Working with the commuter Reporters Committee for the freedom of the press. We put together the coalition for court transparency. It was a single issue group with five or six clients. I was a part of a Consulting Firm in d. C. , and the issue was ending the broadcast media in the federal judiciary. From the federal level to the Supreme Court, we had 20 different groups together, and pressed various different forms as lobbying, media, it going on tv, programs like this, trying to get cameras in the Supreme Court. After doing a number of events like cspan, i realized it wasnt just the issue of a lack of broadcast media inside the courtroom that made the Supreme Court very opaque. It wasnt just the cameras issue. It was the fact that they dont follow the same ethics rules as every other federal judge, the fact that they serve for life where as most other document sees democracies there is a time limit. They dont put information online. They dont say when justice cane is speaking in massachusetts or in georgia. He wasnt as this one issue, but a whole host of issues that made it thereme court made most powerful but least Accountable Institution in washington. I want to start my own thing. Brian where you come from . Gabe roth i come from nashville, tennessee. My parents are back in new jersey, but from age two to 18 i was in nashville. Brian where did you get your education . Gabe roth Washington University in st. Louis. It was one of the best ideas i ever had, and that i would to northwestern and got a degree in broadcast and was a tv news producer for a little while before turning to the political world. Brian where is your headquarters for fix the court . Gabe roth right now it is in my bedroom in downtown chicago. For the time being. It is at my Kitchen Table in chicago. Brian watch anyone care what you think about this . Gabe roth the Supreme Court affects all americans. All americans are aware of the third branch of government, and it has become so powerful. The idea that issues on voting and marriage and health care and rights,ion and womens pregnancy discrimination i can go on and on written these issues that 30 years ago, congress and the executive branch would get together and figure out a compromise, put together a bill. That really does not happen anymore. The buck stops with the Supreme Court that is unprecedented in history. It makes every impactful decisions in our lives. The least we the public can do is press them to comport with modern transparency and accountability. Brian how much of your money comes from the new venture fund . Gabe roth all of it. I am very happy to have a grant from them and spend it to go to washington to talk to you and meet with folks on the hill, talk at law skills across a country talk at law schools across the country. I was able to talk to voters about how the Supreme Court is a crack issue or should be. A Campaign Issue or should be. I had the opportunity to use that money in a bunch of different ways to figure out how to reach the most people in the most effective way. Brian how much time do you commit to this . Gabe roth this is a fulltime job. When i first started out i wasnt sure how much time it ld eat up, but you know doing this mostly myself, i have a few consultants. I know i look young, but i need help with social media. I have consultants to put together a website, which i just learned to do, or figure out how to send emails to 30,000 people. It is just me. At 10 00 news breaks at night, sometimes at 6 00 in the morning. You are always on and try to find ways to get the issues in front of the American People and the decisionmakers that could potentially change the way the court operates as an institution. Brian i will go on to the court stuff in a moment. New venture fund, i have seen nine90s were the a given away lots of money. Gabe roth it is a big funds. I feel very lucky to receive the grant from them. They are based here. They are sort of, all over the map in terms of what they give money. I try to find creative projects, creative Public Affairs projects that bring in maybe we dont think about on a daytoday basis, but we need to be thought about and talked about in a more creative way. Brian where does their money come from, who is behind it . Gabe roth all over the place. The way they work, a lot of the times it is a fundraiser. It is individual, realizes you want to secure malaria in africa, and you will have 10,000, and it will be a 100,000 program. He will go to venture fund and they will hook him up with nine each throwing 10,000, and then have a programmatic hold for figuring out how to solve this problem. It is just all over the map. Brian lets show it add you produced back in 2014 about fix the courts. [video clip] they told us where we could pray, allowed billionaires to buy the elections, and supplied debt. Nine judges appointed for life to a court that makes its own rules and has disdain for openness and transparency. The Supreme Court, the most powerful and least accountable branch of government. Learn more, demand change. Go to fix the court. Com. Brian is there a partisan label on your organization . Gabe roth not partisan. No advantage that either party gains by having the Supreme Court on tv or the Financial Disclosures online or limiting the terms of service of the justices. We are a nonpartisan organization. On a regular basis i am talking to senators or senate staff or members of the congress and their staff on both sides of the aisle. I feel like weve been lucky in the sense that both in terms of who cares about these issues on the hill and individuals from both parties, and when you we hold all of our issues. It was amazing how 74 republicans and 74 democrats want cameras in the court. I feel fortunate and also, given that there is a Party Advantage in either of these reforms, there is no way to skew one way or the other. John chief Justice Roberts in february of this year had this to say about the whole nominating process. [video clip] i do think the process is not functioning very well. You look at two of my colleagues, Justice Scalia and justice ginsburg, for example. I think they were confirmed maybe there were two or three dissenting votes between the two of them. Now you look at my more recent colleagues, all extreme the wellqualified it for the court, and the votes were, i think, stately on party lines, for the last three of them, or close to it. That doesnt make any sense. That suggests to me the process is being used for something other than answering the qualifications of the nominees. Screenlet me put on the the actual vote totals for all the justices, including Justice Scalia. We can look at what he just said. It shows on there, you can see at the top, Justice Scalia got 980. Does kennedy 970. Class thomas was 5248. Justice ginsburg 963. Breyer 879. Chief Justice Roberts 7822. Justice helena 5842. Justice sotomayor or 6831. And Justice Kagan 6337. What is your reaction to what the chief said and what you saw on the screen . Of all, i well first am happy these vote totals add up to 100. Senators are exit voting on these important issues. More critically, that is a very good point. Over time, potentially starting with the board of nomination, thinking back to fortis, nominations have become more partisan. , the genesis of that is hard to say, where that came from, who decided it. But thinking about the court as a whole, it is looked as as a more partisan institution than ever before. You read an article in the paper about the Supreme Court, and almost any article you will see the epithet used, conservative justices did this, liberal justices did this. Republicanappointed justices did this, and oftentimes there is a switchover. Justicesr appointed that became liberal, kennedy had. Onservative jurisprudence and the first bush did the same. But that really hasnt happened, and essentially given the closely divided court, we project that divided this on to the whole nomination process, which i think is a shame. Brian you talked about justice fortis and the important nomination of judge board. I will ask this and then you can react, how big an impact you think this moment had on attitude that people have in the senate today . This moment was july 1, 1987. It was 45 minutes after judge bork was nominated to be on the Supreme Court. [video clip] the man who fired Archibald Cox does not deserve to sit on the Supreme Court of thenited states. Mr. Bork should also be rejected standssenate because he for an extremist view of the constitution and the role of the Supreme Court that would have placed him outside the mainstream of american constitutional jurisprudence in the 1960s, let alone the 1980s. He opposed the public accommodations Civil Rights Act of 1964. He opposed the one man, one vote decision of the Supreme Court the same year. He has said that the First Amendment applied only to political speech, not elective chairs or scientific expression. Under the twin pressures of academic rejection and the prosser of senate rejection, he suddenly retracted the most neanderthal of these views on civil rights and the First Amendment. But his mindset is no less lostus today. Brian he 5842. The conservatives call that slanderous. How old were you in 1987 . Gabe roth i was five. Brian do you have any impact on that . Gabe roth i remember that. It was a formative event. It was clarence thomas. There were accusations that were pretty serious on a personal level, which is different from what you saw with bork in terms of the way he views the world, the way he views the constitution. It is tough because there are a lot of different ways to react to the potential nominee. Time, with president reagan in the white house and the Senate Democrats leading the senate, having a divided government, reagan chose to appoint somebody or try to appoint someone who had fairly whose views were fairly rightwing at the time. He ended up with Justice Kennedy under the bork nomination, after it failed. He ended up with Justice Kennedy who served, i think potentially a model for Supreme Court nominees. I dont love seeing senator kennedy going on and on about this on the one hand. On the other hand, the idea that you are going to appoint someone that is dyed in the wool party kagan came from the obama white house, chief Justice Roberts came from the bush recount in 2000. When you have these individuals who have clear political backgrounds and polluted political stances, it is inevitable individuals will take to senate floor and get up on cspan and harp on their history. Brian here is an ad that ran at the time from the people of the american way. [video clip] this is gregory pac. Robert thorpe was to be a Supreme Court justice, but the record shows that he has a strange idea of what justice is. He defended whole taxes and literacy tests that kept Many Americans from voting. He would hold white only signs of lunch counters. He does not believe in the right to privacy, and thanks freedom of speech is not white to literature, art, and music. The senate has the last word on him. Please urge your senator to vote against the nomination, because if Robert Thorpe wins at sea on the Supreme Court, it will be for life, his life and yours. Brian 20 think of the idea of organizations in home that are 501 c 3 , and have the 501 c four possibility . Gabe roth Supreme Court will not be running ads against obamas nominee, but it is in their right to do that. The laws that exist, and the Supreme Court decisions that have upheld those laws allow this sort of back and forth in the public spear it comes to bat. It is not something i would want to do. I understand the desire to have a say in the public sphere and buying ads on tv is a way to do it. Me, because im here, i might as well bring this up. There are ways to come up with more consensus picks for the Supreme Court. Visit at the state level and even lower, this is something governor palin on this when she was governor of alaska for 18 months. Judicial nominating commissions. You generally have three on the left, three on the right, three in the middle, come together, find a consensus, find someone that can unite the country and is supported by individuals in both parties. I know these individuals exist. Asare going to get antibork an perhaps whoever obama picks or whoever after him picks. You have to find somebody who grew up in a certain political stream and maintained that path throughout his whole life. It is helpful to the institution, which is already polarized and politicized enough. Gabe lets go back before roth was born, 1968. His was a man named a fortis he was a personal friend of lyndon johnston, put on the court, and then Lyndon Johnson wanted him to be chief justice. Here is Strom Thurmond talking about him in 1968. He did not make it. [video clip] i did not support him when he became an associate justice. I have seen nothing since then to cause me to change my views. I believe i am strongly opposed to these legalities. Writingosed to congress in the defense branch. Im strongly opposed to this teaching in schools and colleges. Im strongly opposed to the Supreme Court, the federal government invading the rights fortisstate, and justice has done these decisions. Brian similar to senator kennedys speech. Slicing and burning. Really attacking him personally. In all your conversations about the court, do you ever here anything about those . Gabe roth absolutely, the fortis nomination and the bork nomination are definitely two flashpoints when you think about how the nomination process has become politicized and what chief Justice Roberts was talking about at the new England School of law just a few minutes ago. The folks i feel like on the cry. , bork is a rallying fortis was different given his close political alliances with Lyndon Johnson, and he was getting paid from this nonprofit group, 10,000 a year to do something on the side. It was a little bit different, the fortis nomination got derailed for reasons that were more the character as opposed to political or constitutional beliefs. Those are definitely points that still reverberate today. Years, a over the number of individuals you can think of, clarence thomas, who either went poorly or got derailed because of partisan attacks. Brian that was in 1968, which was an election year. Richard nixon got to appoint warren berger, who became chief justice. Heavy politics in all of this. What are you hearing on capitol hill and from the white house . Gabe roth i am hearing that it is going to be a long, slow year in the Senate Judiciary committee. It is going to be, the nominee will be held up, and whoever wins the white house in november better get ready to potentially ant few new justices given the current age. Not only scalia but also three other justices who are 75 or older. Breyer, ginsburg, and kennedy. The next president has the potential to appoint a handful of justices. It is my hope that while this it is an election year, but it is always an election year, right . After time, the voters will zero sum game, and they will come together to find out a nominee. Through maybe not confirm, but at least have a hearing. That is the basic Building Blocks of democracy. They should not go away just because there is a federal election coming up, and the be a number of vacancies in the coming years with the Senate Judiciary committee. They have a whole number of issues. The people who did this and left,on the right they have been in the senate 1000 years, worked on 100,000 issues. This should be no different. I know it is an awful lot of space given the current makeup of the court, but americans deserve a full Supreme Court. Just like you wouldnt want to fill a team without second baseman, you would not want the Supreme Court with only eight justices. Brian here is harry reid in 2008, talking about that particular time winters w bush was president. [video clip] nowhere in that document does it say the senate has a duty to give president ial nominees a vote. It says appointment shall be made with the advice and consent of the senate. That is very different than saying every nominee receives a hearing. Brian that is different today. Gabe roth completely differently. But as points made by, i want to thenator biden senator biden from 1982, republicans throwing out there, that is the same thing. It is funny to see harry reid, even the way the sentence comes , or the President Shall president obama is saying, the President Shall. The emphasis on the senate sentence, talking about how you figure out these vacancies, the emphasis is on a different level and the word depending on w