Al Regnery

One Judicial Nominee In, The Battle Has Already Begun

Submitted by Kyle on March 23, 2009 - 9:26am

Last week we noted how, right out of the gate, one of the Right’s primary talking points in justifying its immediate opposition top President Obama’s first judicial nominee, was that he was a fundraiser for ACORN and that his nomination was “payback” to the organization.

Of course, as it turned out, Hamilton’s “ties” to ACORN consisted entirely of a one-month stint as a canvasser for the organization thirty years ago.

But that hasn’t stopped Hamilton’s supposed ties to ACORN from becoming a central focus on the Right’s mounting opposition, as it is working its way into Fox News’ coverage of his nomination and continues to be cited, with Robert Stacy McCain predicting that it is only a matter of time before the ACORN-obsessed Michelle Malkin learns about it, saying we’re in “gasket-blowing countdown mode [before] Mt. Malkin erupts.”

To her credit, Malkin has yet to take that bait, as far as we can tell, but the same cannot be said for Ed Messe, Tony Perkins, David McIntosh, TK Cribb, and Alfred Regnery, who issued a joint statement opposing Hamilton’s nomination which placed his “ties” to ACORN at top of their list of objections:

Judge Hamilton is committed to an extreme political agenda.

Hamilton is a former ACLU leader who lent his legal skills to the far-left special interest group.

He was a fundraiser for the liberal activist group ACORN, the sponsor of the most comprehensive criminal voter fraud campaign in American history.

It seems pretty clear that Hamilton’s short-lived, age-old ties are going to remain a centerpiece of the Right’s opposition to his nomination – opposition that is becoming nearly universal among right-wing groups who work on the issue, judging by this article on Focus on the Family’s website:

Curt Levey, executive director of the Committee for Justice, called that a bad sign.

"If this was just one extreme liberal among a bunch of moderate picks that would be OK," he said. "The problem is that the administration is touting this as an example of how moderate their picks will be. If this is what the Obama administration considers 'moderate' then I think the nation is in trouble."

Wendy Long, counsel for the Judicial Confirmation Network, agreed Hamilton is no moderate.

"Hamilton appears, from our initial study, to have made rulings that show his willingness to bend the law to reach outcomes that would be favored by the ACLU, which are inconsistent with the proper role of a judge," she said. "If this is an example of what the White House thinks is a 'moderate judge,' I would shudder to think of what they think a 'liberal' judge looks like.

"If (Obama) continues in this vein, I think there will be a political price to pay in 2010."

Ed Whelan, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, said that people need to understand Obama's agenda.

"It's a radical agenda that would dramatically restrict American citizens' power to self government," he said. "What people need to do is wake up … because if not the courts are going to be transformed in the direction of liberal judicial activism, and the courts will be governing everything in this country."

Hamilton has the support of both of his home-state senators, including Republican Richard Lugar, as well as the support of the president of the local chapter of the Federalist Society, but that apparently doesn’t matter as right-wing judicial activists are committed to waging a battle over judicial nominations, beginning with the very first nominee.

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Who Benefits From the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund?

Submitted by Kyle on November 25, 2008 - 11:21am

The Hartford Courant raises some interesting questions about just what the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund - a right-wing Virginia non-profit organization overseen by the likes of Ed Meese, William Bradford Reynolds, and Al Regnery - is doing with the funds it has been raising because it seems like most of it is going to toward fund-raising, salary for its leadership, and to prop up right-wing organizations to which they have ties, like The American Spectator, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and the Federalist Society :

Tens of thousands of Americans have contributed to the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund after reading letters like Stephanie Lawlor's. But while those donations total millions every year, the fund spends only pennies on the dollar directly assisting officers facing criminal charges, state and federal filings show.

Over the past five years, the charity collected more than $13 million, primarily through direct-mail pitches. But most of that money — more than $9 million — went right back to the professional fundraisers hired by the nonprofit legal defense fund.

Last year, for example, the group spent 81 cents on fundraising for every dollar collected, according to federal tax forms. After other expenses, the defense fund last year devoted only about 8 cents on the dollar to charitable grants, the tax forms show.

That grant money — about $275,000 — was less than the group's co-founders paid themselves in salary and benefits for the year. David H. Martin, a Washington lawyer who serves as chairman, collected $156,000, while Alfred Regnery, publisher of The American Spectator Magazine, received $81,000 for the part-time job of secretary-treasurer. In addition, the charity paid $54,000 into retirement accounts for Martin and Regnery.

In a telephone interview earlier this month, Martin said the charity is at the mercy of expensive mail solicitations. "It's hard to raise money through direct mail. Why? Because postage is so expensive," he said. "It's just a killer."

Martin said he believed the group's fundraising efficiency had consistently improved in recent years. But federal filings suggest just the opposite, showing the cost of raising money increasing each of the last five years, from about 60 cents in fundraising costs for every dollar raised in 2003, to 81 cents last year.

At the same time, administrative costs have soared, particularly for salaries and rent. For years, the legal defense fund was run out of Martin's law office. But the nonprofit now subleases space at Regnery's financially strapped American Spectator. The initial rent in 2003 was $9,000 a year, but the nonprofit agreed last year to increase its payments to $42,000 a year — about a third of the total rent for the American Spectator's space. Martin said the rent covers a large amount of storage space and offices for himself and a clerk, and he said he thought the rent was fair.

And even as the charity devoted only a small fraction of its budget to grants, not all of the money doled out went to help accused officers. Instead, the charity's executives have sent a sizable and growing amount of cash to a small number of universities and conservative policy groups not mentioned in their fundraising pitches.

The charity's biggest beneficiary last year, for example, was not a police officer, but the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a national campus-based think tank that promotes "limited government, individual liberty, personal responsibility, the rule of law, market economy, and moral norms."

The Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund sent $75,000 to the institute last year, part of at least $360,000 the defense fund has pledged. Regnery, secretary-treasurer of the defense fund, is chairman of the institute's board of trustees. The charity has also given tens of thousands of dollars to the Federalist Society, described by The American Conservative magazine as a "training ground for young conservative lawyers"; to the Law and Economics Center at George Mason University in Virginia, a leading center of conservative and libertarian legal studies; and to a project at McDaniel College — Martin's alma mater.

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Regnery on Judges

Submitted by Ezra on February 22, 2008 - 5:15pm

Human Events interviewed its publisher, Al Regnery, who has written a book of his own on movement conservatism. While everyone on the Right talks about so-called “activist judges”—a political theme going back to southern resistance to the 1954 Brown v. Board decision—not too many writers actually cite Brown or Chief Justice Earl Warren anymore. For Regnery, though, Brown is the first case of “judicial fiat”:

[Al Regnery] But, in terms of the reaction, there have been a lot of things that have been done by the left that didn’t reflect democracy, or republican values -- republican with a small ‘r’ -- which conservatives did react to.

I think case in point is, starting with 1953 with the elevation of Earl Warren, the chief justice in the Supreme Court, the things that the courts have done, by unelected people, which have been moving this country to the left, actually since the Roosevelt administration. That’s been somewhat corrected now, but there is a tendency of judges oftentimes to rule in ways that certainly would not be what the people want them to do. They do that by judicial fiat, and the normal thing of conservatives to do is to get together and react to it one way or another.

[Jed Babbin]: That leads to another point. One of the things, it seems to me, that differentiates between liberals from conservatives is that conservatives are more dedicated to personal freedom. And when you have the courts imposing limitations on those freedoms, conservatives are more apt to react negatively.

AR: Well, that’s true. In a broader sense, conservatives are also, really, more dedicated to the rule of law and due process. And even in cases where the result may not bother people, the way the courts went about it often sends conservatives up the wall. Case in point is, as I point out in the book, is the Brown v. Board of Education case in 1953 and ‘54, desegregating the schools. A lot of people thought, there’s nothing wrong with desegregating the schools, it’s the right thing to do. But what in the world are these nine unelected people in Washington telling us in Texas or Mississippi or wherever it may be how to run our school systems?

What could the federal government and the 14th Amendment have to say about militant segregation? If some states wanted to use police dogs and fire hoses to maintain their system of unequal education for blacks, who are we to judge? That appears to be Regnery’s relativistic question about the Supreme Court’s intervention in Brown. In the vestigial memory of the modern Right, apparently, it still comes down to states’ rights.