Corrupt SCOTUS Radicals’ Roots Go Through Reagan Directly To Nixon

Joker in Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. has presided over THE MOST radicalized Supreme Court in well over 100 years.

Since his nomination by then-POTUS George W. Bush, and Senate confirmation by a 78-22 margin, Roberts has demonstrated, time, and time, and time again, that he, and other radicalized SCOTUS GOPers, have no respect for the legal concept of stare decisis, precedent, or other staid legal matters, the purpose of which is to provide stability to civil society.

What do Robert Bork, and Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts have in common?
To find out more, read on.

If, in the law, nothing is TRULY ever settled, and any court now, or in the future, can simply overturn any law or decision with which they disagree — regardless of how long it’s been in effect, and regardless of what their confirmation testimony was — then our nation’s foundation is insecure.

And like subterranean termites tunneling into a well-built house, practically undetected, it is showing signs that it has been undermined. And just as with termite damage, exactly how extensive it is, how severe it has become, and what repair costs will be, remains to be seen.

Since becoming Joker in Chief Justice in September 2005, he has presided over 20 reversals of opinion, some dating as far back as 1911.

That case was Leegin Creative Leather Products Inc. v. PSKS, Inc., 551 U.S. 877 (2007), which overturned the 1911 decision in Dr. Miles Medical Co. v. John D. Park & Sons Co., 220 U.S. 373 (1911).

What do Robert Bork, and Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts have in common?
To find out more, read on.

In the Leegin case, the matter brought before the SCOTUS was one of violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act through price-fixing by Leegin, which, as the court’s decision stated in the beginning, that, “in Dr. Miles Medical Co. v. John D. Park & Sons Co., 220 U. S. 373 (1911), the Court established the rule that it is per se illegal under § 1 of the Sherman Act, 15 U. S. C. § 1, for a manufacturer to agree with its distributor to set the minimum price the distributor can charge for the manufacturer’s goods.”

Further, the court noted that, “on appeal Leegin did not dispute that it had entered into vertical price-fixing agreements with its retailers.”

A “vertical agreement” is the integration of two or more businesses in a supply chain. A “horizontal” merger would be the combining of two or more companies that did essentially the same thing.

Vertical agreements are generally illegal because they tend to eliminate competition, create a monopoly, artificially increase prices and otherwise adversely affect a free market.

And yet, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Leegin.

Why?

This is where matters begin to show the influence of relationship and affiliation.

What is fascinating, and disturbingly telling, is that the Roberts-led radical court quoted a book on anti-trust law authored by none other than the now-late Robert Bork, former Solicitor General in the Nixon and Ford administrations, and acting U.S. Attorney General in the Nixon administration, who obeyed an order from POTUS Nixon to fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, who was investigating the Watergate scandal, in which POTUS Nixon and the Republican Party were discovered to have illegally broken into Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate building complex, bugged (illegally surveilled with remote audio recording equipment) and burgled offices of Nixon’s political opponents, including their physicians, denied it all, and attempted to cover it up. Money involved in the matter was found to be directly liked to Nixon’s Committee to Re-Elect the President, or CREEP.

Watergate was a broadly expansive criminal case with numerous tentacles, outgrowths like cancers amidst tangled webs of deceit in an ocean of corruption, and ultimately, 69 Federal officials were charged, while 48 were found guilty for their roles in the greater matter.

In 1982, Bork was nominated by POTUS Reagan, and confirmed by the Senate on a voice vote to the Federal bench on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which is often monikered as the “mini-Supreme Court,” not only because of its proximity to the SCOTUS, and other governmental buildings, but because of the nature of the cases brought before that court in its capacity as the court of jurisdiction in many matters involving Federal agencies.

Of the current slate of 9 SCOTUS Justices, 4 were formerly judges on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, including Chief Justice John Roberts, Associate Justices Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Former SCOTUS Justices chosen from that court include CJ Warren Burger, AJs Antonin Scalia, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Fred Vinson, and Wiley Blount Rutledge. The present Attorney General Merrick Garland was also formerly a Judge in that court, as was Kenneth Starr, former Independent Counsel in the Whitewater controversy of the Clinton administration, who in later years resigned in disgrace as Chancellor of Baylor University Board of Regents following discovery of his mishandling of several sexual assault cases within the university.

Later, in 1987, then-POTUS Ronald Reagan nominated Bork to an announced soon-coming vacancy on the SCOTUS which would be created by the retirement of Justice Lewis Powell, another Nixon appointee, who replaced the FDR-appointed Justice Hugo Black of Alabama.

Bork’s SCOTUS hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee didn’t go well, and his critics and detractors cited at least three major matters from his career as problems — his scathing criticisms of the Warren and Burger courts’ interpretations of the Constitution, particularly of the First Amendment, his criticisms of the Constitutional right to privacy, and his role in the so-called “Saturday Night Massacre” in which Nixon first ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson, then Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus to fire Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox. Both men refused, and resigned effective immediately, one after the other.

Nixon then turned to the Solicitor General, the third most senior official in the Department of Justice, and ordered him to fire Cox, and he did.

That man was Robert Bork.

Bork’s nomination to the SCOTUS was scuttled in a 42–58 vote, a process which was then colloquially termed as “being Borked.” Shortly thereafter, he resigned from the appellate court and was replaced by Clarence Thomas, who is now under fire for his proximity to the January 6, 2021 armed insurrectionist attack upon the United States Government at the Capitol building, where the violently blood-thirsty mob was whipped into a frenzy by then-POTUS Trump and subsequently stormed the building in an attempt to thwart the Certification of Electoral College votes declaring Joe Biden the winner of the 2020 election.

The man who was next nominated for, and filled, the vacancy following Bork’s SCOTUS rejection was Anthony Kennedy.

But Bork’s book — The Antitrust Paradox — first published in 1978, has been cited authoritatively in numerous SCOTUS cases from that year forward to 2007, including in Leegin, where it was cited no less than six times. And even though Bork argued in the book for legalizing many practices previously prohibited by the Sherman Antitrust Act, it did NOT change the law. Yet, by citing the book numerous times in other antitrust and related cases, the SCOTUS, however, has chosen to throw law to the wind, and elevated a disgraced jurist’s opinion as settled and established law — a genuine mockery, and perversion of justice and the law.

In the opening of his book, Bork wrote that, “law demonstrates that the only legitimate goal of antitrust is the maximization of consumer welfare,” and claimed that the reason Congress enacted the Sherman Act was to be a “consumer welfare prescription,” and postulated that the protection of competition, rather than the protection of competitors, was the law’s ultimate and exclusive objective.

The term Bork couches as “consumer welfare,” simply refers to consumer benefit, and his entire book and line of thinking narrowly focuses upon but one minuscule aspect of such illegal, anti-competitive business practices as monopoly, and others, and that one thing, is price. Though he does not come outright and plainly say it, the gist, the summary of his work could best be described in one easy-to-understand question: Does the price of a good, or service, increase, or decrease, when monopoly, price-fixing, and vertical integration agreements are struck?

THAT is the EXCLUSIVE question asked by Bork (though again, not directly) which he expressed in his book. All other ideas and concepts are subordinate to it.

To illustrate Bork’s thinking with a hypothetical example, in Bork’s bizarre Byzantine way of thinking, if all the BIG OIL companies were to merge into one huge conglomerate, that would be quite alright… if the price of gasoline, diesel fuel, and other petroleum products declined.

Sadly, the resulting irony of his thinking is that since publication of his book, competition has declined, prices have increased, and courts have intensified giving jurisprudential deference to large multinational corporations, and other BIG BUSINESS interests, many with significantly greater resources in volume, than some agencies of the United States Government.

Bork quite likely made up the term “consumer welfare,” for it does not appear as a central focus, nor is it cited, in any of the most renown, and respected works by economists from Adam Smith, forward.

Again, to Bork, the natural consequences, the natural effects of mergers that produce monopolies, vertical agreements, market divisions, and price discrimination do not harm consumers, and therefore should not be prohibited. He ultimately claimed that by legally intervening in such events to prohibit them, prices to consumers are artificially increased because ostensibly, such anti-competitive prohibitions protect inefficient companies from competing. And he characterized it all as a “paradox.”

No economists endorsed, nor cited, his book then, or now.

Courts however, have — most notably the Supreme Court of the United States.

And again, that despite the fact that in his book Bork endorsed monopoly, vertical agreements, price fixing, and other illegal practices if it lowered prices. That is like endorsing murder, if it stops other crimes like rape, robbery, and arson. It is the practical sacrifice of principle upon the altar of expediency couched as “efficiency” and “cost effectiveness,” ultimately presented as “consumer welfare.”

Criticisms and detractors of Bork’s thinking and book are sometimes few, and far between, but are by no means absent. In one of the earliest, and most scathing of such reviews was by the now-late tenured Professor of Law Paul H. Brietzke (1944-2013), which was published 1979 in Valparaiso University Law Review, the year after Bork’s book was published. Professor Brietzke was no intellectual slouch himself, and as a Fulbright Professor (he was also separately Fulbright Professor of Law in 1988 at Universiti Teknologi MA, Malaysia) at National Economics University, Hanoi, Vietnam in 1998 teaching International Trade Law to fourth-year law students, and with a PhD in Law from the University of London, the JD from University of Wisconsin Law School, and a BA (Honors) in Economics from Lake Forest College, Lake Forest, Illinois, he was well-grounded in trade law. His curriculum vitae reflected not only his towering intellect, but an immense breadth of diversity, compassion, and a deeply abiding commitment to the principles of free, just, and fair trade, opportunity and justice throughout the world.

Professor Dr. Brietzke’s lengthy (19 pages) critique and review of Bork’s book The Antitrust Paradox: A Policy at War with Itself may be found online here, and opens with the following scathing paragraph, a paraphrased summary of Bork’s thinking in the book:

“Except when responding to advertisements and sale promotions, the people are stupid; their indolent and fickle representatives in Congress are no better; the courts are unable to recognize the narrow limitations on their competence or to resist the temptations to power provided by the antitrust statutes; FTC and Antitrust Division bureaucrats are guilty of an untrammeled pursuit of the pet theories of the moment at the expense of consumer welfare; private attorneys are frustrated by a fragmentation of issues in complex antitrust litigation; and legal academics, members of an “intellectual class” seeking to augment its power and prestige at the expense of the “business class,” bear a major share of the blame for the decadence of contemporary antitrust law.’ Strong stuff, and Professor Bork seeks to rescue the beleagured and bewildered by deploying insights he has gleaned from neoclassical microeconomics, as it is understood by the Chicago School. The book is uneven, bearing the stamp of having been written and revised over a period of ten years. The content of crucial premises shifts subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) in the course of exposition. While it is not designed as a hornbook and cannot be used as such, given the number of axes being ground, many of Bork’s case commentaries are original and interesting. In sum, however, they fail to meet the burden of proof through logical argumentation incurred by anyone who attacks most of the important Supreme Court decisions in a particular area.”

Bork’s economic ideology originated from his undergraduate school days, where he attended the University of Chicago, a school known for its libertarian-style economic theories, and then the University of Chicago Law School. Of note, Bork twice taught law at Yale, where during his tenure, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Anita Hill, Robert Reich, Jerry Brown, and John Bolton were among his students.

Robert Bork was also significantly responsible for establishing the now-popular method of Constitutional interpretation known as “originalism” and “textualism” — characterizing “the meaning [the Constitution] was understood to have when adopted” — and in its nascent period, was a speaker at the Federalist Society’s very first symposium, where its early leaders Steven Calabresi and Peter Keisler were Bork’s law clerks during his brief stay on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.

The hypocrisy which the John Roberts-led GOP-dominated SCOTUS demonstrates in attempting to justify their thinking is perverse, and little more than chasing a rabbit down a hole by inordinately focusing upon a distraction in the case, and extrapolating from it a rationale, which ultimately becomes their justification. The matter is self-evident, that in the Leegin case, the respondent PSKS lowered prices, much to the chagrin of Leegin, yet the court found PSKS at fault. That is an hypocrisy of the first order, if one uses Bork’s thinking. Curiously, the SCOTUS relies upon his thinking from his book to do so.

The Roberts-led SCOTUS goes to great lengths to justify their hypocritical big-business sympathies.

And in Leegin, which overturned a 96-year precedent established in 1911, in a Sherman anti-trust case in which the petitioner, Leegin Creative Leather Products, Inc., sought relief from the respondent, PSKS, Inc., which sought to continue purchasing from, and selling products made by, petitioner, even though “Leegin refused to sell to retailers that discounted Brighton goods [a brand owned by Leegin] below suggested prices [which is what PSKS had been doing for quite some time]. Brighton was the store’s [PSKS] most important brand and once accounted for 40 to 50 percent of its profits.”

Leegin “also expressed concern that discounting harmed Brighton’s brand image and reputation,” though it could not provide evidence supporting that claim.

“Kay’s Kloset [a store operated by PSKS] contended it placed Brighton products on sale to compete with nearby retailers who also were undercutting Leegin’s suggested prices. Leegin, nonetheless, requested that Kay’s Kloset cease discounting. Its request refused, Leegin stopped selling to the store. The loss of the Brighton brand had a considerable negative impact on the store’s revenue from sales.”

“PSKS sued Leegin in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. It alleged, among other claims, that Leegin had violated the antitrust laws by “enter-ting] into agreements with retailers to charge only those prices fixed by Leegin.”

“At trial PSKS argued that the Heart Store program [which PSKS briefly participated in], among other things, demonstrated Leegin and its retailers had agreed to fix prices.”

“The jury agreed with PSKS and awarded it $1.2 million. Pursuant to 15 U. S. C. § 15(a), the District Court trebled the damages and reimbursed PSKS for its attorney’s fees and costs. It entered judgment against Leegin in the amount of $3,975,000.80.”

“The Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed. 171 Fed. Appx. 464 (2006) (per curiam). On appeal Leegin did not dispute that it had entered into vertical price-fixing agreements with its retailers. Rather, it contended that the *885 rule of reason should have applied to those agreements. The Court of Appeals rejected this argument. Id., at 466-467. It was correct to explain that it remained bound by Dr. Miles “[b]ecause [the Supreme] Court has consistently applied the per se rule to [vertical minimum price-fixing] agreements.” 171 Fed. Appx., at 466. On this premise the Court of Appeals held that the District Court did not abuse its discretion in excluding the testimony of Leegin’s economic expert, for the per se rule rendered irrelevant any procompetitive justifications for Leegin’s pricing policy. Id., at 467. We granted certiorari to determine whether vertical minimum resale price maintenance agreements should continue to be treated as per se unlawful. 549 U. S. 1092 (2006).”

Price-fixing is a CLEAR violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act.

Leegin did NOT deny that they fixed prices.

And every jury and court along the way had agreed with PSKS.

That is, until it met the radical Roberts-led Supreme Court.

Then, the far-right-wing radical extremists turned the law on its head.