Phil & Ted's Sexy Boomer Show - Tuesday, June 9, 2026

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1. 🎵
2. KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles and globally online at kpfk.org.
3. Welcome to Phil and Ted's Sexy Boomer Show. I'm Ted Bonnet.
4. I'm Phil Proctor and I'm sorry, Ted, if I look a little remote because I am actually here.
5. Yes.
6. But I just flew in from the D.C. area yesterday.
7. Yeah, I can smell it.
8. No, that's because I'm feeling a little jet-fuelish.
9. Oh, I see.
10. I see.
11. I just got a whiff of corruption.
12. A whiff of corruption, yes.
13. That's his latest perfume.
14. Yeah.
15. It's in a little gold bottle, right?
16. I think he's, I think, I think the Trumpster is really starting to lose it.
17. I mean, we know he's starting to lose it.
18. But what I think is, I'm going to make a prediction right here and now.
19. Okay.
20. We saw his outburst on NBC.
21. Yes, we did.
22. Over the weekend.
23. And we know he's profane behind the scenes.
24. He's profoundly profane.
25. And when people get old, they lose their ability to filter.
26. I have a feeling that we will see before long
27. The only people who could do that are on dialysis
28. I think we're going to see him
29. Get more and more angry old man-ish
30. And I think he's going to start cursing
31. Start cursing?
32. No, no, on camera
33. I mean, I think he's going to be completely
34. On camera?
35. Yeah
36. Well, he's still doing all that
37. He's going to fall apart
38. More?
39. Yeah
40. And, you know, we had
41. I don't know if you know, but last Thursday
42. there was a fairly unannounced military maneuver assault on Long Beach and Pasadena.
43. A practice school?
44. I think so.
45. It was weird.
46. They have a building in Pasadena, an abandoned hospital,
47. that looks somewhat like a Havana architecture.
48. And it was sort of ostensibly to do maneuvers on how to attack a building.
49. And we had what looked like SEALs, special forces, coming in,
50. helicopters coming into the roof of this place,
51. guys rappelling down onto the roof.
52. They were shooting rifles.
53. They were blowing bombs up.
54. And the neighborhood didn't even know, really.
55. I thought it was a movie.
56. And Trump had said that, you know,
57. he was going to integrate military training in civilian backgrounds.
58. Yes, he did say that. He warned us.
59. And I think this is an intimidation tactic.
60. And, of course, they've said, well, you know, we do this all the time.
61. No, they don't do this all the time.
62. So that makes it really wonder about what's going to happen come the midterms.
63. But, you know, at least we have the three branches of government, checks and balances to reel this all in.
64. The only checks and balances I know are the bank accounts of the billionaires.
65. Yeah, but you know what?
66. But, yeah, we've got at least –
67. But maybe we don't.
68. And today we're going to ask that question.
69. Maybe we don't have the judicial branch with the brakes on all of this madness.
70. We going to ask the question is today U Supreme Court the most corrupt in U history And our guest thinks so Lisa Graves is the author of the national best book Without Precedent
71. How Chief Justice Roberts and his accomplices rewrote the Constitution and dismantled our rights.
72. This book is a bombshell.
73. It's so well-written.
74. It's so god-awful to understand the level of corruption.
75. You read it twice.
76. I did.
77. because my bad eyes i have to have it read to me and so we have we're so fortunate to have lisa
78. graves with us hello lisa hello hello it's a joy to be with you very oh thank you so much for coming
79. on the show where are you calling us from uh i'm calling you from northern wisconsin uh on the
80. wisconsin side near duluth oh that's oh summer must be there now it must be nice summer summer
81. We have six months of winter up here and six months of not winter.
82. I know the feeling.
83. Now, Lisa, let's talk a little bit about who you are.
84. You've worked as an insider.
85. This is what's so valuable about what you wrote.
86. You really did work as an insider on Capitol Hill.
87. You're one of the nation's foremost experts in exposing how special interests are distorting public policy
88. and trying to thwart the public's interest in a thriving and inclusive democracy, as you wrote,
89. and impede measures to protect our environment and mitigate climate change.
90. Other than that...
91. Yeah, you just freeze a bird.
92. Yeah.
93. You are now the founder and executive director of True North Research,
94. a national investigative watchdog group that works with journalists and other researchers
95. to expose the dark money fueling regressive agendas that are targeting vital institutions in our republic,
96. like the courts and our public schools.
97. Hey, is it dark because it's soaked in oil?
98. I've never quite...
99. Some of it is. Some of it is. That's a great question.
100. I mean, the dark money thing, we've been talking about that as just the greatest problem we're facing, Citizens United.
101. We're going to talk about all of that.
102. But again, I think it's really important for people because we're going to have a very intense conversation here.
103. I'm ready to go.
104. We're ready to go with you, Lisa, to get as much as we can of your book out in one hour because it's public service.
105. It's something that needs to be said.
106. And again, your perspective is very important because you were chief counsel for nominations for Senator Patrick Leahy in the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee.
107. You were also a senior strategist for the ACLU on national security and civil liberties.
108. You've been asked and have given expert testimony before several committees in the U.S. Senate and House of Reps.
109. And you've helped shape the national debate about the culture of corruption on the U.S. Supreme Court.
110. So you have really an insider's perspective and what you saw certainly didn't make you happy.
111. We're going to focus on – now, just to draw the picture, we have a conservative supermajority on the court, which is what has tipped the balances.
112. Well, listen, I call it the extreme court.
113. Right?
114. But your book focuses on Chief Justice John Roberts and that's what we're going to – who we're going to speak about primarily today.
115. because I don't think people realize that that friendly-faced, nice smile that he has,
116. masks a much nefarious, if you will, background in his history.
117. He's the nation's 17th Chief Justice.
118. Listen, I loved him when he did his television show.
119. Mr. Roberts?
120. No, I think you got that wrong.
121. Oh, yeah?
122. Yeah.
123. Mr. Roberts?
124. There is a reporter named John Roberts also.
125. Oh, yeah.
126. Yeah but being only the 17th Chief Justice his role is extremely consequential historically He also the richest by far on the Supreme Court with a net worth of over million Because of his wife though right
127. Well, no.
128. He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth actually.
129. His high net worth makes him, as you wrote, wealthier than 99.9% of the US population.
130. He was born, as you say, on third base, the son of a Bethlehem Steel executive with access to the best private schools money could buy.
131. And you wrote, but his wealth has surged since he was appointed to the Supreme Court because his wife Jane has made a fortune as a headhunter.
132. She's been paid large commissions for placing elite lawyers at elite law firms that litigate before the Supreme Court and other courts.
133. Not a conflict of interest there, eh?
134. So let's talk about Roberts.
135. You start in your book about – you go back to his history.
136. Before he was nominated to the Supreme Court, he was involved in the Bush v. Gore election fiasco in Florida.
137. Even before that, he was an operative in the Reagan administration.
138. But let's start with – well, again, let's talk about his background.
139. He is not a – he hasn't shown himself to be a neutral judge siding on fairness.
140. He seems to have his finger on the scale in a political sense, correct?
141. Yes.
142. Well, I will say, gosh, just let me begin by saying what an honor it is to be on your show and have this conversation with you and with your audience.
143. I wrote this book because I was very concerned about how the court was operating not really like a court but like an arm of a political party, like a weapon in a far-right agenda, quite frankly.
144. That's right.
145. And how John Roberts really was a Reagan revolutionary. He was back in the Reagan era. And on the court, he is still a Reagan revolutionary. He is still advancing an extreme agenda. And in some instances, he is using the courts to win battles that he lost when he was a lawyer for the Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush administration.
146. So he's someone who I think really deceived the American people in his confirmation hearings when he was nominated to be the chief justice, when he claimed that he was going to be merely an umpire calling balls and strikes.
147. He wasn't chosen to be an umpire. He was chosen to be a player to move this ball down the field to regress American law, to roll back our rights. And that's what he's done on the bench. And so I can tell you a little about how I tried to stop him.
148. initially from getting a judgeship.
149. Well, when he was announced a Supreme Court nominee, you wrote that you wept.
150. Yes, I was very concerned. Concerned is the least of it, really. I had been certain that
151. he was going to be the nominee if there was a vacancy, if there were a vacancy for George W.
152. Bush. That's why I asked my boss if I could ask Senator Reid, who was then the whip for the
153. Democrats that there not be a recorded up or down vote for John Roberts when he was nominated and
154. confirmed to the D.C. Circuit, which is one of the appellate courts in the country. And so that's why
155. John Roberts was confirmed by unanimous consent. It doesn't mean that he was unanimously approved
156. to the D.C. Circuit. It just meant that I was trying to preserve for the Democrats
157. an opportunity to vote against him when he was elevated or promoted to the Supreme Court,
158. which I was certain that he was going to be George W. Bush's nominee for the Supreme Court,
159. and he was.
160. And so when he was confirmed, I wept.
161. So you knew that he was a bad choice for America as far as the Republic is concerned Could you specifically you know what were the things that he had done that made you so concerned about him
162. Well, I thought that John Roberts was really like Robert Bork without the goatee and the sort of villainous look about him that the editorial cartoonist had really captured.
163. Yeah, or the funny name. Bork?
164. Robert Bork was very loud about his regressive views.
165. And John Roberts, in essence, learned from that and was quiet about his views.
166. But he held and continues to hold very extreme views about the presidency, really aggrandizing presidential power, and a very narrow view of civil rights and the rights under the Voting Rights Act.
167. And so he's someone who, if you remember back then, maybe it was like 1999, 2000, there was this chant that began at a Federalist Society event.
168. The Federalist Society is a group that was created in the early 1980s to create a pipeline for power for right wing lawyers to become judges and get other key posts.
169. It was funded by a man who is faded in history, but who was very famous for a while, Dick Scaife.
170. He was an heir to the Mellon Banking fortune. And Dick Scaife was sort of a demi-billionaire back then. And he funded this group to really create this pipeline. And John Roberts is a beneficiary of that.
171. So fast forward to 1999, 2000, after Clarence Thomas had been confirmed to the Supreme Court along with David Souter for a number of years, there was this chant, no more suitors.
172. The right wing felt that they had wasted a seat on Souter because he was following the law.
173. He was following legal precedents like Roe versus Wade and other precedents.
174. And they didn't want any more suitors.
175. Right.
176. How dare how dare a judge follow those precedents?
177. So John Roberts, yeah, is the beneficiary of the No More Suitors campaign. He and Sam Alito, both that chant was not, did not go for them. In fact, if you look at what happened that year in 2005, what you see is John Roberts gets confirmed.
178. Harriet Myers is nominated by George W. Bush to the Supreme Court. These howls of protest by none
179. other than Robert Bork and others against her arose, you know, on this No More Suitors campaign
180. saying she wasn't doctrinary enough. She wasn't reliable enough. She wasn't going to be a sure
181. vote. So after about three weeks of pressure, George W. Bush pulled down the nomination of
182. his longtime counsel, and they swapped in Sam Alito. And so Sam Alito and John Roberts were
183. confirmed, you know, as part of this agenda to capture the court. And, and, and not just like
184. to capture with fair judges, right, to capture with judges who are going to use that judicial power,
185. I think, illegitimately, quite frankly, to roll back our rights to reverse the key precedents
186. of the 21st and 20th century. It was an agenda. I mean, when you look at the big picture,
187. the macro view here. Now we can look in retrospect and it's a little sad because we had this moment in the 60s where we swung to a liberal society.
188. We had a robust middle class. People could afford housing. They could afford one-income families.
189. And the rate of wealth among the middle class was rising faster than the wealth class and that had to come to a stop.
190. And the Reagan revolution sort of represented the fight back to clawing back to a more conservative age.
191. and roberts
192. uh... was involved he was
193. not only he was he was the go-to guy for the reagan administration
194. uh...
195. You wrote in the book that when Justice Sandra Day O'Connor was nominated by Reagan, you wrote that she was more of a centrist but disappointed us when she voted to stop the recount ballots in Florida.
196. And just to show you the coziness of all this, John Roberts, when he was working for the Reagan administration, he coached Sandra Day O'Connor on how to not answer questions when she was in the nomination hearings.
197. So this is our chief justice teaching her not to answer correctly.
198. And then in 2000, when he was an appellate lawyer in private practice, Roberts traveled to Florida to advise then-Florida Governor Jeb Bush, the president's brother, on how to navigate the recount.
199. And less than a week before the court issued its partisan 5-4 ruling of Bush v. Gore, they stopped the recount.
200. And when that happened, Jeb sent a personal note to Roberts thanking him.
201. And as you write in the book, there's a good chance that Gore would have won.
202. Yeah, this is it's really extraordinary when you think about where we are now in 2026 compared to 2000.
203. That was a hyper partisan decision by the Rehnquist court.
204. That was John Roberts mentor Bill Rehnquist.
205. And although Souter was on the other side of that vote, it was five Republicans voting to stop the ballots from being counted in Florida.
206. and they adopted arguments that were made by the Bush team.
207. And we now know that John Roberts helped advise
208. some of the main lawyers arguing the cases below
209. before the Florida Supreme Court.
210. But it wasn't just him.
211. Brett Kavanaugh went to Florida also to help with the recount.
212. And also Amy Coney Barrett went to Florida to help with the recount.
213. And we also learned through the research that I've done
214. and that my team has done
215. that Ted Cruz was instrumental in bringing people together for that recount, including lawyers like
216. John Roberts. That was one of his first calls. But also Leonard Leo, the man that Donald Trump tapped
217. to choose his list for the Supreme Court to handpick the Supreme Court justices in Trump's
218. first term. Leonard Leo was organizing lawyers, including John Roberts and others, to be there,
219. people who had been either part of the federal society or helped or friendly to the federal society.
220. And so you have a situation where these key players who were not famous then, but are very famous now,
221. were part of that effort to block Americans' votes from being counted in that election.
222. And what that meant was not just that we had a president in George W. Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney,
223. who lied us into the war in Iraq, who, you know, made false claims about weapons of mass destruction
224. and the like. But what that meant was that in 2004, they were incumbents when they ran again,
225. and incumbents typically have an advantage. And so they were in the place to benefit from those
226. vacancies, from Sandra Day O'Connor stepping down after George W. Bush was elected in 2004.
227. And then you had Bill Rehnquist dying in the fall of 2005. And that opened up two seats for George W. Bush. Had Gore been president, it would be a Democratic majority in terms of the appointees on the Supreme Court. But not just that.
228. That wasn the only sort of thing of fate or thing that was sort of changed in history due to this unprecedented intervention by the Supreme Court in 2000 But also as we all know we saw the Republicans block President Obama from filling the vacancy
229. when Scalia died. And Obama was a twice duly elected, popularly elected
230. president of the United States. And the Republicans, conspiring with their funders
231. and with people like Leonard Leo, blocked that vacancy from being filled with Merrick Garland,
232. filled it with Neil Gorsuch. Their claim was you couldn't confirm someone at the Supreme Court
233. while the presidential election year was happening, even though he died in February,
234. and the election was in November. Then, of course, fast forward to 2020, when Ruth Bader Ginsburg
235. dies in September of 2020, they moved Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court within a month as
236. Americans were voting Donald Trump out of office. And in the middle of that, you had Brett Kavanaugh
237. confirmed despite the very serious allegations against him. So if Gorsuch had not been confirmed
238. and if Amy Coney Barrett had not been confirmed, you would have a super majority on the Supreme
239. Court of Democratic appointees. So you had this complicity by all branches because Mitch McConnell,
240. who was a Senate leader at the time, I mean, he considers one of his proudest achievements was to
241. destroy the Merrick Garland nomination. I mean, these guys are just completely...
242. So who are the overlords?
243. Who are the puppet masters?
244. Who's in the writer's room doing all of this?
245. Oh, I love that question.
246. Yeah, I'm super happy on this show with you, Phil and Ted.
247. That is a great question, and it really is the right question,
248. because this didn't happen overnight.
249. Like I said, the Federalist Society was initially staked by Dick Scaife,
250. a very notorious right winger who ultimately would go on to fund the attack on the tax on Bill Clinton, the American spectator attacks and the like, along with a bunch of other dirty tricks.
251. He was a very Nixonian supporter of the far right in America.
252. You know, when the Federalist Society was launched back in 1982, it claims to have been, you know, just three students getting together to advance so-called conservative ideas.
253. Well, it's two leading advisors were Robert Bork, who had just been confirmed to a judgeship by the Senate after Reagan nominated him, and Antonin Scalia, who a few months later would also be nominated to a circuit court position.
254. And the Federal Society was created not just as a so-called conservative organization, but as a conservative and libertarian organization.
255. And we know that the biggest funder of the Libertarian Party in 1980 was David Koch.
256. He was the brother of Charles Koch.
257. Charles and David Koch had cumulatively spent hundreds of millions on elections to influence elections in America.
258. Oil money.
259. Oil money.
260. Oil money.
261. Yeah, big oil money.
262. Not only did they do that.
263. These people play the long game.
264. You see the Koch brothers have funded curriculums in college campuses in return for right-wing ideology and a lot of universities take that money.
265. I think Harvard was the one that did not and they've been under attack.
266. Yeah.
267. And it makes you wonder.
268. It's like, OK, they're playing the long game very successfully.
269. Where the hell are the Democrats?
270. I mean they couldn't even get Ruth Ginsburg to step down when the coast was clear.
271. I mean why is the opposition so feeble to this Well you know this issue of when you step down that something why we got to have term limits That one of the reforms that has to happen because justices should not be able to time their stepping down to keep their party in power which is what the Republicans have done very effectively and the Democrats quite frankly as you point out have not
272. But let me just tell a little bit more about the story of the money because you are so right.
273. Dark money is what it's – everybody –
274. Most people who are aware, and it's shocking, we want to talk about that, why it seems that the American public is either willfully ignorant or completely clueless as to the severity of the situation here when we have a criminal presidency not obeying laws and we're not having the judicial branch stand up to them.
275. That's where the real danger lies.
276. So what's the motivation?
277. It's money.
278. And Citizens United really opened up the floodgates.
279. And most people will tell you that unless until that is somehow pulled back, there's not much hope for the republic.
280. Yeah, I mean, the dark money is extraordinary.
281. And Charles Koch, as you said, it has played the long game.
282. We know from my research that he's been targeting universities for capture since the 1960s.
283. Like, how can he get his fringe ideas into, you know, into a position where they become dominant?
284. And after that initial phase in the 1960s, he began substantially investing in universities. And just to really put a finer point on that, back in 1971, there was a memo called the Powell Memo, which I'm sure a lot of your listeners have heard about. It was written by Lewis Powell. He was then nominated by Nixon to the Supreme Court.
285. But in that memo, Lewis Powell wrote this piece, this strategy piece for the Chamber of Commerce, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in which he claimed outlandishly that no one had more influence in American, less influence.
286. No one had less influence in American politics than the American businessmen.
287. It wasn't true then and it's not true now.
288. And he asserted that the businesses and these right wing CEOs needed to spend more money on focusing on the courts and on universities.
289. And Charles Koch gave a speech a year or so later in which he said the Powell memo didn't go far enough because it didn't tie enough strings to the money going into universities.
290. And then, as you point out, Charles Koch has spent enormous sums. I think the tally that one of my colleagues did a few years ago was more than half a billion dollars has been invested by Charles Koch just in universities. And it's not just to promote classical education. Those grant agreements that we've seen have strings attached so that his team gets to choose the faculty.
291. They get to basically pave the way for fringe ideas, people proposing fringe ideas to become mainstream at the universities.
292. But back to the –
293. So in a sense, they're calling free thinking in some ways critical thinking.
294. We're speaking with Lisa Graves, the author of the national bestselling book, Without Precedent, How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights.
295. Lisa, would you mind if you could lean a little more into your microphone?
296. You seem a little –
297. Yes.
298. Yeah, there we go.
299. Thank you so much.
300. There we go.
301. I did.
302. I got so animated, I moved the mic in a gesture.
303. Thank you for catching that.
304. No worries.
305. You know, it's for the state, after all.
306. All of this is being recorded.
307. Yes.
308. Right?
309. Yes.
310. But, okay, so now we're starting to understand why, you know, the cause of this.
311. But, again, Roberts, who you're focusing on, this guy is a lifelong operative for the right wing.
312. When he was at with the Reagan administration he was vocally opposed to affirmative action minority set employment tests racial discrimination
313. He wrote – as you wrote in an administration memo, Roberts asserted that the Supreme Court precedents against voluntary prayer or so-called moments of silence in schools seemed indefensible.
314. He also routinely used his perch, as you wrote, to assail women's equality rights.
315. including the Equal Rights Amendment.
316. And you wrote, quote, his writings show him to be arrogant and sarcastic on the subject.
317. So this is a guy who is far from impartial.
318. And the question I have is, now we know why they pick young nominees because their shelf life is long to keep the political wins the way they want.
319. But why not pick an experienced associate judge to run the court?
320. Why someone, well, he was young, no question, we understand that, but how does this work?
321. How does a guy out of nowhere suddenly become chief justice?
322. Well, so the chief justice position is a position that gets filled by a presidential nomination with the Senate's consent.
323. And I think it should be someone who is skilled in administration and has an impeccable record for fairness,
324. But that's not how it has worked. It has been used in the case of John Roberts to reward someone with such a position who is, you know, very devoted to this right wing agenda.
325. But it is it is not just the chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.
326. It's also the chief justice for the U.S. judicial system.
327. And so the person who is the chief justice gets to choose who sits on almost all of the judicial committees for issues like ethics and the like, including overseeing the judicial conference, which is the chief judges of the other circuits of the circuit courts and representatives of the district courts.
328. And in that role, the judicial conference has swept under the rug the very serious ethical concerns and allegations and evidence against Clarence Thomas, against Sam Alito and others.
329. And so you have a judiciary helmed by someone in John Roberts determined to not hold justice accountable for violating the ethics rules in numerous ways.
330. But, you know, John, who is John Roberts? He's someone who when he was nominated in 2005 for that chief justice position, his his confirmation was backed by a bunch of billionaires, including people who, you know, were not famous then, like Charles Koch and also Harlan Crowe, not famous then, very famous now.
331. Yeah. So he was one of the first beneficiaries of dark money influencing the appointment process for the Supreme Court. And so he has has had no incentive to do anything about it. In fact, I would say to you and your listeners that when you look at what John Roberts did around the immunity decision, the unprecedented counter constitutional creation of immunity from criminal prosecution for Donald Trump, John Roberts needed Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas to be part of those decisions.
332. decisions or he risked Amy Coney Barrett swinging to the other side. And so you have two men,
333. Clarence Thomas, whose wife was demonstrably, we have ample evidence that she was actively
334. contacting the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, trying to subvert that election,
335. stop the recount from happening. We know that from the Washington Post reporting.
336. And we know from other reporting that she was actively soliciting fake electors in Arizona
337. and in Wisconsin, sending emails, urging those state reps.
338. And yet Clarence Thomas refuses to recuse himself.
339. He takes gifts of big RV campers, real estate for his mom's house, expensive trips on private planes.
340. Is it fair to say he's taking bribes?
341. I think that it's definitely intended to influence him by keeping him on the court because what the ProPublica reporters uncovered in their Pulitzer Prize winning investigation from two years ago,
342. So what they uncovered was that in 1999, 2000, Clarence Thomas was complaining that he wasn't living the lifestyle to which he wanted to be accustomed.
343. And he was threatening to quit, to resign, to go take a job as a as a partner at a law firm and cash out.
344. And then all of a sudden there was all this all these trips started coming in.
345. All these benefits started coming in to keep him basically on the court where he gets to live the lifestyle of a billionaire, specifically Harlan Crowe, but also, you know, hang out, rub elbows with Charles Koch and other billionaires at, you know, secret men's clubs and the like.
346. And we also have Clarence Thomas like this. So you have John Roberts not insisting that Clarence Thomas recuse himself from cases where he is clearly conflicted due to his wife's activity, but also where he himself is conflicted.
347. So that Citizens United decision that you mentioned, which is just had such a devastating effect on our democracy, injecting billions of dollars into our elections by billionaires, you know, trying to drown out the voices of ordinary people and also distort their voices, basically ply them with propaganda.
348. What happened in that Citizens United case is an absolute scandal.
349. In that ruling, Clarence Thomas sat on that case. It was a 5-4 ruling. Just weeks before that decision was issued, Jenny Thomas received $500,000 from Harlan Crowe to stake her nonprofit, a 501c4 nonprofit, that she was creating to take advantage of the decision to come by the Citizens United in that City United case to allow these C4 groups, this dark money operation,
350. to really proceed. So on New Year's Eve, she rushed an emergency LLC request to the Virginia
351. Corporation Council because she needed to cash the check. There's no scenario in which Jenny
352. Thomas did not tell Clarence Thomas that their benefactor, the man that had been bankrolling them
353. for luxury trips to his resorts and his super yacht and his super private plane, that he didn't
354. know that she got $500,000 to cash to fund this organization. He did not recuse himself. He was
355. the swing vote. Had he recused himself, it would have been a four to four decision that would have
356. left the campaign finance laws in place. And Thomas had the audacity, Clarence Thomas, to write a
357. concurring opinion in which he claimed that under the precedent, new precedent of Citizens United,
358. expanding on the notion that money is speech,
359. anything that chills the spending of money is unconstitutional.
360. And so he affirmatively attacked disclosure
361. because disclosure of who was giving money to these C4 groups
362. would chill the spending of money
363. knowing that his wife had just received a half a million dollars
364. from his billionaire backer.
365. You know, I always thought of Citizens Party.
366. Let me clear my throat.
367. Can't clear my mind.
368. I always thought of Citizens United as being oligarchs untied, right?
369. Yes.
370. Really?
371. I call it Billionaires United but I like billionaires untied But this wasn out of the blue Ginny Thomas had a high job at the Heritage Foundation executive branch liaison
372. She was given this high-paying role after her husband cast the tie-breaking vote on Bush v. Gore.
373. So these people are institutionally corrupt.
374. Now, Scalia, he died in his sleep at a rich man's retreat in Texas.
375. Did that raise eyebrows?
376. It really did.
377. And there were requests and questions raised by members of Congress about who was paying for that trip and whether they had any business for the court.
378. You know, Scalia is someone who really in some ways was a model.
379. And I say that word loosely, but a model for Clarence Thomas in this gift of Palooza where where basically Scalia would solicit trips from wealthy businessmen to fund his hunting habits, his shooting habits.
380. And he also one of the things that people don't know about about about Scalia, not just his penchant for these free gifts of trips from very, very rich people, is that the the year before the ruling changing the interpretation of the Second Amendment to assert that it it protects an individual right to bear arms rather than a collective right.
381. Yes.
382. traveling with him, that if the Supreme Court accepted the petition for cert on a case involving
383. the Second Amendment that was coming out of D.C., the Heller case, that that would mean that they
384. had the votes, the five to four votes, to overturn more than a century of precedent about reasonable
385. regulations of our gun laws. He didn't call them reasonable regulations, of course, but he basically
386. signaled that when this right-wing majority on the court that's now a supermajority, when they
387. accept the case, it basically means that they have the votes to change the law in the direction that
388. they want. Number one with a bullet. I bet you Clarence also said, and if Dick Cheney's on the
389. hunting trip, I'm not going. Well, that would have been wise. So while we're on the greatest hits
390. here, Brett Kavanaugh, Brett Kavanaugh, I mean, you did talk a little bit about him, but that had
391. to be one of the most disgraceful nomination processes ever, where you had someone spitting
392. and crying on stage in the hearing saying, I like beer. How did we sink this low?
393. Well, this was really grassy in the Republican Party and Donald Trump, because why would Donald
394. Trump withdraw a nominee who's been accused of sexual assault when he himself has been accused
395. of sexual assault and subsequently was found in the Eugene Carroll case to have committed sexual
396. abuse and then smeared her and defamed her. This is someone in a president who is nominated and
397. enforced through the confirmation of Pete Hegseth, who was accused of sexually assaulting a woman,
398. settled that case without an admission of responsibility for doing so. And we've seen
399. other allegations of the like. But regarding Brett Kavanaugh, not only was it just,
400. you know it revealed his character it revealed his anger and his nature and so much so that Justice Stevens who had previously endorsed him this was a Ford nominee to the US Supreme Court withdrew his endorsement of Kavanaugh for his behavior
401. But what was happening behind the scenes is even more astonishing. Because what we learned
402. subsequently, and this was due to the efforts of Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and others, what we
403. learned subsequently was that basically the Trump administration made an agreement with the
404. Republicans on the Senate that they, you know, if they would basically allow the FBI to look into
405. whether there was corroborating evidence or other allegations of sexual assault or sexual misconduct
406. by Brett Kavanaugh, that, you know, they would be examined. And what really happened, what we know
407. subsequently is that the FBI didn't look into any of them, didn't follow up on any of those
408. allegations, didn't ask for any of the corroboration, sent the materials over to the White House,
409. the White House Counsel's Office to Don McGahn. And Don McGahn threw them away, like basically
410. threw them in the trash. There was no investigation to follow up on all the people who were coming out
411. in news stories saying that they had experienced or they'd seen sexual misconduct by Brett Kavanaugh.
412. And so you had a complete whitewash, just a total subversion of the FBI background investigation
413. process. I'm familiar with that. When I worked at the Justice Department, I was the lead counsel
414. for the Working Group on Judicial Nominations.
415. I used to review the FBI files of potential nominees,
416. you know, just go back to their 18th birthday
417. and look into whether there's any, you know,
418. crimes or allegations of criminal activity,
419. whether they have blackmail ability issues and the like.
420. It looked at whether they have debt, you know,
421. significant debt, like somehow buying a bunch of tickets
422. for baseball games and getting cash from your friends,
423. paying off loans mysteriously.
424. But the FBI did no follow-up investigation.
425. in response to the allegations of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford.
426. And also...
427. Who took the same hit Anita Hill took.
428. Yeah, I mean, just out...
429. I mean, and her life was threatened over and over
430. for daring to testify about what she experienced.
431. I think she testified compellingly under oath.
432. And yet, like you said, it is genuinely a scandal
433. that this man, Brett Kavanaugh, is on the Supreme Court.
434. I actually wrote a piece right after he was nominated
435. and his hearings began saying that he should not be confirmed.
436. He should be impeached from the D.C. Circuit for lying under oath to Congress about files
437. that have been stolen from me that were in his possession.
438. But, you know, not to make it all about me, because it's about what's happening in our
439. country.
440. The fact of the matter is, is that neither Brett Kavanaugh nor Clarence Thomas should
441. be on the Supreme Court based on the very credible testimony of women about how they
442. were treated by those men.
443. And Kavanaugh lied under oath too.
444. He said that he would not overturn precedent.
445. And of course, they did with Roe v. Wade through the Dobbs decision, among other things.
446. You had – another big issue is gerrymandering and conflicts of interest.
447. And that Sam Alito, he blatantly constituted racial gerrymandering.
448. I mean he disregarded factual findings of the lower court by overturning the lower court.
449. I just want to go back for a second.
450. It seems to me that the philosophy that is in play in when the FBI becomes the FIB, the fib, and they lie, is based on Christian nationalism and radical Christian ideology,
451. which is women are inferior to men and have a role to play in the life of the leaders Right I mean aren we really into a Nazi way of thinking
452. And, you know, the concept that the elite
453. should control the world?
454. A regressive view of progressivism.
455. I mean, women's rights,
456. the whole shebang, right?
457. I mean –
458. It's just like it's a pervasive mental –
459. Yeah, but they're so open about it.
460. Like Alito should have recused himself when he was flying that upside-down flag during the insurrection, the appeal to heaven flag.
461. I mean here we had a chief justice, an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States flying an insurrectionist flag.
462. Or a summer house.
463. And a summer house and then denying it.
464. How does this happen?
465. And how do they stay in power?
466. Well, so part of what's happened is that you have a U.S. Supreme Court led by John Roberts that has blocked every effort to have an enforceable ethics code.
467. And so every time Congress has raised those issues, Roberts has assailed that.
468. In fact, right before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee was about to approve subpoenas for Harlan Crow and Leonard Leo regarding this gift and travel situation that reporters had uncovered,
469. John Roberts released
470. made a public release saying
471. there is an ethics code for the
472. Supreme Court and every justice
473. has signed saying that they follow
474. it which means it means nothing
475. the billions of dollars of gifts that have come
476. in to the benefit of Clarence Thomas
477. and the non-recusal
478. that we've now seen of
479. Alito despite
480. having those instructions flags flying over
481. his homes
482. and more and so John Roberts
483. is complicit in all this, in trying to, you know, keep his Republican appointees safe on that court
484. in order to continue to damage the law in this country, as with these cases on redistricting,
485. on voting. Because John Roberts, you know, one of the things about John Roberts that most people
486. don't know is that he was basically the person who mentored with Bill Rehnquist. Bill Rehnquist
487. was the Justice of the People at the time.
488. He was a Nixon appointee,
489. but before that,
490. he was known for his role
491. in the Republican Party in Arizona.
492. And he helped implement a thing
493. called Operation Eagle Eye,
494. where he and other Republicans,
495. white Republicans,
496. would go to the black neighborhoods in Phoenix,
497. in Bethune and other neighborhoods,
498. to have cameras to photograph voters.
499. This was in the 1960s,
500. where people were still being lynched.
501. You know, people had a great amount of fear about voting.
502. And the Voting Rights Act had just passed in 1965.
503. So, you know, Roberts chose to clerk for Bill Rehnquist.
504. The clerks on the court at that time in 1980, 81,
505. they remarked on how close they were on civil rights issues,
506. meaning hostile to civil rights.
507. And then what happened was Bill Rehnquist called the chief of staff
508. or the Attorney General of the United States, who was not then famous, a guy named Ken Starr,
509. who became very famous. He called Ken Starr to get John Roberts a job at the top of the Justice
510. Department advising the Attorney General of the United States. And he got him that job. And what
511. was John Roberts' job? It was to attack the Voting Rights Act, to attack efforts by Congress to renew
512. the Voting Rights Act and repair a decision that John Roberts' mentor had helped make on Section 2
513. with the Voting Rights Act and what the Supreme Court with Frank Wist
514. on board had done was try to gut Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act to say that you couldn't
515. look at the effects of a map. If you couldn't look at the effects of changing a map, if it,
516. you know, bleached out black voting, if it diluted black voting, you could only look at the intent,
517. whether someone said the N-word, basically. And Congress knew that was wrong. Congress knew that
518. that would destroy the Voting Rights Act if you could not take into account the effects. And so
519. Congress repaired it over John Roberts' strenuous objections. He spent hundreds of hours
520. fighting the renewal of the Voting Rights Act and the repair of that damage. And then just this
521. spring, just weeks ago, John Roberts handed the pen to Sam Alito to put a dagger in the back of
522. the Voting Rights Act on this very section, section two of the Voting Rights Act, to bar the effects
523. from being taken into account to show a violation of the Voting Rights Act. The very issue he knows
524. with every bone in his body.
525. He lost as a lawyer,
526. and now he's using the court to win
527. in a way that demonstrably hurts the American people.
528. Revenge!
529. And it's leading to the bleaching out
530. of the Black Caucus in the South,
531. and it may be weaponized
532. by the Trump administration against California.
533. The pen is mightier than the sword.
534. Or the South shall rise again.
535. Yeah.
536. Our guest, this is Sexy Boomer Show.
537. Our guest today is Lisa Graves,
538. He's the author of the national bestselling book, Without Precedent, How Chief Justice Roberts and his accomplices rewrote the Constitution and dismantled our rights.
539. In the time we have left, Lisa, it's going so quickly.
540. Why do you suppose the American public seems to be disinterested or oblivious to this?
541. Why isn't the fourth estate on this story?
542. What has happened to our country in that respect?
543. Well, for a long time, there was this notion by some Democrats that people weren't paying attention to the court, that it was inside baseball to fight with the court.
544. The Republicans did not take that approach.
545. The Republicans took the approach that they didn't want neutral judges.
546. They wanted players on the chessboard who were going to move the ball forward.
547. And Democrats were just trying to have neutral and fair judges, which means you're not putting a lot of political capital into those fights.
548. But that has changed.
549. There's been a growing awareness among the Democrats about what's been happening, you know, starting in the early 2000s and up to now in terms of this effort to capture the court.
550. But the other thing that's happened that has been amazing and so changing is investigative reporters have started covering the court.
551. Previously, there were like legacy reporters, famous names, people who, you know, got, you know, built their reputation in part on friendships and connections to Supreme Court justices.
552. talking about the court, but normalizing it in a way and not actually conducting investigations.
553. Their job, to be fair to them, wasn't investigative reporting. But it began a few years ago,
554. real investigative reporting by ProPublica, by The Washington Post, New York Times,
555. by Rolling Stone and Politico. And that investigative reporting changed things because
556. it uncovered these scandals. It showed these biases. It helped reveal and unmask this dark
557. money so that people could understand how this court was captured and what it meant for our
558. rights. And as a consequence, over the last three years, public opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court
559. has plummeted. The support for John Roberts, the support for the court, the belief that it is fair
560. is you know is the lowest point it been in history And that disdain for the court is growing not just because of the Dobbs ruling that overturned Roe not just because of the immunity decision not just because of 23 24 decisions in the past year giving Donald Trump the green light on all sorts of violations of our rights and our rules
561. but because there has also been this demonstrated scandal of how these justices are living these
562. very high lifestyles, how they're not recusing, how they're not being fair. And so we've never
563. had more support than now for reforming the court.
564. So we have some hope.
565. There was a very interesting personal perspective you wrote about in your book when you were
566. involved in the vetting of judicial appointees.
567. You were reporting to Attorney General's Janet Reno and then John Ashcroft, and you
568. witnessed a shocking view from the top in the way in which they operated or performed
569. their duties in vetting potential judicial nominees.
570. because I think it's important to say, you know, people could argue and say,
571. well, you guys are left.
572. You guys just don't agree with what they're doing and they're winning and you're sour grapes.
573. This perspective you saw how Ashcroft on the Republican side operated and how Reno operated
574. says another story, doesn't it?
575. It does.
576. Yeah, and if you could just briefly explain what you witnessed between the two of them.
577. Well, you know, you had, there's so much more to the story.
578. I know we have time for the full version, but read the book.
579. Miss Reno was very conscientious and very devoted to making sure that we had people, you know, what would happen is a Senate, a senator or a member of Congress or maybe a donor might say, hey, I recommend this person for judgeship.
580. But we did a full vetting of those nominees to make sure that they are potential nominees to make sure that they were qualified and that wasn't nepotism and that they didn't have issues or scandals in their background, that they were qualified.
581. Reno was under Clinton. Reno was under Clinton.
582. The Ashcroft Justice Department worked with the Federal Society, with Leonard Leo, to be the ones who screened people to get judgeships.
583. And they started putting forward very young people because they wanted them to stay on the bench for 30 or 40 years.
584. You know, beyond like 10 times the period, the term of a president.
585. They wanted young ideologues.
586. They didn't want people who had more experience.
587. So we have to have those reputations.
588. So we have a long – to get into a summation here and some solutions going forward, we have to undo so much damage.
589. Gun control, the Chevron decision, the Dobbs decision.
590. The voting.
591. The voting.
592. And so there is – there are efforts being made on the Hill to try to reel this in.
593. You bring it out about how do we – basically we can bring it down to the bottom line.
594. It's the tsunami of dark money. How do we stop this influence peddling that has completely consumed Washington, D.C.? Now, there's the Disclose Act and to overturn a lot of these decisions I just mentioned. And is there really any progress being made yet to do this? I mean, we know Schumer's introduced some things.
595. Is there any recourse to this?
596. Unless the Democrats take control of Congress what hope do we have Well there are a number of Democrats including Senator Whitehouse Representative Raskin a number on the House a growing number on the House and Senate side who have put forward these reform measures including as you mentioned Senator Schumer in terms of the No Kings Act
597. So there's actually a robust and growing call for both the substantive reform of the law and for reforming the court and not just, you know, around the edges.
598. Because the reality is, is that this court, this Roberts Court will continue to destroy our rights, including our voting rights, unless we reform the court and limit its jurisdiction, limit its power and limit have term limits and have other things.
599. Because this court has shown how hostile it is to the Voting Rights Act.
600. So we need to build that momentum with a Congress in the next two years that will investigate this court, that will investigate that corruption, that will build the case for reform coming in to 2028.
601. And I hope in my personal capacity that there will be a president and a Congress president willing to sign what Congress passes to reform this court and limit its ability to harm our rights.
602. You mean actually follow the law?
603. Yeah.
604. Wouldn't it be great that the chief justices would follow the law?
605. There's this idea, of course, of expanding the court, which is not unprecedented, which could, in effect, go up to 15 and create a de facto attrition rate.
606. And you wrote that to increase the size of the court would also possibly include ensuring that each presidential term has at least one Supreme Court seat to fill to better represent the interests of the voters.
607. And then you also talk about set reasonable time limits, like 25-year term limit, because Roberts is still a relatively young guy.
608. This guy could be doing what he's doing for another couple of decades.
609. Terrifying.
610. So, you know, is there any movement to impeach Roberts?
611. Yes, there are.
612. There have been members who have been working on a bill particularly for John Roberts.
613. There also was a bill introduced by AOC to impeach Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas.
614. The term limit measure at 15 years or 20 years, if that went through 15 or 20 years, that would immediately remove Alito and Thomas and Roberts because of how long they've been on the court.
615. And I think those term limits should apply to the judiciary across the board at all levels.
616. Retroactively.
617. Yeah, what we see with Trump is putting bloggers and people who are like in their 30s on judicial position, people like Eileen Cannon, who have, you know, have not had any distinguished career at all, but have used that position of power to favor Donald Trump and try to, you know, twist the law in his direction.
618. And so we need substantial reform. And that's one of the reasons why I'm so proud to have co-founded Court Accountability with my my work partner, Alex Aronson.
619. And we are putting forward this summer to come a really significant reform memo that goes to the heart of what we're facing with real bold reforms to protect our rights.
620. And we, you know, call, you know, call up basically the words of Abraham Lincoln, who was taking on, you know, that that court that issued that Dred Scott decision that that, you know, that Roger Taney court.
621. And what Abraham Lincoln said is that if we let these unelected judges be the final arbiters of our rights, we will cease to be to be to be able to rule ourselves.
622. And so we have to, you know, reinvigorate our democracy and restore the power of our representatives to represent our interests.
623. And as Senator Whitehouse said this weekend on a panel I was on with him you know it one thing if Congress gets it wrong they make a mistake In two years you can have a new vote and vote them out But these judges are serving by design by these Republicans choosing them so young for 10 20 30 40 years
624. Clarence Thomas is on track to be the longest serving Supreme Court justice in history.
625. He has been on the bench for 45 years.
626. That is an outrageous period of time to invest in someone to have such power over our lives who we have no way to check other than through impeachment.
627. And I think, yeah, I think he should be impeached.
628. And I think we should have bills of impeachment for others as well.
629. So you have – there's hope that Citizens United and some of these more egregious decisions could be either nullified or overturned.
630. I want to end with this quote from your book.
631. You wrote, I think John Roberts will go down as the worst chief justice in American history.
632. The path of deep destruction he has carved through our laws and our democracy all but ensures it.
633. He has sown the seeds for his fall from grace by opening the door to authoritarianism in America.
634. I think that pretty much says it all.
635. How can people follow you in your work?
636. And is there somewhere for them to support you?
637. Yes.
638. Yes. Yes. So court accountability is is our work, the work I do on court reform and court policy.
639. I also so that's that's a group where we receive donations to support that work, along with my research at True North Research, but through court accountability.
640. And I have I'm a co-host on the Midas Touch Network on Legal AF.
641. And I have a sub stack called Grave Injustice.
642. And you can follow me basically on any social media as TheLisaGraves at TheLisaGraves.
643. So I would welcome the chance to meet you guys in person one of these days when I get to L.A. for book tour.
644. And it's just been a delight being on your show.
645. Oh, thank you.
646. It was wonderful.
647. With pleasure.
648. Lisa Graves is author of the National Mess Selling Book, Without Precedent, How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights.
649. I cannot recommend that book enough.
650. I think it should be required reading in schools.
651. Do yourself a favor and read this book.
652. You can also learn more about it at withoutprecedent.info.
653. Lisa, thank you so much for taking such time and giving us such a generous amount of time.
654. Thank you for such a wonderful and horrifying experience.
655. And thank you for doing some brave work here.
656. This is not without –
657. Let us do what we can to turn things around, folks.
658. Yes.
659. Well, hope is a choice.
660. So let's choose it.
661. and take action to move forward.
662. Thank you, Lisa.
663. I'm Ted Bonnet.
664. I'm Phil Proctor.
665. And we will see you.
666. You can see all of our shows at sexyboomershow.com.
667. And we will be back with a special show next week.
668. Thanks for listening.
669. Take care.
670. Bye for now.
671. Will Gear Theatricum Botanicum returns this June 6th through October 4th with outdoor repertory theater, events and educational programs for all ages.
672. A Midsummer Night's Dream is back, alongside Romeo and Juliet, Treasure Island, Noel Coward's Waiting in the Wings and Bernardo Cubrilla's dark and incisive new comedy The People of Pompeii, set in the aftermath of the 2025 Palisades fire.
673. Seatricum is located in Topanga Canyon
674. just off the 101 freeway
675. in the shade of the California live oaks
676. Explore and picnic in the gardens
677. before the show
678. Further information available
679. at www.theatricum.com and