U.S. Supreme Court building. Photo: Diego M. Radzinschi/ALM

The man leading President Donald Trump's revamp of our nation's judiciary once boasted to a private gathering of wealthy donors that America is on the brink of a right-wing “revival” of the Constitution. That man is Leonard Leo. And he sits at the center of an almost $250 million network of dark money groups working to fill our courts with men and women (but mostly men) who will roll back the clock on our laws and our democracy all the way to the robber baron era.

This movement, which Leo now has termed the resurrection of the “structural Constitution,” has a long history and deep roots. But you can really see it emerging in the Reagan years, following the rejection of the ultra-conservative Robert Bork's nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. And you can see it in the confirmation hearings for Justice Clarence Thomas when then-Sen. Joe Biden, chairman of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, said Thomas was unfit for a lifetime seat on the Supreme Court because he embraced this extreme agenda.

That was before Anita Hill's eyewitness testimony about her sexual harassment by Thomas dominated the headlines. Thomas denied both Hill's charges and Biden's.

Justice Thomas' wife, Ginni Thomas, recently gave Leo an award she created to honor her allies on the right. She praised Leo for “single-handedly changing the face of the judiciary under the auspices of the Federalist Society,” noting that “he has many hats; that's not even all he does.”

That's true. He not only picked the list of judges Trump chooses from, but he also helps orchestrate millions of dollars to get them confirmed to further his extreme agenda.

That agenda includes not just overruling Roe v. Wade, but nearly a century of Supreme Court decisions upholding the hard-won progress of the New Deal, our civil rights struggles, and Great Society protections up to the present day. His agenda is to destroy what the right dubs “the administrative state” by judicial fiat.

Every issue progressives care about is on Leo's judicial chopping block. The judges and justices he is installing have been chosen to help strike down not just new policies like the Green New Deal and Medicare for All, but clean air and water regulations and consumer protections passed by overwhelming congressional majorities decades ago. They will also escalate the existing right-wing assault on workers' rights and kneecap agencies that billionaires like Charles Koch have long wanted eliminated, including the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Department of Education.  

And these radicals in robes will wage a culture war at a pitch yet unseen, stripping people of color and LGBTQ people of basic human rights, all on the basis of a warped notion of “free speech” and “religious freedom” that the Constitution's framers could never have intended.

And it has already begun. We can see it in the discredited Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling that unleashed hundreds of millions in spending on elections by billionaires and powerful special interest groups. Since that ruling, dark money without limits and from undisclosed sources has dwarfed the spending of candidates and political parties. The court's recent gutting of the Voting Rights Act is another sign.

Indeed, Leo recently told far-right donors they have to treat judicial nominations as “political campaigns,” saying more money is needed to “defend” his nominees and their rulings “in unprecedented ways.”

While Leo knows exactly who is bankrolling his efforts to capture our courts, the American people do not.  

It's the $250 million question that everyone should be asking. Who is funding this effort to dramatically rewrite our Constitution and remake our country without a debate or our consent?

This is a real constitutional crisis. It goes to the heart of the legitimacy of the courts. And “We the People” deserve the truth.

Caroline Fredrickson is the president of the American Constitution Society and author of “Under the Bus: How Working Women Are Being Run Over” and the forthcoming “The Democracy Fix: How to Win the Fight for Fair Rules, Fair Courts, and Fair Elections.” She can be reached on Twitter @crfredrickson.

Lisa Graves is the co-founder of Documented Investigations and previously served as chief counsel for nominations for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, deputy assistant attorney general at the U.S. Department of Justice (on nominations and more), and in other posts. She is also a researcher for ACS. She can be reached on Twitter @thelisagraves.