheet during (or, as alleged here, because
of) the misbehavior,” wrote Justice Sonia Sotomayor in her dissent. “Indeed, the
Court holds that the Constitution forbids retirees to remedy or prevent fiduciary
breaches in federal court until their retirement plan or employer is on the brink
of financial ruin.”

To be sure, pension systems themselves may still be able to sue when they are
bilked by third-party financial firms. The systems could still argue that they were
directly harmed and therefore have standing. But the new ruling disempowers
workers and retirees from taking legal matters into their own hands — which is a
big deal.

In the private sector, the ruling leaves workers relying on legal action from
corporate pension officials who probably aren’t going to take legal action against
themselves in a situation like Thole, which was about self-dealing. Even in cases
that aren’t about self-dealing, corporate pension officials also might not want to
rock the boat with powerful outside investment houses that may have other
relationships with their company.

16
 In the public sector, it’s a similarly bleak situation — workers whose pension
funds are ripped off are now left to rely on legal action from public pension
officials, some of whom may have been wined and dined by Wall Street firms, and
others who may have been appointed by Wall Street-friendly politicians.

Implications For Another Case That Wall Street Fears

Sotomayor concluded that “after today’s decision, about 35 million people with
defined-benefit plans will be vulnerable to fiduciary misconduct.”

But even beyond that, the Thole ruling may end up rescuing financial firms from a
separate suit they’ve been desperately trying to halt.

In Mayberry v. KKR, Kentucky public workers and retirees are suing Wall Street
giants including Blackstone and KKR, alleging that the companies misled their
pension system about investments, and ultimately delivered losses that
contributed to the financial emergency plaguing the state’s retirement system. If
it moves forward, the case — which was praised by the state pension system —
could force the firms for the first time to let the public scrutinize high-fee hedge
fund investments.

That unto itself would be a significant development, as critics say the secretive
investments are ripping off investors across the country.

Wall Street firms want to keep their fee gravy train going — and they know that
the only way to do that is to keep details of these black box investments
concealed. And so they are doing everything they can to halt the case. Not only did
they countersue the beleaguered state pension system that they already made big
fees off of, they also sought to get the entire case dismissed. They are arguing that
the workers do not have standing to bring the suit, because “they cannot show
that their retirement benefits have been reduced because of any alleged losses
caused by the hedge fund investments,” as the Lexington Herald Leader reported.

This echoes the reasoning Kavanaugh and conservative justices on the Supreme
Court just cited in dismissing the Thole case.

Mayberry is now pending before the Kentucky Supreme Court — and experts say
that state court could now easily cite the U.S. Supreme Court precedent as its own
rationale for throwing out the case.

17
 “It would be an easy out for the Kentucky court to now take the Kavanaugh
principal and deny standing to the Kentucky workers,” said Chris Tobe, a former
Kentucky pension official and author of the book Kentucky Fried Pensions.

University of Wyoming law professor Michael Duff agreed.

“If the Kentucky Supremes were of a mind to dismiss for lack of standing they
would certainly cite a recent U.S. Supreme Court opinion reaching the same
outcome,” he said. “This frequently happens when unsophisticated states don’t
have a great deal of their own law in areas where there is a great deal of
analogous federal law.”

18
 How Lobbyists Are Protecting The Corporate Court
Lobbying groups are fighting to protect the GOP’s Supreme Court majority, which is
great for business.

Dec 2, 2021 • Andrew Perez

AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite

The U.S. Supreme Court is a corporate star chamber, and big business wants to
keep it that way.

That’s why corporate lobbying groups — like the Business Roundtable, the
National Federation of Independent Businesses, and the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce — are pressing the Biden administration not to reform the Supreme
Court.

The lobbying groups warn that expanding the Supreme Court would damage
perception of its legitimacy and independence. It’s a ridiculous argument, given
that Republicans blocked President Barack Obama from filling a Supreme Court
seat in 2016, stacked the court with conservative ideologues under President
Donald Trump, and confirmed Justice Amy Coney Barrett days before the 2020
election.

Some of the business organizations are even claiming that adding seats on the
Supreme Court would harm the U.S. economy.

19
 The groups’ letters were filed in response to President Joe Biden’s decision to set
up a commission to consider court reform options, such as adding more justices
as a defense against the existing corporatist supermajority. Taken together, the
documents offer further proof that corporate interests will do anything to
preserve a GOP-dominated court that is a boon for business, no matter how
reactionary the justices may be.

So far, the Biden administration seems to be heeding some of the lobbying

groups’ arguments about protecting the Supreme Court’s legitimacy, even as the
court’s conservative justices aggressively threaten abortion rights — and as
Democratic senators point out that “wealthy special interests” have already
captured the court.

“Harm Our Nation's Economy”

The Business Roundtable, a lobbying group that represents corporate CEOs,
secured favorable headlines in 2019 when it announced that it would “push for an
economy that serves all Americans," not just company shareholders.

The organization, however, has yet to do anything to fulfill that promise — and
just days before the Supreme Court knocked down the Biden administration’s
federal COVID-19 eviction ban, the Business Roundtable argued that reforming
the court isn’t necessary and would actually hurt the U.S. economy.

“In our view, increasing the size of the court is not only unnecessary but would
also harm our nation's economy and global competitiveness,” the Business
Roundtable wrote in August in a letter to the Biden administration.

“Any alteration to the Supreme Court’s independence and stability — perceived or

actual — would have dire economic consequences,” said the organization. “If
American business owners expect that their legal rights and obligations will
change with the political winds, they will be less inclined to deploy capital and
invest in growth and innovation. In addition, such change would weaken the
conditions that make the United States such an attractive place for business and
investment from around the world.”

Adding seats, the Business Roundtable continued, would create “greater

uncertainty and more costly litigation as lower courts struggle to sort out the
court’s binding instructions. This uncertainty would, in turn, place additional
restraints on economic growth and innovation.”

20
 The National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB), a corporate lobbying
group that calls itself “the voice of small business,” issued a similar warning in
June.

“America’s small businesses depend on courts to provide stability and

predictability in adjudication under the law of property, contracts, torts,
insurance, employment, and other business-related matters,” the NFIB wrote.
“Turning federal courts, and in particular the Supreme Court of the United States,
into political spoils to be seized instantly by the political party that prevails in
congressional and presidential elections in a particular year would destroy the
stability and predictability an effective free market economy requires.”

The NFIB, however, didn’t seem to be concerned about turning the federal courts
into political spoils when it backed all of Trump’s Supreme Court nominees, or
when it opposed Obama’s 2016 nominee Merrick Garland. Senate Republicans
never gave Garland a vote, which allowed them to begin the process of flipping
control of the court.

The Chamber, the nation’s top business lobby, also demanded that the Biden
commission preserve the court’s independence, after previously supporting all of
Trump’s high court selections.

“Americans treasure the nation’s dedication to the rule of law,” the Chamber
wrote in August. “The Supreme Court plays an important role in transforming
that formal commitment into a practical reality. Interventions in its size and
affairs are to a large extent absent from the historical record, and for good reason.
The commission, Congress, and the country at large should not take this record
for granted, nor should any citizen invite a course of action that would jeopardize
the court’s independence.”

“Restoring The Court’s Legitimacy”

Biden’s court reform commission recently released draft materials debating
potential Supreme Court reform options, and the documents suggest that
officials will likely not recommend adding seats.

One draft document says that “the risks of court expansion are considerable,
including that it could undermine the very goal of some of its proponents of
restoring the court’s legitimacy.”

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 The document notes that some commission members believe that “court
expansion is likely to undermine, rather than enhance, the Supreme Court’s
legitimacy and its role in the constitutional system, and there are significant
reasons to be skeptical that expansion would serve democratic values.”

However, there are good reasons to question the court’s legitimacy. Republicans
managed to flip the Supreme Court and build a substantial GOP majority with the
support of a secretive conservative network that has been fueled by tens of
millions of dollars in dark money and steered by Trump’s judicial adviser, Leonard
Leo.

As The Lever has previously reported, this conservative courts network has
regularly been financed by eight-figure donations from mystery donors. The vast
majority of its funding sources have never been disclosed.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has become a reliable bulwark for corporate
interests, with justices ruling with the Chamber more than 83 percent of the time
during its most recent term.

What’s more, the court’s newly-minted conservative supermajority recently

allowed a restrictive Texas abortion law to take effect. Justices could soon allow
additional limits on abortion rights — and potentially even overturn the court’s
landmark 1973 abortion decision, Roe v. Wade.

The court may also threaten environmental regulators’ ability to limit carbon
emissions at all amid an escalating global climate crisis.

In a recent “Captured Courts” report, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer

(D-N.Y.) , Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.)
wrote that “wealthy special interests have been able to successfully undermine
our Constitution’s promise of an independent judiciary.”

Whitehouse separately wrote in a new law review journal that “​​the courts are
becoming an arena for enacting policies by judicial decree that are too unpopular
to pass through democratically elected legislatures.”

Unsurprisingly, public approval of the Supreme Court has plummeted: It reached

an all-time low of 40 percent approval, according to a Gallup poll released in
September.

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 The Supreme Court Is A Corporate Star Chamber
The high court has become one of the most powerful weapons of Big Business and
billionaires.

Jun 26, 2020 • David Sirota

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court issued two commendable rulings that may
have seemed off brand for a conservative judicial panel: In one case, the court
prevented President Trump from deporting the children of undocumented
immigrants; in another case, the court extended anti-discrimination protections
to cover sexual orientation and gender identity.

Progressives rightly lauded these civil rights victories, which dominated the
headlines. But amid the celebrations, the court also issued the three following
rulings, which received relatively little attention:

● The court limited Securities and Exchange Commission regulators’ power

to punish financial firms that bilk investors.
● Justices overturned a lower court’s ruling and fortified energy companies’
power to steamroll environmental objections to fossil fuel infrastructure.
● The court prevented workers and retirees from suing Wall Street firms that
bilk their pension systems (see this week’s previous story on that here).

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 Once again, the high court used business cases to fortify the power of the
already-powerful. I say “once again” because for all the focus on the court’s
rulings on important social issues, much of the justices’ work is on business
litigation — and in that role, the court now serves as a reliable star chamber
defending corporations and the wealthy.

This is a development that is only rarely spotlighted — and it is barely part of the
discourse when Supreme Court appointments are referenced in national politics.
Indeed, one of the very few times corporate power became an issue in a recent
Supreme Court nomination fight was when a few senators briefly asked Neil
Gorsuch about his legal defense of a company’s decision to fire a worker for
trying to not freeze to death — but Gorsuch was confirmed anyway.

That confirmation helped the court continue to be a driving force behind the
corporate takeover of our country and our democracy.

The Most Conservative Court In Modern History

Among the best ways to see the court’s corporate fealty is to follow amicus briefs
filed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the most powerful business lobbying
group in Washington.

The Chamber filed an amicus brief in all three of last week’s cases — and the court
fully sided with the Chamber’s arguments in the fossil fuel and pension cases. In
all during the current term, the Supreme Court has sided with the Chamber in 9
out of 13 cases, according to the Constitutional Accountability Center (and one of
those supposed losses was the SEC case, in which the court did not comply with
the Chamber’s demand to fully abolish corporate punishments, but still severely
limited that authority, which was a partial win for corporations).

This is part of a larger historical shift. According to the organization’s 2019 report,
“Since Justice Samuel Alito joined Chief Justice Roberts on the Court in 2006, the
Chamber’s success rate has surged: the Roberts Court has sided with the
Chamber in 70 percent of its cases, diverging sharply from the Rehnquist Court
(56 percent) and the Burger Court (43 percent).”

The report notes that in the last term, conservative justices followed the
Chamber’s demands in 77 percent of the cases in which the group filed amicus
briefs. What may surprise liberals is that the four ostensibly liberal justices
collectively followed the Chamber’s demands almost half the time — a statistic
that exemplifies how loyalty to business transcends ideology on the court.

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 “The Extreme, Right-Wing Leader Of An Extreme Right-Wing Majority”
Why aren’t the Supreme Court’s plutocratic leanings more of a story in politics?
Part of it has to do with the nature of business cases — they are often esoteric and
undercovered in the political media. Part of it may also have to do with how some
of the business wins occur inside of cases that don’t seem to be about business at
all. Indeed, in a 2018 Atlantic report, Boston College law professor Kent Greenfield
and UCLA law professor Adam Winkler argue that in cases about sports
gambling, cell phone privacy, abortion, and the First Amendment, the court set
new legal precedents that will likely be invoked by corporate interest to
strengthen their power.

Then there is also the issue of Chief Justice John Roberts. His reputation as a
bipartisan swing vote has helped deflect attention from the court’s
ultraconservative corporatism. But Roberts doesn’t deserve that reputation.

“With the court on the precipice of a dangerous lurch rightward, polling data
indicate that Democrats have a positive view of Chief Justice John Roberts, who
has expressed regard for precedent and concern for the court’s legitimacy,
encouraging a view that he will step in to prevent partisan excess. Yet history
suggests that Democrats have much to fear,” wrote leaders of the advocacy group
Take Back the Court in a 2019 New York Times op-ed.

“The chief justice is neither a swing vote among his four liberal and four
conservative justices, nor a moderate,” the group’s leaders wrote. “Expect him to
land time and again with the conservatives… The chief justice’s voting record is as
conservative as those of his most extreme current and former colleagues —
Justices Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, and Antonin Scalia. In all 42
split-decision cases that the chief justice has presided over involving racial
minorities, immigrants, workers, and abortion, he voted for conservative
outcomes 100 percent of the time.”

The authors rightly conclude that far from a moderate or a centrist, Roberts “is
the extreme, right-wing leader of an extreme, right-wing majority.” That majority
continues to use business cases to try to turn America into a full-fledged
oligarchy.

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 Trump’s Pal Just Used John Roberts’ Get-Out-Of-Jail
Free Card
While Roberts was being praised as a hero, his court’s recent ruling just helped Wall
Street giants stomp on thousands of public-sector workers and retirees in one of
America’s poorest states.

Jul 16, 2020 • David Sirota

Chief Justice John Roberts has created the most conservative court in modern
history: In just the last few weeks, his court has helped financial firms bilk
pension funds, strengthened fossil fuel companies’ power to fast-track pipelines,
limited the power of regulatory agencies that police Wall Street, and stealthily let
Donald Trump hide his tax returns.

As a reward for Roberts’ continued defense of the wealthy and powerful, much of
the national media has obediently depicted him as a great hero of moderation,
because he sort of seemed to snub Trump in a handful of other rulings.

The press corps is willfully covering up the Roberts Court’s class war — and the
cover up is happening even as the court’s latest salvo is now reverberating far
away from the Washington political theater out here in the actual, real world.

Indeed, one of the Supreme Court’s least-noticed rulings in the last few months
just helped the planet’s most rapacious financial firms — and one of Donald

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 Trump’s billionaire pals — stomp on thousands of public-sector workers and
retirees in one of America’s poorest states. It also helped Wall Street avoid a full
public examination of schemes that fleece investors. As one industry trade
publication put it: “Hedge fund managers slept a little bit easier” after the events
that unfolded last week.

The Kentucky Case That Wall Street Really Feared

All of this traces back to the Supreme Court’s recent Thole ruling, which we first
reported on in June. That radical opinion — which has gone unmentioned in all
the Roberts hagiographies — effectively barred retirees from suing when their
employers let Wall Street firms bilk their pension funds. This was a huge win for
both employers and the financial firms that drain retirement systems — and it
was a victory that came at exactly the moment the SEC and FBI are sounding
alarms about such firms’ exorbitant fees, conflicts of interest, and secrecy.

This story could have ended there — and if you paid attention to the news (or lack
thereof) you may have thought it did. However, less than six weeks after this
travesty, the Thole ruling was just used by Kentucky judges to shut down another
landmark case that Wall Street really feared — a case that could have forced some
of the globe’s most powerful financial firms to open up their secretive schemes to
public scrutiny for the first time.

The Kentucky case was filed by public-sector retirees who alleged that Wall Street
behemoths including KKR and The Blackstone Group misled their state pension
fund into investing in “extremely high-risk, secretive, opaque, high-fee, and
illiquid vehicles” that enriched the firms with excessive fees while delivering
subpar returns that exacerbated the state’s financial crisis. Among the named
defendants was billionaire Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman, a top outside
adviser to President Trump.

The plaintiffs in the case argued that in order to protect the pension system, the
court needed to recognize workers’ standing to sue because the Kentucky
pension officials who authorized the original investments would never take legal
action that might spotlight their own complicity in the alleged rip-off schemes.

“The current (pension board) cannot and will not sue themselves or their alleged
co-actors and any demand that they bring this suit would be a useless act,” they
asserted. “All (pension) trustees have been involved in the wrongdoing and will
not subject themselves to suit or public exposure and scrutiny.”

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 Preventing A Potential Pentagon Papers Moment For Wall Street
If the case went forward, KKR and Blackstone could have been compelled to turn
over documents detailing all the secret fees, shell games and get-rich-quick
schemes they use to profit not only off of Kentucky workers, but off of millions of
public workers and retirees across the nation whose pension funds they manage.
It would have been a potential Pentagon Papers moment for Schwarzman and
other Wall Street billionaires.

But that’s when the Kentucky Supreme Court stepped in last week to side with the
Wall Street firms and shut down the case — and to do that, they relied on the
Roberts Court.

In its opinion, which cited the Thole ruling 18 separate times, the Kentucky court
asserted that the case should be thrown out because even though the Wall Street
firms may have bilked the now-beleaguered pension fund, the Kentucky workers
themselves had not yet seen a reduction in their promised benefits — and so
therefore, the workers did not have standing to sue.

“Our decision today borrows heavily from the analysis of Thole,” wrote the
Kentucky judges, who have their own separate, well-funded state pension system
that didn’t funnel money into the high-risk investments.

They noted that “the Supreme Court in Thole recently rejected this exact
argument” that the Kentucky workers were making.

Back in Washington, none of this made any news — the press was too busy
helping manufacture their saccharine fairy tale about Roberts saving the world,
even as he was ruining it for millions of workers.

But despite that news blackout, you can rest assured that the most powerful
people in the financial industry noticed the ruling — and are deeply grateful for a
Roberts Court that lets them continue stealthily vacuuming Americans’ meager
retirement savings into billionaires’ bank accounts.

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 Another Supreme Court Corporatist Would Be A
Disaster
A Breyer clone would help Big Business own the court for another generation.

Jan 26, 2022 • David Sirota

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer (AP Photo/Steven Senne)

Though most of the Supreme Court discourse revolves around hot-button social
issues, the high court is first and foremost big business’s cannon aimed squarely
at the American worker and at the livable ecosystem that supports human life.
The upcoming battle over Justice Stephen Breyer’s replacement will only be an
opportunity to start fixing this emergency if the nomination discourse, advocacy,
and decision making acknowledges that this is the big judicial problem — one
that has helped turn America’s economy into a corporate dystopia.

On one level, Breyer reportedly retiring is welcome news because it provides a

rare opportunity for lawmakers other than Republicans to put someone on the
court who doesn’t resemble a villain from The Handmaid's Tale. But with
corporate America’s stranglehold on policy — from health care to labor to climate
— it’s not enough to merely get an appointee who checks some important
demographic boxes and isn’t a religious zealot.
Tip Jar

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 With so much of the court’s day-to-day work focused on corporate cases rather
than on social policy, the moment calls not merely for some younger version of
Breyer, who has pretended the court is not inherently rigged in favor of corporate
power — even though it quite obviously is.

Instead, this moment begs for a jurist whose life experience and record shows a
commitment to prioritizing American workers and the environment — and
breaking with the most powerful lobbying group in America: The U.S. Chamber of
Commerce.

The Chamber’s Court

Sixteen years ago, the Chamber launched its campaign to own the Supreme Court
with a bang: It got its own former lawyer, John Roberts, a seat on the panel during
confirmation hearings that predictably focused on social issues and largely
ignored the nominee’s record as “the go-to lawyer for the business community.”

Since then, the Chamber and conservative dark money groups have placed
several Roberts clones on the court, and the putatively liberal minority has
routinely acquiesced to the Chamber’s demands. Save for an occasional anomaly,
the Roberts Court has typically delivered rulings that favor capital over labor,
retirees, the environment, and any other priority seen as an obstacle to private
profit.

Data from the Constitutional Accountability Center (CAC) tell the story of a
seismic transformation in American jurisprudence: Whereas Chief Justice
Warren Burger’s court sided with Chamber amicus briefs just 43 percent of the
time, the Roberts Court has sided with the Chamber 70 percent of the time —
including 83 percent of the time in the most recent session.

In other words, over the course of two generations, the high court went from
roughly split on decisions about capital and labor to firmly on the side of capital.

Importantly, this transformation happened with the help of Breyer, a Clinton

appointee billed as a liberal holdout even though he often is a conservative
accomplice. Again, CAC data tells that story: Breyer has voted with the Chamber
position a majority of the time.

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 In practice, that has meant Breyer recently voting to restrict regulators’ power to
punish Wall Street criminals, to empower fossil fuel companies to brush off
environmental concerns, and to oppose a state mining ban. It means Breyer
voting to shield companies from liability when they face allegations of human
rights abuses abroad. It means Breyer voting to limit consumer debt protections.
And as the progressive legal publication Balls and Strikes notes, Breyer’s 27-year
career of rulings have “protected big business privilege from antitrust lawsuits.”
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Balls and Strikes points out that Breyer’s record as a legislative staffer and lower
court judge was predictive of his corporate fealty.

That record was inappropriate for a nominee in the Clinton era, and would be
completely preposterous for a replacement nominee in the present moment,
when corporations have positioned their boots even more securely on the neck of
the American worker.

Stop Normalizing The Court’s Corporatism

For its part, the White House may understand this truism. While Biden has put
forward its share of corporate-aligned judicial nominees, he also has broken with
past precedent and named more court appointees with public interest
backgrounds than any recent past president. Clearly, there’s some spark of
recognition that perhaps the Chamber path is a betrayal of everything Democrats
purport to stand for.

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 The trouble is that the Supreme Court nomination fight is not a lower court
appointment that can just imperceptibly slip through. It is the highest of
high-profile battles — and the conflict-averse Biden might not be under any kind
of popular pressure to name a Breyer replacement who will be judged on their
economic posture, rather than only on their positions on social issues.

Without that popular pressure as a countervailing force at his back, he will be

blasted by pressure from the Chamber, corporate media, and the conservative
dark money machine that buys Supreme Court seats — as well as their potential
Democratic allies like Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of
Arizona — who will all push Biden to pick a so-called “moderate”
corporate-friendly justice, rather than one with a pro-worker record and outlook.
Tip Jar
Why might there be so little voter focus on economic issues in a court
nomination? Why might Biden feel no popular pressure to name a pro-worker
nominee?

Because that’s just not the way most people are taught to even think about the
Supreme Court.

Right now, corporate media rarely ever focus on the court’s corporate record.
Indeed, the 2017 Neil Gorsuch nomination was notable only because it broke
from precedent and focused for one second on corporate power — something
that almost never happens. Most of the time, the Washington press corps often
downplays, camouflages, and normalizes business rulings, portraying the high
court’s extremist edicts as centrist and pragmatic.

The effect of that incessant media propaganda can be seen in the most recent
Gallup poll: As Roberts continues successfully shifting the court farther to the
economic right, he is now the most popular federal official in America and is even
viewed favorably by a majority of Democratic voters.

That’s not because the public loves Roberts’ esoteric court rulings that are helping
corporations rip off millions of people. It’s because Roberts knows how to play the
game: He occasionally offers the occasional non-lunatic decision on a
high-profile social issue that gets tons of headlines, all while his extremist
economic rulings are either depicted as “moderate” or aren’t part of the media
discourse at all.

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 If that dynamic persists into the nomination of Breyer’s replacement — if the
media discourse and Democrats’ rank-and-file just ignore economic issues — this
will be a lost opportunity of epic proportions.

Replacing one business ally with another would further cement the court as a
corporate star chamber for another generation, making America’s economy even
more rigged against workers, retirees, and climate justice than it already is.

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 Roberts Started A Revolution, Dems Enabled It
Chief Justice John Roberts is spearheading the right’s judicial coup — and
Democrats’ worship of norms is allowing it to accelerate.

Jun 30, 2022 • David Sirota

President Joe Biden greets Chief Justice John Roberts during Biden’s first State of the Union
address. (Saul Loeb, AP)

As the director of the horror show that was the Supreme Court’s 2022 term, Chief
Justice John Roberts on Thursday opted to script his movie with the same plot
twist as Don’t Look Up. In an environmental ruling literally issued on Asteroid Day,
Roberts channeled President Jeannie Orlean and aborted the government’s
nascent effort to halt the climate crisis imperiling the planet — a decision making
it more likely that the human story will mimic the film’s ending.

Amid desperate screams from scientists about the impending climate

catastrophe, Roberts limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA)
authority to regulate carbon emissions. He declared that “capping carbon dioxide
emissions at a level that will force a nationwide transition away from the use of
coal to generate electricity may be a sensible ‘solution to the crisis of the day,’ but
it is not plausible that Congress gave EPA the authority to adopt on its own such a
regulatory scheme” to halt the disaster.

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 As The Lever’s reporting has shown, today’s cataclysmic ruling (though slightly
narrower than it could have been) is part of a larger judicial coup fueled by dark
money that has bought both sides of the justice system — the petitioners and the
arbiters.

This coup — which has received far less attention than the January 6 plot —
features a cadre of unelected judges appointed by popular vote losers now
commandeering control of the government. It has resulted in the evisceration of
protections for voters, women, workers, consumers, retirees, and now every
living thing on the entire planet.

All of that was engineered by the coup's puppetmaster Roberts, a former U.S.
Chamber of Commerce lawyer and Bush 2000 election thief who enjoys incessant
corporate media billing as a thoughtful moderate — even as his rulings legalizing
corruption made this rampage possible, and even as he now threatens to
considerably expand the carnage.

And yet, Roberts, Leonard Leo, and the other real-life House of Cards operatives of
the American right are not the only reason this happened.

They were enabled by a Democratic Party and its own cast of West Wing
characters, who in the name of bipartisanship, comity, and manners started
surrendering right when the putsch began. At precisely the moment Roberts
began his crusade, these Democrats constructed an entire religion of normalism
— the worship of norms, institutions, and etiquette above every other principle or
inalienable right.

There is little chance this nightmare will end unless we first understand how this
religion took hold.

“Within The Mainstream”

Some could argue that Democrats’ normalism began in 1991, when Joe Biden
failed to block Clarence Thomas’s court nomination and the
Democratic-controlled Senate confirmed him to replace civil rights hero
Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court.

But that moment was the prelude. Democrats’ church of normalism really rose in
the mid-2000s, when during the culmination of Aaron Sorkin’s television

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 homage to bipartisanship, fully half of the Senate Democratic caucus voted with
Republicans to install Roberts as chief justice.

Having finished up a string of disillusioning jobs in Washington, I was quoted

back then in The New York Times for being particularly demoralized by Democrats’
refusal to seriously challenge the nomination of Roberts, the Rasputin with the
sunny smile who was cheerily billed as “the go-to lawyer for the business
community.”

But my anger was anomalous among Democratic Capitol Hill staff, liberal think
tanks, advocacy groups, and political committees. Instead, the prevailing
sentiment was that of a young senator named Barack Obama, who — in a preview
of his White House — lashed out at those begging Democrats to do whatever they
could to stop Roberts.

In a much-touted blog post that now reads both like a Jed Bartlet monologue and
a terrible omen of what was to come, Obama first scoffed at the idea of Democrats
wielding power in an aggressive way:

According to the storyline that drives many advocacy groups and Democratic
activists — a storyline often reflected in comments on this blog — we are up
against a sharply partisan, radically conservative, take-no-prisoners
Republican party. They have beaten us twice by energizing their base with red
meat rhetoric and single-minded devotion and discipline to their agenda.

In order to beat them, it is necessary for Democrats to get some backbone,

give as good as they get, break no compromise, drive out Democrats who are
interested in “appeasing” the right wing, and enforce a more clearly
progressive agenda. The country, finally knowing what we stand for and
seeing a sharp contrast, will rally to our side and thereby usher in a new
progressive era.

I think this perspective misreads the American people.

He then went on to apply the argument to Court nomination fights, telling

progressives to shut up and accept capitulation:

A majority of folks, including a number of Democrats and Independents,

don't think that John Roberts is an ideologue bent on overturning every
vestige of civil rights and civil liberties protections in our possession. Instead,
they have good reason to believe he is a conservative judge who is (like it or

36
 not) within the mainstream of American jurisprudence, a judge appointed
by a conservative president who could have done much worse (and probably, I
fear, may do worse with the next nominee)...

Short of mounting an all-out filibuster — a quixotic fight I would not have

supported; a fight I believe Democrats would have lost both in the Senate and
in the court of public opinion; a fight that would have been difficult for
Democratic senators defending seats in states like North Dakota and
Nebraska that are essential for Democrats to hold if we hope to recapture the
majority; and a fight that would have effectively signaled an unwillingness on
the part of Democrats to confirm any Bush nominee, an unwillingness which
I believe would have set a dangerous precedent for future administrations —
blocking Roberts was not a realistic option.

Obama did cast a ceremonial vote against Roberts when the confirmation was
already a foregone conclusion. However, he not only helped shift the Overton
Window to the hard right by casting Roberts as “mainstream,” he also had made a
much bigger statement about his objectives and that of his party. He was the high
priest of normalism.

Appeasement, compromise, preservation of norms, and surrender to the right in

the name of being “realistic” was the new priority — leading to a president who
campaigned on hope and change but then reneged on his promise to codify Roe v.
Wade, said he “regrets” trying to block Justice Sam Alito’s Supreme Court
nomination, praised the billionaire Koch Brothers pushing our politics far right,
tried to help Republicans cut Social Security, and demanded credit for boosting
the fossil fuel industry.

It also led to an administration that bailed out health insurers and banks while
millions were immiserated, and a White House that berated the left as “fucking
retarded” — so demoralizing Democratic voters that a reality TV star demagogue
soon took over and gave Roberts the three other right-wing zealots he’s now
using to repeal the 20th century.

“A Man Of Honor”
After four years of Donald Trump’s tenure that culminated with the installation of
Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, you might have expected Democrats to
discard the appeasement strategy, especially because party leaders have been so

37
 eager to get on cable television to cite the January 6 riot as proof that the end of
democracy is nigh.

Instead, though, the opposite has happened. With swamp things like Rahm
Emanuel and Politico hilariously promising the rise of “Biden Republicans,” Biden
has spent the first two years of his presidency trying to appease the GOP and
delivering on the only promise he seems intent on keeping: that “nothing would
fundamentally change.”

Biden has not only abandoned his promised legislative agenda and declined to
implement promised executive actions, he has continued to tout his “friend”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) as a “man of honor” — while
McConnell returns the favor by bragging about blocking Obama Supreme Court
nominee Merrick Garland, who might have helped prevent Roberts’ judicial coup
laying waste to America.

Worse, Biden and his White House are signaling they are unwilling to wield real
power to counter the Supreme Court’s radical conservative supermajority in any
significant way. Up until Thursday, they had steadfastly defended the filibuster.
They have also rejected court expansion proposals. In the days following the
overturning of Roe, the administration even brushed off demands that it consider
using its authority to offer reproductive health services on federal lands.

“The White House is unlikely to take up the bold steps to protect women's right to
have an abortion that Democratic lawmakers have called for in recent days,”
reported Reuters after the news service interviewed top administration officials.
“Biden and officials are concerned that more radical moves would be politically
polarizing ahead of November's midterm elections, undermining public trust in
institutions like the Supreme Court.”

Of course, that public trust is already gone. Gallup’s most recent poll shows the
public’s confidence in the Supreme Court has hit an all-time low. Apparently,
though, Biden and his staffers are so out of touch with reality and so devoted to
normalism they don’t even know that — and in exuding such a let-them-eat-cake
attitude, they may have catalyzed a rage we haven’t seen in generations.

The Church Of Normalism Must Fall

This gets to the silver lining in all the darkness — because things have gotten so
bad and Biden is so much less charismatic than Obama, maybe more people can

38
 see through the bullshit and stop allowing themselves to be politically
anesthetized, lobotomized, and euthanized by MSNBC and every other Acela
corridor elite media outlet whose mission is to ether progressives and scoff at the
working class.

Maybe there is finally a critical mass that has reached that horrible,
gut-wrenching disillusioning inflection point I found myself at back in the
mid-2000s — that turning point in my life when House Democrats tried to get me
fired for daring to criticize Biden’s bankruptcy bill and then I naively wondered
why almost nobody seemed bothered by Roberts’ installation.

Maybe Democrats’ cartoonish Neville Chamberlain act in the face of the Roberts
Revolution is going to mainstream righteous anger in ways we have not seen
since that kind of rage forced the party kicking and screaming to actually do the
great things of history.

If that somehow happens, then there’s plenty that can be done — not after the
next election, not next month, not tomorrow. Right now.

For example: Democratic activists and elected officials at every level of

government can demand that their leaders in Washington take a page out of the
playbook of their party’s most popular president in history and seriously press to
expand the court. The Congressional Progressive Caucus could right now
reintroduce Franklin Roosevelt’s own legislation and begin the reclamation of a
court that is obviously out of control.

Even if it fails like FDR’s bill did, it would send a message to the court that the
Roberts Revolution will no longer go unchallenged — and that was a message that
successfully countered the court in Roosevelt’s day.

Those same Democratic voices can demand Biden start signing the pile of
executive orders gathering dust in the White House — orders that could limit the
court’s EPA ruling today.

Meanwhile, Democrats in Congress could also rip a page out of recent history and
simply start legislatively overriding the court’s most extreme rulings. As The
American Prospect has noted, a Yale study shows that such overrides “blossomed”
between 1967 and 1990, and that in 1991 alone, a civil rights bill overrode “as many
as twelve Supreme Court decisions that had significantly cut back on workplace
antidiscrimination protections.”

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 A separate study found that “the 1990s was actually the golden age of overrides” —
but that after 1998, “Overrides declined as dramatically as they had ascended.”

Such overrides are particularly relevant in the West Virginia v. EPA case handed
down Thursday. As journalist Amy Westervelt pointed out on our latest Lever Time
podcast, the court was ruling on whether Congress had explicitly given the
agency the power to regulate power plants’ greenhouse gas emissions. That
means the Democratic president and the Democratic Congress can simply pass a
one-page bill making clear that yes, the EPA does have the power to try to halt the
climate crisis threatening all life on the planet.

These are just a few examples of things that can be done, and it is heartening to
see at least a few Democratic elected officials starting to speak up against their
conservative party members who are still stuck in the Obama Era — and still
enabling the Roberts Revolution.

But we should be under no illusion that countering that revolution will be

pleasant or easy. And most importantly, it will not be normal — which is a
challenge to the modern Democratic Party’s ethos.

At its core, normalism — the worship of norms and normalcy — is the abiding
religion championed by Obama and Biden, promoted by corporate media, and
internalized by rank-and-file Democratic voters. It is a religion embodied in these
kinds of viral tweets and explicitly articulated by former CIA agent and current
conservative Democratic Rep. Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, who last year
declared: “Nobody elected [Biden] to be FDR, they elected him to be normal and
stop the chaos.”

That statement was an admission that when the Democratic Party was most
popular and powerful, it was the opposite of a normalist party. Indeed, FDR and
his voters were not disciples of normalism — he spent much of his presidency
pressing a New Deal that violated all sorts of outdated norms that had for too long
protected a destructive Supreme Court and economic establishment. Same thing
for the Great Society era of civil, human, and economic rights.

But Spanberger’s comment was also a reminder that today’s normie Democrats
have been taught by their leaders and their media to love norms above all else —
even above reproductive rights, workers’ rights, consumer rights, and the
long-term survival of the human species.

40
 That shift to normalism is a big reason we are here, and why the Roberts
Revolution is accelerating.

Ending that religion is the first step to stopping the chief justice’s rampage —
before he destroys what’s left of the country.

41
 How A New Supreme Court Could Forever
Change America

One of the nation’s top legal experts says: “A Trump appointment will very much
solidify the power of corporations and businesses on the Supreme Court.”

Sep 23, 2020 • David Sirota

Photo Credit: Flickr

If you are a reader of this newsletter, you know we cover Supreme Court cases
that are often ignored by the media — cases about corporate power, labor rights,
and business regulations. These cases fill up the judicial docket and transform the
American economy, but they are typically overshadowed by high-profile battles
over social issues.

One huge question now is: How would adding another Donald Trump appointee
to the court potentially change the judicial system’s attitude towards corporate
power?

Bloomberg News reports that “the prospect of Republicans increasing their

majority to 6-3, after the death of liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg, could make
the court more favorable for business.”

42
 For a deeper look at the situation, I spoke with UCLA law professor Adam Winkler,
the author of the book We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their
Civil Rights. He has also written a series of articles for The Atlantic about
corporations’ winning streak at the high court.

What follows is an edited transcript of my discussion with Winkler about the

current situation on the court and how the judicial system could ultimately be
reformed.

David Sirota: In general, how much is the high court dealing with business and
economic issues?

Adam Winkler: While the high profile, controversial cases over issues like
abortion or gay rights take up all the headlines, most of the Supreme Court's
docket is focused on ordinary business disputes and disputes that affect
businesses and business people. They're not all corporate power cases directly in
the sense that they're not like Citizens United (and) about whether corporations
can spend money on elections, but they're issues like how do we read
employment discrimination laws.

The Supreme Court just this past year narrowly read federal employment
discrimination laws to make it harder for employees to bring an employment
discrimination action. You don't necessarily read that when you read it in the
newspaper as a corporate power issue, but it's clearly a corporate power case. It's
giving powers to corporate management and corporate employers and making it
easier for them to discriminate without the threat of significant legal liability.
Then there are cases that don't seem like they touch upon corporations at all, but
have a huge impact on the ability of the government to regulate corporations.

So for instance, if the court has what seems like a rather esoteric case about
whether Congress can structure a federal agency in a particular way so that its
commissioners are appointed... there's a move afoot among conservatives to
outlaw appointments so that every executive appointment should be subject to
being fired by the president at the president's whim. That doesn't seem like a
business case, but the effect of it is to make it harder for government agencies
that regulate businesses to function.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau would be a good example. The

director can't be fired by the president (and) serves a certain term of years. If you
call that into question, it makes it easier for businesses to escape regulation by
the CFPB.

43
 You’ve written about the Supreme Court’s rulings on speech issues that have
strengthened corporate power. How does that matter to regular people in their
daily lives?

One of the ways in which we restrict corporate speech is, for instance, requiring
dangerous products to provide labeling that informs consumers... (If) the
Supreme Court continues its trend of broadly reading commercial speech
protections in the Constitution, that will make it harder for the government to
force businesses to provide those warnings. We saw this, for instance, when a
lower court used the commercial speech doctrine to strike down graphic
warnings on cigarette labels…

The court could rule that basic securities laws that require disclosure of corporate
behavior are unconstitutional as a violation of corporations’ free speech rights. In
that case, it (would) really affect not only stockholders, but any employee who has
retirement funds wrapped up in a mutual or pension fund…

There's been a move afoot among libertarian law professors to push for the court
to second guess securities laws and securities regulations that require
corporations to disclose what they're doing (and) all the various kinds of activities
that they're taking to shareholders... So we could see corporate speech rights
expanded to make it harder for the capital markets to have the transparency
needed for safe investing.

Let’s assume that Trump gets his way and gets another nominee on the court …

David, Trump always gets his way. Totally. Sadly, that’s the state of American
politics.

OK, so then how much would another Trump appointment tilt the current
court? Is this a “game over” kind of moment?

I guess nothing's over in the sense that the game just keeps getting played over
and over again, it's not like a baseball game or a basketball game that runs out of
time or runs out of innings. Hopefully the country is going to survive another 10,
15, 20 years, but, look, a Trump appointment will very much solidify the power of
corporations and businesses on the Supreme Court.

44
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Fifteen years of
a dancer's life
 This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away
or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License
included with this ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the
laws of the country where you are located before using this
eBook.

Title: Fifteen years of a dancer's life

With some account of her distinguished friends

Author: Loie Fuller

Author of introduction, etc.: Anatole France

Release date: November 29, 2023 [eBook #72257]

Language: English

Original publication: United Kingdom: Herbert Jenkins Limited,

1913

Credits: Tim Lindell, Debrah Thompson and the Online

Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
(This file was produced from images generously made
available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FIFTEEN

YEARS OF A DANCER'S LIFE ***
 FIFTEEN YEARS OF
A DANCER’S LIFE
WITH SOME ACCOUNT OF HER
DISTINGUISHED FRIENDS
BY
LOIE
FULLER
WITH AN INTRODUCTION
BY

ANATOLE FRANCE

“SHE OUGHT TO WRITE OUT HER MEMORIES AND HER IMPRESSIONS.”—

Alexandre Dumas

HERBERT JENKINS LIMITED

ARUNDEL PLACE, HAYMARKET
LONDON, S.W. MCMXIII
Photo Langfier
LOIE FULLER
 ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN FRENCH.

LONDON AND NORWICH PRESS, LIMITED, LONDON AND

NORWICH
 INTRODUCTION

I HAD seen her only as she had been seen by multitudes from
every corner of the globe, on the stage, waving her draperies in
the first light, or transformed into a great resplendent lily, revealing
to us a new and dignified type of beauty. I had the honour of being
presented to her at a luncheon of the tour du monde at Boulogne. I
saw an American lady with small features, with blue eyes, like water
in which a pale sky is reflected, rather plump, quiet, smiling, refined. I
heard her talk. The difficulty with which she speaks French adds to
her power of expression without injuring her vivacity. It obliges her to
rely on the rare and the exquisite, at each moment to create the
requisite expression, the quickest and best turn of speech. Her
words gush forth, the unaccustomed linguistic form shapes itself. As
assistance she employs neither gestures nor motions, but only the
expression of her eyes, which changes like the landscapes that are
disclosed along a beautiful highway. And the basis of her
conversation, now smiling and now serious, is one of charm and
delightfulness.
This brilliant artist is revealed as a woman of just and delicate
sensibility, endowed with a marvellous perception of spiritual values.
She is one who is able to grasp the profound significance of things
that seem insignificant, and to see the splendour hidden in simple
lives. Gleefully she depicts, with keen and brilliant stroke, the humble
folk in whom she finds some ennobling and magnifying beauty. Not
that she is especially devoted to the lowly, the poor in spirit. On the
contrary she enters easily into the lives of artists and scholars. I have
heard her say the most delicate, the subtlest things about Curie,
Mme. Curie, Auguste Rodin and other geniuses. She has
formulated, without desiring to do so, and perhaps without knowing
it, a considerable theory of human knowledge and philosophy of art.
But the subject of conversation which comes closest to her is
religious research. Should we recognize in this fact a characteristic
of the Anglo-Saxon race, of the effect of a Protestant education, or
simply a peculiarity of temperament of which there is no
explanation? I do not know. At all events she is profoundly religious,
with a very acute spirit of inquiry and a perpetual anxiety about
human destiny. Under various guises, in various ways, she has
asked me about the cause and the final outcome of things. I need
not say that none of my replies were couched in a manner to satisfy
her. Nevertheless she has received my doubts serenely, smiling at
everything. For she is distinctly an amiable being.
As regards understanding? Comprehension? She is marvellously
intelligent. She is even more marvellously instinctive. Rich in so
many natural gifts she might have become a scholar. I have heard
her employ a very comprehensive vocabulary in discussing the
various subjects of astronomy, chemistry and physiology. But it is the
unconscious in her that counts. She is an artist.
I have been unable to resist the pleasure of recalling my first
meeting with this extraordinary and delightful woman. What a rare
chance! You admire afar off, as in a vision, an airy figure comparable
in grace to those dancers whom one sees on Pompeiian wall
paintings, moving in their light draperies. Some day you discover
once again this apparition in real life, softened in colour and hidden
under those thicker robes with which mortals cover themselves, and
you perceive that she is a person of good mind and good heart, a
soul somewhat inclined to mysticism, to philosophy, to religion, a
very deep, a very cheerful and a very noble soul.
There you have to the life this Loie Fuller, in whom our Roger
Marx has hailed the chastest and most expressive of dancers,
beautifully inspired, who reanimates within herself and restores to us
the lost wonders of Greek mimicry, the art of those motions, at once
voluptuous and mystical, which interpret the phenomena of nature
and the life history of living beings.
ANATOLE FRANCE
 CONTENTS

PAGE
I. MY STAGE ENTRANCE 15
II. MY A PPEARANCE ON A REAL STAGE AT TWO YEARS AND A 20
HALF
III. HOW I CREATED THE SERPENTINE DANCE 25
IV. HOW I CAME TO PARIS 43
V. MY APPEARANCE AT THE FOLIES-BERGÈRE 51
VI. LIGHT AND THE DANCE 62
VII. A JOURNEY TO RUSSIA—A BROKEN CONTRACT 73
VIII. SARAH BERNHARDT—THE DREAM AND THE REALITY 84
IX. ALEXANDRE DUMAS 101
X. M. AND MME. CAMILLE FLAMMARION 111
XI. A V ISIT AT RODIN’S 122
XII. M. GROULT’S COLLECTION 128
XIII. MY DANCES AND THE CHILDREN 137
XIV. PRINCESS MARIE 151
XV. SEVERAL SOVEREIGNS 165
XVI. OTHER MONARCHS 184
XVII. SOME PHILOSOPHERS 192
XVIII. HOW I DISCOVERED HANAKO 207
XIX. SARDOU AND KAWAKAMI 217
XX. AN EXPERIENCE 223
XXI. AMERICAN A FFAIRS 232
XXII. GAB 250
XXIII. THE VALUE OF A NAME 267
XXIV. HOW M. CLARETIE INDUCED ME TO WRITE THIS BOOK 273
 ILLUSTRATIONS

LOIE FULLER Frontispiece

PAGE
LOIE FULLER IN HER ORIGINAL SERPENTINE DRESS 29
THE DANCE OF FLAME 59
LOIE FULLER AND HER MOTHER 75
THE DANCE OF THE LILY 93
LOIE FULLER AND ALEXANDRE DUMAS 107
M. AND MME. CAMILLE FLAMMARION, AT JUVISY 115
THE DANCE OF FLOWERS 139
THE DANCE OF THE BUTTERFLY 143
DANCE TO GOUNOD’S “AVE MARIA” 159
THE DANCE OF THE BUTTERFLY 181
LOIE FULLER IN HER GARDEN AT PASSY 193
LOIE FULLER’S ROOM AT THE FOLIES-BERGÈRE 211
GAB 253
THE DANCE OF FIRE 261
THE DANCE OF FEAR FROM “SALOME” 283
 FIFTEEN YEARS OF A
DANCER’S LIFE

I
MY STAGE ENTRANCE

“W HOSE baby is this?”

“I don’t know.”
“Well, anyway, don’t leave it here. Take it away.”
Thereupon one of the two speakers seized the little thing and
brought it into the dancing-hall.
It was an odd little baggage, with long, black, curly hair, and it
weighed barely six pounds.
The two gentlemen went round the room and asked each lady if
the child were hers. None claimed it.
Meanwhile two women entered the room that served as dressing-
room and turned directly toward the bed where, as a last resort, the
baby had been put. One of them asked, just as a few minutes before
the man in the dancing-hall had asked:
“Whose child is this?”
The other woman replied:
“For Heaven’s sake what is it doing there? This is Lillie’s baby. It
is only six weeks old and she brought it here with her. This really is
no place for a baby of that age. Look out; you will break its neck if
you hold it that way. The child is only six weeks old, I tell you.”
At this moment a woman ran from the other end of the hall. She
uttered a cry and grasped the child. Blushing deeply she prepared to
take it away, when one of the dancers said to her:
 “She has made her entrance into society. Now she will have to
stay here.”
From that moment until the end of the ball the baby was the chief
attraction of the evening. She cooed, laughed, waved her little hands
and was passed round the hall until the last of the dancers was
gone.
I was that baby. Let me explain how such an adventure came
about.
It occurred in January, during a very severe winter. The
thermometer registered forty degrees below zero. At that time my
father, my mother, and my brothers lived on a farm about sixteen
miles from Chicago. When the occasion of my appearance in the
world was approaching, the temperature went so low that it was
impossible to heat our house properly. My mother’s health naturally
made my father anxious. He went accordingly to the village of
Fullersburg, the population of which was composed almost
exclusively of cousins and kinsmen, and made an arrangement with
the proprietor of the only public-house of the place. In the general
room there was a huge cast-iron stove. This was, in the whole
countryside, the only stove which seemed to give out an appreciable
heat. They transformed the bar into a sleeping-room and there it was
that I first saw light. On that day the frost was thick on the window
panes and the water froze in dishes two yards from the famous
stove.
I am positive of all these details, for I caught a cold at the very
moment of my birth, which I have never got rid of. On my father’s
side I had a sturdy ancestry. I therefore came into life with a certain
power of resistance, and if I have not been able to recover altogether
from the effects of this initial cold, I have had the strength at all
events to withstand them.
A month later we had returned to the farm, and the saloon
resumed its customary appearance. I have mentioned that it was the
only tavern in town, and, as we occupied the main room, we had
inflicted considerable hardship upon the villagers, who were deprived
of their entertainment for more than four weeks.
 When I was about six weeks old a lot of people stopped one
evening in front of our house. They were going to give a surprise
party at a house about twenty miles from ours.
They were picking up everybody en route, and they stopped at
our house to include my parents. They gave them five minutes in
which to get ready. My father was an intimate friend of the people
whom they were going to surprise; and, furthermore, as he was one
of the best musicians of the neighbourhood he could not get out of
going, as without him the company would have no chance of
dancing. He accordingly consented to join the party. Then they
insisted that my mother go, too.
“What will she do with the baby? Who will feed her?”
There was only one thing to do in these circumstances—take
baby too.
My mother declined at first, alleging that she had no time to make
the necessary preparations, but the jubilant crowd would accept no
refusal. They bundled me up in a coverlet and I was packed into a
sleigh, which bore me to the ball.
When we arrived they supposed that, like a well-brought-up baby,
I should sleep all night, and they put me on the bed in a room
temporarily transformed into a dressing-room. They covered me
carefully and left me to myself.
There it was that the two gentlemen quoted at the beginning of
this chapter discovered the baby agitating feet and hands in every
direction. Her only clothing was a yellow flannel garment and a calico
petticoat, which made her look like a poor little waif. You may
imagine my mother’s feelings when she saw her daughter make an
appearance in such a costume.
That at all events is how I made my debut, at the age of six
weeks. I made it because I could not do otherwise. In all my life
everything that I have done has had that one starting-point; I have
never been able to do anything else.
I have likewise continued not to bother much about my personal
appearance.
 II
MY APPEARANCE ON A REAL STAGE AT TWO
YEARS AND A HALF

W HEN I was a very small girl the president of the Chicago

Progressive Lyceum, where my parents and I went every
Sunday, called on my mother one afternoon, and
congratulated her on the appearance I had made the preceding
Sunday at the Lyceum. As my mother did not understand what he
meant, I raised myself from the carpet, on which I was playing with
some toys, and I explained:
“I forgot to tell you, mamma, that I recited my piece at the Lyceum
last Sunday.”
“Recited your piece?” repeated my mother. “What does she
mean?”
“What!” said the president, “haven’t you heard that Loie recited
some poetry last Sunday?”
My mother was quite overcome with surprise. I threw myself upon
her and fairly smothered her with kisses, saying,
“I forgot to tell you. I recited my piece.”
“Oh, yes,” said the president, “and she was a great success, too.”
My mother asked for explanations.
The president then told her: “During an interval between the
exercises, Loie climbed up on the platform, made a pretty bow as
she had seen orators do, and then, kneeling down, she recited a little
prayer. What this prayer was I don’t remember.”
But my mother interrupted him.
“Oh, I know. It is the prayer she says every evening when I put
her to bed.”
 And I had recited that in a Sunday School thronged by free-
thinkers!
“After that Loie arose, and saluted the audience once more. Then
immense difficulties arose. She did not dare to descend the steps in
the usual way. So she sat down and let herself slide from one step to
another until she reached the floor of the house. During this exercise
the whole hall laughed loudly at the sight of her little yellow flannel
petticoat, and her copper-toed boots beating the air. But Loie got on
her feet again, and, hearing the laughter, raised her right hand and
said in a shrill voice: ‘Hush! Keep quiet. I am going to recite my
poem.’ She would not stir until silence was restored. Loie then
recited her poem as she had promised, and returned to her seat with
the air of having done the most natural thing in the world.”
The following Sunday I went as usual to the Lyceum with my
brothers. My mother came, too, in the course of the afternoon, and
took her seat at the end of a settee among the invited guests who
took no part in our exercises. She was thinking how much she had
missed in not being there the preceding Sunday to witness my
“success,” when she saw a woman rise and approach the platform.
The woman began to read a little paper which she held in her hand.
After she had finished reading my mother heard her say:
“And now we are going to have the pleasure of hearing our little
friend Loie Fuller recite a poem entitled: ‘Mary had a little Lamb.’”
My mother, absolutely amazed, was unable to stir or to say a
word. She merely gasped:
“How can this little girl be so foolish! She will never be able to
recite that. She has only heard it once.”
In a sort of daze she saw me rise from my seat, slowly walk to
the steps and climb upon the platform, helping myself up with feet
and hands. Once there I turned around and took in my audience. I
made a pretty courtesy, and began in a voice which resounded
throughout the hall. I repeated the little poem in so serious a manner
that, despite the mistakes I must have made, the spirit of it was
intelligible and impressed the audience. I did not stop once. Then I
courtesied again and everybody applauded me wildly. I went back to
the stairs and let myself slide down to the bottom, as I had done the
preceding Sunday. Only this time no one made fun of me.
When my mother rejoined me, some time after, she was still pale
and trembling. She asked me why I had not informed her of what I
was going to do. I replied that I could not let her know about a thing
that I did not know myself.
“Where have you learned this?”
“I don’t know, mamma.”
She said then that I must have heard it read by my brother; and I
remembered that it was so. From this time on I was always reciting
poems, wherever I happened to be. I used to make little speeches,
but in prose, for I employed the words that were natural for me,
contenting myself with translating the spirit of the things that I recited
without bothering much over word-by-word renderings. With my firm
and very tenacious memory, I needed then only to hear a poem once
to recite it, from beginning to end, without making a single mistake. I
have always had a wonderful memory. I have proved it repeatedly by
unexpectedly taking parts of which I did not know a word the day
before the first performance.
It was thus, for instance, when I played the part of Marguerite
Gauthier in La Dame aux Camélias with only four hours to learn the
lines.
On the Sunday of which I have been speaking, my mother
experienced the first of the nervous shocks that might have warned
her, had she been able to understand, that she was destined to
become the prey of a dreadful disease, which would never leave her.
From the spring which followed my first appearance at the Folies-
Bergère until the time of her death she accompanied me in all my
travels. As I was writing this, some days before her end, I could hear
her stir or speak, for she was in the next room with two nurses
watching over her night and day. While I was working I would go to
her from time to time, rearrange her pillows a little, lift her, give her