The Secret Plot To Buy American Democracy

Lever Time with David Sirota

In 1971, Lewis Powell, a tobacco industry lawyer and future Supreme Court justice, penned a memo calling on conservatives and business interests to make the nation’s legal system far more friendly to corporate power. A few years later, a lawyer named Michael Horowitz penned a follow-up memo calling for conservatives to indoctrinate generations of lawyers as the right’s foot soldiers on the ground.

Today on Lever Time, senior podcast producer Arjun Singh talks to David Sirota and Jared Jacang Maher about their deep-dive investigation into this 50-year plan in the hit new Lever podcast Master Plan. Then, he sits down with journalist David Daley to discuss his latest book, Antidemocratic: Inside the Far Right's 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections.

Daley’s book centers around Chief Justice John Roberts, whose ascent to the high court — and the conservative rulings he’s handed down — was the culmination of decades of work that began with Powell and Horowitz’s memos.