Judicial Crisis Network Launches Media Blitz to Fight Dark Money Aiding Joe Biden’s Court-Packing Scheme

Judicial Crisis Network (JCN) has launched a one million dollar media campaign to oppose President Joe Biden’s court-packing legislation.

The campaign will kickoff with an ad named “Terrible Mistake,” which will target national markets and Washington, DC for three weeks. “The blitz also includes grassroots activation and coalition engagement,” according to JCN.

The ad highlights Biden’s decision to pack the Supreme Court based on a large quantity of dark money Biden raised during the 2020 campaign cycle. “After one hundred forty-five million in dark money, Biden changed his tune,” the ad explains.

President of JCN Carrie Severino wrote in a statement, “For decades, Joe Biden stood firmly against court packing. But now the left-wing dark money groups who elected him and Senate Democrats are demanding it, and Biden is changing his tune.”

Indeed, Biden received a “record-breaking” amount of dark money contributions from anonymous donors in his bid for the White House, totaling $145 million of his $1.5 billion total amount raised.

“Biden’s winning campaign was backed by $145 million in so-called dark money donations, a type of fundraising Democrats have decried for years. Those fundraising streams augmented Biden’s $1.5 billion haul, in itself a record for a challenger to an incumbent president,” Bloomberg reported in January 2021.

But 2020 was not Democrats’ first rodeo. In 2019, Democrats raised another $137 million from dark money donors, who used the money to fund “an eight-figure ad campaign attacking Republican senators, bolstered key pieces of Democratic and environmentalist infrastructure and supported expensive ballot measure campaigns,” Politico reported in December of 2020.

The Democrats’ recent experience with large dark money contributions in the last two years is anchored by their 2018 mid-term cause, when Politico reported a “green wave” of cash “pumped $140 million into Democrat and left-leaning causes” by “a little-known nonprofit called The Sixteen Thirty Fund.”

Over the years, the dark money donations have seemingly turned Biden more radical, perhaps influencing him to support Wednesday’s percolating court-packing bill in the House. In 1983, Biden said of former President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s court-packing scheme, “It was a bonehead idea, it was a terrible, terrible mistake.” Now Biden is leading a Democrat Party rife with radical proposals like Roosevelt’s attempt to expand the Supreme Court.

Roosevelt’s proposal, though, for political reasons was opposed by Congress and historians. It was seen “as a crude power grab” and “one that ultimately convinced the Court to stop striking down his New Deal legislation and to allow government powers to grow,” Breitbart reported.

According to the Congressional Research Service, while Congress has expanded the federal courts based on caseload, “some contend that expanding the [Supreme] Court with the intent to shape the Court’s composition and obtain more favorable case outcomes [for the president] may raise constitutional questions.”

The current court-packing legislation is championed by House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerry Nadler (D-NY), Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA), and Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-NY), which purportedly intends to expand the court from nine justices to 13.

The radical proposal may place pressure on Democrats by forcing them to make tough political votes in the House in which they only enjoy a two-vote majority, as Rep. Julia Letlow (R-LA) was sworn in Wednesday, shrinking the Democrats’ numbers.