The MAGA legal networks that could topple Planned Parenthood and gut women’s healthcare
In the second year of Donald Trump’s presidency, a young lawyer with crisply shorn blond hair approached the podium at a gathering for Texas members of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group that wields immense power in the US judicial system. As vice-president of the group’s Fort Worth chapter, Matthew Kacsmaryk had the honor of presenting the first speaker.
“We are blessed to have Judge Edith Jones,” Kacsmaryk announced. Jones, a longtime judge on the US fifth circuit court of appeals, stepped on stage to introduce the evening’s guest, her friend, the supreme court justice Clarence Thomas. In her introduction, Jones also hailed the four new conservative judges Trump had appointed to join her on the appeals court.
“They’ve raised the bar for the fifth circuit since I got on,” she said. “And that’s thanks to the Federalist Society, to Leonard.”
Leonard Leo needed no last name in his introduction to this crowd as he took his seat in a black leather chair across from Thomas. The justice was the featured speaker but Leo may have been the most important person in the American legal system in that room – a conservative activist who had built the Federalist Society into a political powerhouse and helped Trump create the supreme court majority that, in 2022, erased federal protections for abortion.
His influence continues to be on display now in one of the most consequential cases moving through the American legal system – one that seeks to strike another blow to abortion rights and could possibly bankrupt Planned Parenthood, one of the nation’s leading providers of healthcare for women. It’s a lawsuit that has been filed by an anti-abortion activist tied to Leo and heard by judges – from the lower courts to the fifth circuit appeals court – who are also linked to Leo.
Three of the people on the stage at the Federalist Society event in Fort Worth in 2018 – Kacsmaryk, Jones and Leo – have all played key roles in the case. Though the stakes in this case couldn’t be higher for one of the nation’s oldest healthcare providers, it is about more than abortion or healthcare. The lawsuit is a parable about Leo’s power amid a presidential election season whose outcome will probably determine to what extent Leo will continue to reshape the makeup and ideology of the nation’s courts. [Continue reading…]