We have all seen by now that the push to overturn Roe V Wade was not just about Christians trying to protect the unborn as they felt called to by their religion and certainly not about states rights. I will not argue the ruling or the policy, or how not all religions view the issue the same way as some Christians. Soon after the judgement was issued, we heard calls for a national abortion ban, pregnancy tests at state borders, expanding state powers over Native American Reservations, outlawing same sex marriage, and what ever else is getting tacked on to this unbelievable wave of Republican laws. A law in Florida was written so poorly that districts are left to guess what will bring down the fist of our dictator and his new personal army. Teachers are being told that rainbows aren’t allowed and refrain from ever mentioning a spouse. I hope the kids won’t get in trouble if they aske Mr. Smith what he did over the weekend or if he has any kids. Teachers being told that they have to report to parents if a kid comes out to them. The Ohio tragedy and women actively dying while their doctors consult lawyers, I cannot even fathom.
Below is a space where I will be gathering information. I will be adding to it as I come across things. A sort of clip board. If you have any articles or videos you think are interesting, please drop a link in the comments. I am doing this because there has been a shift in politics. The Republican Party has shifted, or at least how they are executing their ideas has shifted. Maybe it’s just the realization of the big donors’ dreams after decades of focused pursuit of redistricting++ and SCOTUS control.
I have believed for a long time that we needed some serious changes in this country. But this is NOT it. Whatever sect of fundamentalist Christians in alliance with business focused only on making more money and expanding the already grand canyon of wealth disparity, could mean 2020 was this country’s last real presidential election (for years/decades). [**articles added at end of post]. Using the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers as muscle…just bends my brain.
Abortion in early America
- PMID: 10297561
- DOI: 10.1300/J013v04n02_05
Abstract
This piece describes abortion practices in use from the 1600s to the 19th century among the inhabitants of North America. The abortive techniques of women from different ethnic and racial groups as found in historical literature are revealed. Thus, the point is made that abortion is not simply a “now issue” that effects select women. Instead, it is demonstrated that it is a widespread practice as solidly rooted in our past as it is in the present.
PIP: Abortion was frequently practiced in North America during the period from 1600 to 1900. Many tribal societies knew how to induce abortions. They used a variety of methods including the use of black root and cedar root as abortifacient agents. During the colonial period, the legality of abortion varied from colony to colony and reflected the attitude of the European country which controlled the specific colony. In the British colonies abortions were legal if they were performed prior to quickening. In the French colonies abortions were frequently performed despite the fact that they were considered to be illegal. In the Spanish and Portuguese colonies abortion was illegal. From 1776 until the mid-1800s abortion was viewed as socially unacceptable; however, abortions were not illegal in most states…Throughout the colonial period and during the early years of the republic, the abortion situation for slave women was different than for other women.
Slaves were subject to the rules of their owners, and the owners refused to allow their slaves to terminate pregnancies. The owners wanted their slaves to produce as many children as possible since these children belonged to the slave owners. This situation persisted until the end of the slavery era.
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On how the Koch brothers’ father built oil refineries for Hitler and Stalin
Fred Koch, the patriarch of the family, was an expert in building oil refineries, and he and a friend named William Rhodes Davis proposed building one in Germany during 1934, ’35, that period in there. In 1933, Adolf Hitler became chancellor of the Third Reich in Germany, so this meant working under the Third Reich. And in order to get permission, they actually had to go to Hitler himself, and William Rhodes Davis did the “Heil Hitler” to greet Hitler, and finally they got Hitler to greenlight this proposal so that they could build an oil refinery in Hamburg.
Dark Money
The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right
by Jane Mayer
Hardcover, 449 pages purchase
And the Hamburg Oil Refinery, built by the Winkler-Koch Co., became key, according to several German historians I talked to, to Hitler’s war efforts. By the time they built it, it was already clear that Hitler had very major military ambitions, but one of the things he was unable to do was to refine high-octane oil for warplanes. What this plant did was create that capacity, and it eventually supplied much of the fuel that was needed for Hitler’s Luftwaffe.
He was not a Nazi, and I certainly don’t suggest that in the book, but what he was was an American businessman looking for a good deal, and he was looking all over the world to see how he could make some money. Oddly, and what’s been known before, is before working under Hitler’s Third Reich, Fred Koch had worked for Stalin, where — under Stalin’s first five-year plan — Fred Koch helped build up the Russian, the Soviet oil refineries and really gave huge muscle to the oil industry in the Soviet Union.
Here again, you get this strange recurrence of a kind of little touch of Nazi Germany, because … Charles and Frederick, the oldest sons, were put in the hands of a German nanny who was described by other family members as just a fervid Nazi. She was so devout a supporter of Hitler that finally, after five years working for the family, she left of her own volition in 1940 when Hitler entered France because she wanted to celebrate with the Fuehrer.
It was in the 1990s. Koch Industries was dragged in front of the U.S. Senate. There was a committee investigating the company, looking into accusations that it had stolen oil from Indian reservations by purposefully mis-measuring it and had pocketed millions and millions of dollars of extra money by doing so. The company didn’t deny it at the time. … They said it had happened, but they said it was an accident. But if you take a look at the Senate report, what you see is that other companies that were operating around the same time in that same oil patch didn’t have this problem. They’ve raised eyebrows in pushing the limits of what a company can get away with for decades during this period, and to some extent it was in harmony with Charles Koch’s hard-lined libertarian views, that the government just should not interfere with private enterprise.
Fred C. Koch, the father of Charles and David, was a founding member of the John Birch Society.[10]
Ties to the Koch Brothers
The Heritage Foundation has received funding from organizations with connections to the Koch brothers. In 2012, the Heritage Foundation received $650,000 from the Claude R. Lambe Foundation, which was one of the Koch Family Foundations before it closed in 2013. The Lambe Foundation contributed at least $4.8 million to the Heritage Foundation between 1998 and 2012.
In recent years, the Heritage Foundation has also received funding from Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, including $53,300 in 2010 and $69,850 in 2012. The Koch brothers have donated millions of dollars to Donors Trust through the Knowledge and Progress Fund, and possibly other vehicles.
Heritage Foundation Called Out for Blocking Action on Climate Change
In July of 2016, nineteen U.S. Senators delivered a series of speeches denouncing climate change denial from 32 organizations with links to fossil-fuel interests, including the Heritage Foundation.[4] Sen. Whitehouse (RI-D), who led the effort to expose “the web of denial” said in his remarks on the floor that the purpose was to,”shine a little light on the web of climate denial and spotlight the bad actors in the web, who are polluting our American discourse with phony climate denial. This web of denial, formed over decades, has been built and provisioned by the deep-pocketed Koch brothers, by ExxonMobil, by Peabody coal, and by other fossil fuel interests. It is a grim shadow over our democracy in that it includes an electioneering effort that spends hundreds of millions of dollars in a single election cycle and threatens any Republican who steps up to address the global threat of climate change. . . .
Former South Carolina Republican Senator Jim DeMint became president of the Heritage Foundation in 2013. Based on an interview with DeMint later that year, NPR reported that his goal in that position “is to make Heritage the most influential public policy organization in the country.”[17] The New York Times reported that DeMint’s approach “is to spread the ethos of the Heritage Foundation more broadly and among younger recruits. “Conservative ideas are invigorating,” he said. “We had allowed them to become too serious.””[18]
The Heritage Foundation has become very politically active under DeMint. The New York Times reported in early 2014 that under the presidency of Jim DeMint, “Heritage has shifted. Long known as an incubator for policy ideas and the embodiment of the party establishment, it has become more of a political organization feeding off the rising populism of the Tea Party movement.“[18] Founding Heritage trustee Mickey Edwards said, “DeMint has not only politicized Heritage, he’s also trivialized it.”[18]
DeMint has played a public role as Heritage President, going on a 9-city “Defund Obamacare” tour in 2013 with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX). The tour was funded by Heritage Action.[19]
In its four-decade history, the Heritage Foundation has had significant effect on U.S. domestic and foreign policy. According to The Atlantic, “Heritage has shaped American public policy in major ways, from Reagan’s missile-defense initiative to Clinton’s welfare reform: Both originated as Heritage proposals. So, too, did the idea of a universal health-care system based on a mandate that individuals buy insurance. Though Heritage subsequently abandoned it, the individual mandate famously became the basis of health-care reforms proposed by Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama.”[24]
Inventing, then Opposing, the Individual Healthcare Mandate
The idea of an individual mandate to buy health insurance originated at the Heritage Foundation[25], and was outlined in a 1989 paper by Heritage scholar Stuart Butler.[26] In debates about health care reform in the 1990s, prominent Republicans, including House Minority Leader Newt Gingrich, expressed support for plans based on an individual mandate.[25] However, since the passage of the 2010 Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare), according to The New York Times, Heritage “has taken pains to distance itself from its past support of an individual mandate: it wrote a court amicus brief noting its change of heart, and Mr. Butler wrote an op-ed article in USA Today this month headlined “Don’t blame Heritage for ‘ObamaCare’ mandate.””[27] In 2013, Heritage Action for America sent Heritage Foundation President Jim DeMint and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) on a “Defund Obamacare Town Hall Tour.”[28]
Fighting Immigration Reform
As a response to the earned citizenship provisions of the comprehensive immigration reform bill under debate in the U.S. Senate as of May 2013, Robert Rector, a Heritage research fellow, and Jason Richwine, policy analyst, released a special report on immigration entitled “The Fiscal Cost of Unlawful Immigrants and Amnesty to the U.S. Taxpayer”. The co-authors estimated that the cost of offering a pathway to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants (part of a plan by a bipartisan group of senators to overhaul the immigration system), would create a “lifetime fiscal deficit” for the government of $6.3 trillion. This cost estimate was based on several big assumptions (that the majority of immigrants formerly in the country illegally will eventually use government programs for low-income Americans, for example) and was rejected by many conservatives.[29]
The report was highly criticized by both the left and the right, with prominent conservatives speaking out against it.[29] Haley Barbour, a Republican leader and former governor of Mississippi, called the report a “political document” and stated, “This gigantic cost figure that the Heritage Foundation puts out is actually the cost over 50 years. If you put the 50-year cost of anything in front of the public, it is going to be a huge number.”[29] Even anti-tax activist Grover Norquist denounced the study, claiming the cost estimate was “wildly overblown.”[29] Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform spoke out against the report, arguing that the underlying analysis only focused on costs while ignoring all the benefits of the immigration bill.[30]
The study was further discredited when the Washington Post brought to light that co-author, Jason Richwine, had argued in his Harvard doctoral thesis, “IQ and Immigration Policy,” that Hispanic immigrants have lower IQ’s than white Americans and that the U.S. would ameliorate problems by only selecting high-IQ immigrants.[31] Amid the controversy, Richwine, resigned from the Heritage Foundation.[32]
HOW BIG OIL AND BIG TOBACCO PARTNERED WITH THE KOCH BROTHERS TO TAKE OVER THE GOP BY JEFF NESBIT
At the time, no one knew much about Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE). When I’d asked about funding for CSE, it had taken a while to get a clear answer. But, eventually, it became obvious when Rich Fink showed up at critical strategy sessions and spoke with unblinking certainty about what Charles Koch was interested in and wanted done without question. Though few have heard of Rich Fink, he’s been in the inner circle of the Koch brothers’ movement-building efforts for decades, influencing the creation and actions of Koch-funded front groups.
CSE was, in effect, a wholly owned subsidiary of Koch Industries, the second-largest privately owned company in the United States, with interests in manufacturing, trade, and investments.
But what I didn’t know when I began consulting for Citizens for a Sound Economy was what any of the connections between CSE and the Koch brothers were really all about. What was the endgame? Today, we know.
According to publicly available IRS records, the five essential pillars of just such a Tea Party movement network were all funded and in place by that spring of 2009—the Sam Adams Alliance to direct grassroots efforts; the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity to direct propaganda efforts in state capitals across the United States; the State Policy Network to coordinate funding and free-market policies at state-based think tanks; hundreds of grants from the Koch foundations to American universities that were linked in through SPN; and, of course, CSE’s successor, Americans for Prosperity, built to coordinate the effort nationally.
All of them saw their budgets expand significantly as Obama ran for the White House and then took office—months or even a full year before the Tea Party movement erupted into public view. This explains why the Tea Party movement was able to mobilize, spread, and network so rapidly, as if by magic.
CNP
The Council for National Policy (CNP) is a right-wing 501(c)(3) nonprofit group that has been described as “a little-known club of a few hundred of the most powerful conservatives in the country”[1] and “a hyper-secretive Christian Right powerhouse that helps set the movement’s agenda”.[2] Anne Nelson’s book about CNP, Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right, describes how the organization connects “the manpower and media of the Christian right with the finances of Western plutocrats and the strategy of right-wing Republican political operatives.”[3]
CNP’s membership is comprised of leaders in the family values, national defense and decency movements woven by members of the Dead Billionaires Club like the Adolph Coors Foundation, the Koch brothers, Richard DeVos, Richard Scaife and other billionaires and foundations who have invested heavily in developing a complex web of far-Right groups, think-tanks and politicians over the last forty years to return the United States to its pre Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 19th century capitalist roots.[5]
Barry W. Lynn, the executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, told the New York Times about the CNP meeting ahead of the 2004 Republican National Convention, “The real crux of this is that these are the genuine leaders of the Republican Party, but they certainly aren’t going to be visible on television next week.“[6]
“Utah Democratic Party Chairman Wayne Holland said that the Council for National Policy meeting gives [the public] ‘a rare opportunity to see – or more accurately not see – what Republicans are all about. And that is how policy is influenced in this country by what amounts to a secret society of far-right-wing conservatives and religious extremists.'”
History and Founding
As reported by ABC News, “CNP was conceived in 1981 by at least five fathers, including the Rev. Tim LaHaye, an evangelical preacher who was then the head of the Moral Majority. (LaHaye is the co-author of the popular Left Behind series that predicts and subsequently depicts the Apocalypse). Nelson Baker Hunt, billionaire son of billionaire oilman H.L. Hunt (connected to both the John Birch Society and to Ronald Reagan‘s political network), businessman and one-time murder suspect T. Cullen Davis, and wealthy John Bircher William Cies provided the seed money.”[23] The report also notes how “Christian activist Paul Weyrich took responsibility for bringing together the best minds of conservatism, and his imprint on the group’s mission is unmistakable: It provided a forum for religiously engaged conservative Christians to influence the geography of American political power.”[23]
A 2020 New Republic book review of Anne Nelson’s Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right retells the story of CNP’s founding: “In 1981, Weyrich, Viguerie, LaHaye, Republican functionary Morton Blackwell, anti-feminist lawyer Phyllis Schlafly, oil scion Nelson Bunker Hunt, beer magnate Joseph Coors, and some 50 other conservatives began meeting every Wednesday morning in Viguerie’s handsome Virginia home. It was there that they founded the Council for National Policy. The CNP was deliberately modeled after the Council on Foreign Relations, a prestigious nonprofit think tank with thousands of prominent members and deep connections to America’s foreign policy elite. Similarly, the CNP focused early on international affairs, presenting Oliver North with a special award “for national defense” and inviting far-right Salvadoran death squad leader Roberto D’Aubuisson to give a talk. It also sought tax-exempt status, citing the group’s similarity to the CFR. And though membership in the CNP was likewise highly exclusive and by invitation only, Nelson wryly notes that its 1982 executive committee included Richard Shoff, ‘former state secretary of the Indiana Ku Klux Klan.'”[3]
2016, Ed Corrigan, then the vice president for policy promotion at the Heritage Foundation, was summoned to Trump Tower in New York to join the senior leadership team of the Trump transition. From inside the building where the climactic personnel decisions of “The Apprentice” were once taped, Corrigan oversaw the staffing of 10 different domestic agencies. Donald Trump, the former reality-TV star, was now the president-elect of the United States, and he had an administration to fill.
The job of staffing the government is the first, and in many ways defining, challenge faced by every president.
What is more, in the days after his election, Donald Trump replaced the head of his preliminary transition operation, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, with Vice President-elect Mike Pence and purged Christie’s allies from the team, throwing away months’ worth of their work recruiting and vetting personnel; a senior Trump aide, Stephen K. Bannon, made a show of gleefully dumping binders filled with résumés into the trash.
Corrigan has over 25 years of leadership experience on Capitol Hill and in the conservative movement. In 2009, GQ magazine named Corrigan to its list of “50 Most Powerful People in DC.” He was tapped by the Trump Transition to lead the personnel selection process for all domestic policy departments, placing hundreds of conservatives in key administrative positions.
Known for his passion to build the conservative movement, he works with the Conservative Action Project and serves on the board of the Leadership Institute. Corrigan previously served in senior roles in the U.S. Senate. From 2003 through 2012, he was executive director of the Senate Steering Committee, the caucus of conservative senators, under two chairmen — Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) and Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL). He served again at Steering as executive director under Chairman Mike Lee (R-UT) during the Spring of 2017.
He got his start on Capitol Hill as an intern on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee under Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC). From 1991 to 2003, he served in various capacities, including legislative director, in the office of Senator Bob Smith (R-NH). In 2011, Corrigan received the Weyrich Award for Capitol Hill Staffer of the Year, an honor named after former Hill aide Paul M. Weyrich, who became the first president of The Heritage Foundation. In 2013, Corrigan was named Heritage Foundation’s group vice president for policy promotion, which worked to advance conservative policy on Capitol Hill and in the conservative movement.
The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies is an American legal organization of conservatives andlibertarians that advocates for a textualist and originalist interpretation of the United States Constitution. It features a student division, a lawyers division, and a faculty division. The society currently has chapters at more than 200 American law schools. The lawyers division comprises more than 70,000 practicing attorneys (organized as “lawyers chapters” and “practice groups” within the division) in ninety cities.[2] The society is headquartered in Washington, D.C. Through speaking events, lectures, and other activities, it provides a forum for legal experts of opposing views to interact with members of the legal profession, the judiciary, and the legal academy.[4] It is one of the United States’ most influential legal organizations.[5][6]
The society’s initial 1982 conference was funded, at a cost of $25,000, by the Institute for Educational Affairs.[11] Later funding of $5.5 million came from the John M. Olin Foundation. Other early donors included the Scaife Foundation and the Koch family foundations. Donors to the Federalist Society have included Google, Chevron, Charles G.andDavid H. Koch; the family foundation of Richard Mellon Scaife; and the Mercer family.[14] By 2017, the Federalist Society had $20 million in annual revenue.[2]
From 1958-1966, the foundation was used to launder money for the Central Intelligence Agency, which funded covert anti-communist propaganda.[3] The fund was largely inactive until 1969, when John M. Olin was disturbed by the Willard Straight Hall takeover at his alma mater, Cornell University. At the age of 80, he decided that he must pour his time and resources into preserving the free market system.[4]
The Foundation is most notable for its early support and funding of the law and economics movement,[5] a discipline that applies incentive-based thinking and cost-benefit analysis to the field of legal theory. Olin believed that law schools have a disproportionately large impact on society given their size and to this end decided to focus the majority of his funding there.[citation needed]
The executive director of the Foundation in its early years was conservative activist Michael S. Joyce, who left to head the similar Bradley Foundation.[5] William E. Simon, a leverage buyout pioneer who was United States Secretary of the Treasury under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, was president of the Foundation from 1977 until his death in 2000.[6] He frequently discussed the foundation’s commitment to supporting the “counter-intelligentsia”. Conservative scholar James Piereson was the last executive director[5] and secretary.
The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, commonly known as the Bradley Foundation, is an American charitable foundation based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, that primarily supports conservative causes.[1][2]
The foundation provides between $35 million and $45 million annually to a variety of causes, including cultural institutions, community-based nonprofit organizations in Milwaukee, and conservative groups. It has been active in education reform including school choice, and efforts to change election rules.[1][3] Approximately 70% of the foundation’s giving is directed to national groups while 30% is Wisconsin-based.[1] The foundation had about $850 million in assets as of 2021.[3]
The Manhattan Institute (MI) is a right-wing501(c)(3) non-profit think tank founded in 1978 by William J. Casey, who later became President Ronald Reagan‘s CIA director.[1] It is an associate member of the State Policy Network.
“The Manhattan Institute concerns itself with such things as ‘welfare reform’ (dismantling social programs), ‘faith-based initiatives’ (blurring the distinction between church and state), and ‘education reform’ (destroying public education),” Kurt Nimmo wrote October 10, 2002, in CounterPunch.[3] It was also recognized as leading the Republican/corporate efforts to destroy Ralph Nader and his supporters, in the 1990s.
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The Proud Boys are a right-wing extremist group with a violent agenda. They are primarily misogynistic, Islamophobic, transphobic and anti-immigration. Some members espouse white supremacist and anti-Semitic ideologies and/or engage with white supremacist groups.
The Oath Keepers are a loosely organized group of right-wing anti-government extremists within the larger militia movement. While they allow anyone to join, the Oath Keepers explicitly focus on recruiting current and former military, law enforcement, and first responder personnel. The group was founded in 2009 by their current leader, Stewart Rhodes.
Alex Jones has repeatedly hosted Stewart Rhodes, who has used the show to call for violence
Infowars’ Alex Jones is a violent conspiracy theorist who helped incite the January 6 insurrection. Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes has made numerous appearances on The Alex Jones Show over the years. In the months leading up to the January 6 attack, Rhodes used his platform on the show to state that his group is ready to engage in pro-Trump violence and kill Democrats.
Roger Stone got Oath Keepers to provide security for him on January 6
Roger Stone is a conspiracy theorist who received a pardon from former President Donald Trump. The New York Times reported in a February 14 article headlined “First They Guarded Roger Stone. Then They Joined the Capitol Attack”:
At least six people who had provided security for Roger Stone entered the Capitol during the Jan. 6 attack, according to a New York Times investigation.
Videos show the group guarding Mr. Stone, a longtime friend of former President Donald J. Trump, on the day of the attack or the day before. All six of them are associated with the Oath Keepers, a far-right anti-government militia that is known to provide security for right-wing personalities and protesters at public events.
++Tom Delay
The prosecution alleged that it was part of a strategy to ensure that Republicans were in charge of drawing the Texas district map that would favor the GOP in Washington.
Republicans won the majority in the Texas House of Representatives in 2002 for the first time since the Civil war period.
The National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) is the oldest and largest national grassroots[citation needed] anti-abortion organization in the United States with affiliates in all 50 states and more than 3,000 local chapters nationwide.[3][N 1]
In 1966, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB) asked James T. McHugh to begin observing trends in the reform of policy on abortion.[4] The NRLC was founded in 1967 as the “Right to Life League” to coordinate its state campaigns under the auspices of the NCCB.[1][5]
To appeal to a more broad-based, nonsectarian movement, crucial Minnesotan leaders proposed an organizational constitution that would separate the NRLC from the direct supervision of the NCCB, and by early 1973 McHugh and his executive assistant, Michael Taylor, proposed a different plan to move the NRLC toward independence from the Catholic Church.
Campaign financing[edit]
In 1978, James Bopp was hired to serve as legal counsel[28] and the NRLC began to have more involvement in elections to further influence state and federal legislation to advance their anti-abortion position. In 1980, the National Right to Life Political Action Committee (NRL PAC) was founded to support anti-abortion and almost exclusively Republican candidates.[29][30] Also that year, Bopp led a walkout of conservative delegates from a White House Conference on Families[31] and defended the NLRC’s 1980 presidential election voter guides from legal challenges of improper electioneering by a nonprofit.[32]
By the 1990s, the NLRC became a major player in campaign financing through its $2 million campaign contributions in the 1996 presidential election. In 1999, the NLRC aggressively lobbied against the 1999 Shays-Meehan bill, which later became the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA), because it would reclassify many of its and other nonpartisan groups’ ads as campaign contributions. A bipartisan group of legislators including John McCain, Ronnie Shows, and Zach Wamp criticized the organization for getting involved in issues that did not affect the unborn.[33] Legislative Director Douglas Johnson defended the NRLC’s involvement in campaign financing, saying that the bill “would cripple the prolife movement.”[34]
In 2003, Bopp filed a lawsuit on behalf of the NLRC against the Federal Election Commission about whether BCRA violates the First Amendment in its prohibition of the use of “soft money” in campaign financing. On May 1, 2003 the district court issued judgment on the case and the NLRC appeals to the Supreme Court.[35] Later that year, the case was consolidated along with eleven other lawsuits into McConnell v. FEC.[36] In the ruling, the Supreme Court upheld the control of soft money and the regulation of electioneering communications in BCRA.[37]
The death of Justice William Rehnquist and retirement of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor changed the Supreme Court to a conservative majority and in 2007 NLRC’s affiliate Wisconsin Right to Life brought a case against the FEC again challenging BCRA provisions. In FEC v. Wisconsin Right to Life, Inc., the justices held that issue ads may not be banned from the months preceding a primary or general election.[38]
***
Real Woman's Health 