The U.S. Supreme Court’s consideration of so-called “birthright citizenship” last week has rightly drawn many eyeballs to a high-profile subject involving the rule of law and judiciary. And while the issue is certainly important, there’s another newsworthy story related to the high court that isn’t receiving the attention it deserves.
The New York Times published a seemingly under-the-radar piece on Friday titled, “Liberal Group Warns That Trump Could Have Two More Supreme Court Picks.” Authored by Times reporter Reid Epstein, the article disclosed plans by a far-left organization to disrupt potential Supreme Court nominations should they arise during President Trump’s second term.
While speaking with the left-wing outlet, Demand Justice President Josh Orton revealed that his group is “preparing a multimillion-dollar effort to oppose potential Trump Supreme Court appointees before they happen — with a warning that Mr. Trump could be replacing two justices this year,” as described by the Times. This project seeks “to tie all Republicans running for office this year to a potential Trump Supreme Court selection” and “frame a Supreme Court nomination fight less on traditional Democratic issues and more about a nominee having greater loyalty to Mr. Trump than to the country.”
Orton noted ongoing speculation about whether Justices Clarence Thomas, 77, and/or Samuel Alito, 76, will retire at the end of the court’s 2025-2026 term. In doing so, he notably bemoaned the left’s “fundamental miscalculation about power” when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg declined to step down when Barack Obama was president. That fatal decision and Ginsburg’s 2020 death allowed Trump to replace one of the court’s leftists with Amy Coney Barrett, a move that further shifted the court in an originalist direction.
According to Orton, Demand Justice’s game plan will cost $3 million and an additional $15 million should a vacancy arise ahead of the 2026 midterms. The group is working on the project alongside Indivisible, a far-left organization reportedly involved in organizing “No Kings” and anti-ICE demonstrations since Trump’s return to office.
Where Demand Justice is getting its millions of dollars to run this campaign is not disclosed in the article. Nor is it clear whether Epstein even bothered asking Orton about it.
What is evident, however, is that this is not the first time Demand Justice has sought to undermine Trump, his judicial selections, and the Supreme Court. While the Times was seemingly more than willing to spotlight the organization’s partisan plans for future SCOTUS nominations, it declined to delve into Demand Justice’s sordid history and how it’s served as a left-wing political weapon for years.
Origins and Leadership
According to the Capital Research Center’s InfluenceWatch database, Demand Justice was born in early 2018 as a project of the Sixteen Thirty Fund to advocate on behalf of left-wing judicial nominees and oppose conservative ones. The Sixteen Thirty Fund — which regularly injects its money into U.S. elections — is a left-wing advocacy group that operates within the recently re-acquisitioned Arabella Advisors dark-money network. The group has come under fire in recent years for accepting millions of dollars from Swiss national Hansjorg Wyss via his Berger Action Fund.
Within its first year of operations, Demand Justice waged an ad campaign against Trump’s prospective nominees to replace retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy — more specifically, then-Judges Brett Kavanaugh and Barrett. The left-wing judicial group would go on to increase its aggressive tactics upon Kavanaugh’s nomination by orchestrating protestor-led disruptions to Kavanaugh’s Senate hearings and launching a smear website aimed at tanking his nomination.
The group would go on to produce ads opposing Barrett’s and supporting Ketanji Brown Jackson’s respective SCOTUS nominations.
[READ: The Kavanaugh Circus Continues, More Dangerous Than Ever]
According to InfluenceWatch, Demand Justice became its own nonprofit in mid-2021, but nonetheless “received $1,982,613 from its former fiscal sponsor, Sixteen Thirty Fund” that year. The group also reportedly “received more than $2.5 million from the Open Society Policy Center, a 501(c)(4) lobbying group founded by George Soros, for general support” from April-June 2018.
This financial support from the left’s dark money war chest is unsurprising when further examining the organization’s leadership.
Demand Justice was co-founded by Obama White House official Christopher Kang and Brian Fallon, who served as press secretary for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Fallon would serve as the group’s executive director until 2023, at which point he stepped down from the position to become then-Vice President Kamala Harris’ senior communications official as part of Joe Biden’s 2024 campaign, a role he would maintain on Harris’ campaign.
The leftist organization would continue its entanglement with Democrat Party politics with its 2025 appointment of Orton as president. The Demand Justice chief notably served as a senior adviser to Harris in the Biden White House. He also previously worked as policy director and senior adviser to Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign, an adviser to former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and the “top judicial strategist” for the pro-abortion NARAL Pro-Choice America (now known as “Reproductive Justice for All“).
Court Packing and Other Left-Wing Advocacy
While opposing Trump’s judicial picks became a feature of Demand Justice during the president’s first term, the group notably boasted support for a policy that it touted much more prominently once Joe Biden became president. Namely, efforts to pack the Supreme Court.
The Capital Research Center (CRC) traced Demand Justice’s support for the extreme policy back to 2019 but noted how the group again promoted the idea “following the Democratic Party’s victories in the 2020 general election.” The group later ratcheted up its support for court packing in spring 2021, when it backed a bill introduced by congressional Democrats to add seats to the Supreme Court.
Demand Justice would go on to shell out $1.5 million on a program aimed at getting the Democrat proposal passed. The organization notably dialed down its infatuation with court packing following Trump’s return to office, as CRC’s Parker Thayer previously observed.
Supporting Democrat-led court-packing efforts is only part of Demand Justice’s bid to try and cripple the Supreme Court, however.
The group notably signed onto a 2024 letter from numerous leftist organizations to then-Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin, D-Ill., requesting that Alito recuse himself from cases related to the 2020 election and the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. The demand came in response to a media-concocted “scandal” about noncontroversial flags flown by Alito’s wife at their residence, which leftists tried to tie to “Stop the Steal” protestors.
Demand Justice subsequently announced plans later that year to launch a $10 million campaign to effectively undermine the court and future Republican judicial nominees.
Demand Justice has since re-focused much of its efforts to opposing Trump’s judicial picks since his return to the White House, according to InfluenceWatch. The organization also spawned an initiative to track what it claims to be are attempts by Trump and his allies to take “a sledgehammer to the rule of law and the balance of powers in our government.”
“The tracker’s release was accompanied by a targeted print and digital advertising campaign in the Washington Post, highlighting polling data from 2026 Senate battleground states,” the InfluenceWatch report reads. “The polling indicated cross-partisan concern regarding judicial integrity and political influence over the courts. [Demand Justice] stated that it intends to use both the tracker and polling data to apply pressure on lawmakers, regardless of party affiliation, during upcoming Senate confirmation votes.”
Closing Thoughts
If this look at Demand Justice and its destructive antics shows anything, it’s that the left will not hesitate to expend every resource necessary to accomplish its goals. And if that means throwing all that they have (including the kitchen sink) at a nominee to destroy his life and prevent him from ascending to the Supreme Court, then so be it.
The right would be wise to take heed of what groups like Demand Justice are doing and prepare accordingly. While conservatives were successful in overcoming the left’s campaigns to defeat Thomas and Kavanaugh’s SCOTUS nominations, it’s not guaranteed this will always be the case. Just look at what happened to Robert Bork.
While it’s currently unknown whether Thomas and/or Alito plan to retire any time soon, the Trump administration and its allies shouldn’t wait. They need to begin developing a plan of action on how best to confront what will likely be a vicious Democrat smear campaign.
