Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus slammed President Barack Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid for working alongside a well-oiled machine of “dark money” leftist donors to engage in “judicial cronyism,” packing courts with liberal activist judges.
“The actions of this Administration, Senator Reid, and secret organizations like the Democracy Alliance and the ACS with which they partner, are reprehensible and have no place in our country,” Priebus said in a statement provided exclusively to Breitbart News. “The Administration and Senator Reid have hijacked the D.C. Circuit and have threatened the sanctity of the independent federal judiciary.”
At issue is a Monday report from the Washington Free Beacon‘s Alana Goodman on documents from the American Constitutional Society (ACS) boasting during a fundraising pitch at a secretive Democracy Alliance meeting in Chicago this spring about how it met “performance goals” which Goodman wrote “included helping to secure the Senate filibuster reform that paved the way for reshaping the D.C. circuit court.”
“The group said it ‘advanced filibuster reform’ by ‘highlighting [the] issue in national media’ and ‘successfully leveraging attention to create outcry for confirmation of long-stalled D.C. circuit nominees,’ according to its presentation,” Goodman wrote, adding: “The ACS also said it drafted and supplied materials that were used by Senate Democrats to advance the rule change.”
In the RNC release from Priebus, the GOP noted that since ACS achieved this Senate Democrat-fueled rules change, “three members of ACS’s network were confirmed by the Senate to the DC Circuit Court.” In the headline of the release, the RNC called this “judicial cronyism.”
Their confirmation, Priebus’s operation noted, has wide and far-reaching implications on national policy. “In essence, with the addition of the three judges from the ACS network, the DC Circuit Court is now packed with a majority of liberal judges, who will make rulings on the constitutionality of key issues such as Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, EPA regulations, immigration, and a host of other issues,” the RNC said in the press release provided to Breitbart News.
“The American people, Congress, and the media need to hold this Administration, Senator Reid, the Senate Democrats, and their ‘dark money’ allies accountable for playing politics with the American judiciary,” Priebus said.
The Democracy Alliance is a secretive far-left-wing organization of influential leftist donors, groups, and other progressive leaders. According to a report from the Media Research Center’s Business and Media Institute’s Mike Ciandella detailing five “clones” of George Soros–Warren Buffett, Michael Bloomberg, Pierre Omidyar, Tom Steyer and Jonathan Soros–the Democracy Alliance was “founded in part by liberal billionaires George Soros and Peter Lewis” and “seeks to coordinate the donations of dozens of wealthy liberals including eco-activist billionaire Steyer and Soros’ own son, Jonathan.”
“The Alliance encourages its supporters to donate to 172 liberal groups that made up a ‘Progressive Infrastructure Map,'” Ciandella wrote.
That the secretive umbrella leftist organization–and specifically ACS, which won’t disclose its donors–appears to have been behind influencing the Senate Democrats and Reid to blow up the nuclear option in the Senate rules, changing for the first time in the history of the United States Senate rules as they pertain to judicial nominations, is sure to make Reid’s move late last year even more controversial, as the fate of the Senate Democratic majority hangs in the balance heading into November’s midterm elections.
Before Reid pushed the nuclear option button, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and other Senate Republicans argued that his doing so was a move to distract from the failures of Obamacare.
McConnell said on the Senate floor in a fiery speech about Reid’s nuclear option move:
Actually, this is all basically the same debate. And rather than distract people from Obamacare, it only reinforces the narrative of a party that is willing to do and say just about anything to get its way. Because that’s just what they’re doing all over again. Once again, Senate Democrats are threatening to break the rules of the Senate in order to the change the rules of the Senate. Over what? Over a court that doesn’t even have enough work to do?
Millions of Americans are hurting because of a law Washington Democrats forced upon them, and what do they do about it? They cook up some fake fight over judges, a fake fight over judges that aren’t even needed.
Sen. John Thune (R-SD), the chairman of the Senate GOP conference, added then that “Senate Democrats are desperate to talk about anything other than the disastrous train wreck of ObamaCare,” and that the nuclear option move was an effort to “change the subject away from all of their broken ObamaCare promises.”
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