Landmark Legal Foundation

The Landmark Legal Foundation is an American conservative legal advocacy group.[1] The President as of 2018 is Richard P. Hutchison. Through litigation and direct interfacing with government agencies, Landmark Legal advances a conservative platform of limited government and has litigated a number of cases up to and before the US Supreme Court.[2]

History

Landmark was founded in 1976 as an offshoot of The National Legal Center for the Public Interest with its focus on protecting individual rights, challenging the scope and authority of government, defending free enterprise, and exposing teachers' union fraud.[3] Landmark has made efforts to scale back funding for non-profits which it holds to be political in nature but list no political expenditures on tax forms. The National Education Association has often been the subject of complaints to the IRS made by Landmark Legal. Throughout its history Landmark Legal Foundation has filed lawsuits against labor unions and has fought for legislation that would allow parents to direct public education funding toward their children's private schools, homeschooling, or school of choice.

In 1990, Landmark was involved in a civil rights court case when it questioned the legality of taxes to pay for the effect of segregation in Kansas City; the case went to the Supreme Court, which decided the taxes were legal.[4]

During the presidency of Bill Clinton, Landmark Legal unsuccessfully requested an independent counsel to investigate the role of Vice President Al Gore with an event hosted at a California Buddhist temple that was at the center of the 1996 United States campaign finance controversy. Landmark also filed a lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) that alleged that the IRS targeted conservative groups for audits at the request of government officials.[5] When the impeachment of Bill Clinton began, Landmark Legal actively played a role in scrutinizing government actions. In 1998, Landmark called for a federal probe about ties between the website Salon.com and Justice Department officials that the foundation accused of illegally leaking information; Levin called Salon "a mouthpiece for the [Clinton] administration."[6] A federal appeals court rejected a request by Landmark Legal in 1999 to block a Justice Department investigation of special counsel Ken Starr for alleged misconduct in the impeachment inquiry.[7]

In 2000, Landmark Legal filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission alleging that the National Education Association, the largest teachers' union in the U.S., did not disclose spending on political activity in Internal Revenue Service documentation.[8] Landmark Legal also filed similar complaints with the United States Department of Labor in 2002 regarding NEA and political activity; by 2006, the NEA and smaller American Federation of Teachers had filed new documents with the Labor Department revealing over $100 million combined in political action spending.[9]

In 2007 the Landmark Legal Foundation nominated commentator Rush Limbaugh, who sits as an unpaid member of its advisory board, for a Nobel Peace Prize.[10]

In 2016, the director of Penn State Earth System Science Center, climatologist Michael E. Mann, named Landmark as part of an alleged smear campaign against him after his testimony on the C-SPAN TV network about the threat of human-caused climate change.[11][12]

In 2015, a federal judge found that the Environmental Protection Agency had handled Landmark's 2012 Freedom of Information Act request in a "suspicious" manner, but the judge did not impose sanctions because Landmark had not established that the EPA acted in bad faith.[13]

Supreme Court of Arizona Justice Clint Bolick has worked for the foundation.[14] Former Whitewater special investigator Kenneth Starr has also worked with Landmark.[15] Former U.S. Attorney General and counselor to President Reagan Edwin Meese is currently the Second Vice Chairman of Landmark Legal Foundation.[16]

Leadership and staff

Kansas City attorney Jerald L. Hill served as president of Landmark Legal from 1985 to 1997. From 1997 to 2018, Mark Levin served as president.[17] Since 2018, Pete Hutchison has been president of Landmark Legal.[18]

A former White House official during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, Levin joined Landmark in 1991 and previously served as director of legal policy and the foundation's Washington-based Center for Civil Rights before becoming president.[19][20] In 2001 the American Conservative Union awarded Levin its Ronald Reagan Award for his work with Landmark Legal.[21][22] Levin would go on to become a bestselling author and host of the nationally syndicated talk radio program The Mark Levin Show and Fox News Channel program Life, Liberty & Levin; after stepping down as president, he continues to serve Landmark Legal as a member of its board of directors.[23]

After serving in the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission under Clarence Thomas, Clint Bolick served as the director of Landmark Legal's Center for Civil Rights from 1988 to 1991.[24][25][26] In seeking an alternative to affirmative action, Bolick advocated that "the conservative cause on civil rights was better served by identifying blacks, not whites, as its beneficiaries," wrote Steven M. Teles in 2008.[26] Bolick went on to become co-founding vice president at the Institute for Justice and Associate Justice of the Arizona Supreme Court.[24]

Former U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese also serves on the board of directors. The foundation's advisory board includes Hillsdale College president Larry P. Arnn and syndicated columnist and George Mason University economics professor Walter E. Williams.[23]

Organization and funding

The Landmark Legal Foundation is a 501(c)(3) organization.[27] As of 2017, Landmark Legal had an annual budget of nearly $1.6 million, with nearly 99 percent of funding coming from charitable contributions.[27] Landmark Legal does not accept government funding.[28]

In the 1990s, Richard Mellon Scaife was a major donor to Landmark Legal.[5] Scaife gave $525,000 to Landmark Legal in 1997.[29] The Coors brewing family of Colorado has also donated to Landmark Legal.[30]

Notes
  1. Organizational Profile Archived 2016-01-26 at the Wayback Machine – National Center for Charitable Statistics (Urban Institute)
  2. Landmark Legal Foundation on corporatepolicy.org
  3. "Landmark Legal Foundation". Archived from the original on 2007-06-25. Retrieved 2007-07-18.
  4. Robbins, William; Times, Special To the New York (1990-04-19). "Kansas City Rights Leaders Praise Supreme Court Ruling". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2019-10-23.
  5. Segal, David (January 26, 1998). "Dream Case Is a Burden, Lawyer Finds". The Washington Post. p. A09. Archived from the original on September 15, 2000. Retrieved April 23, 2020.
  6. Kurtz, Howard (April 24, 1998). "Whitewater Mud Hits the Messengers". The Washington Post. p. B01. Archived from the original on September 15, 2000. Retrieved April 23, 2020.
  7. Suro, Roberto (March 19, 1999). "Justice Investigation of Starr Approved". The Washington Post. p. A10. Archived from the original on September 15, 2000. Retrieved April 23, 2020.
  8. Archer, Jeff (November 1, 2000). "Complaints Point Up 'Murky' Areas In Union Activism". Education Week. Archived from the original on January 11, 2002.
  9. Keller, Bess; Honawar, Vaishali (January 10, 2006). "Union Filings Give In-Depth Look at Spending Patterns". Education Week. Archived from the original on January 21, 2020.
  10. "Landmark Legal Foundation Nominates Rush Limbaugh for 2007 Nobel Peace Prize".
  11. Mann, Michael E.; Writer, ContributorGuest Writer Guest (2016-07-15). "'Anatomy of a Smear' or 'How the Right Wing Denial Machine Distorts The Climate Change Discourse'". HuffPost. Retrieved 2019-10-23.
  12. "Democratic Platform Drafting Committee Hearing, Day 1, Part 1 | C-SPAN.org". www.c-span.org. Retrieved 2019-10-23.
  13. Hsu, Spencer S. (2015-03-02). "Judge blasts EPA for 'suspicious' handling of conservative group's FOIA". Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved 2019-10-23.
  14. Steven Teles, 'Compassionate Conservatism, Domestic Policy, and the Politics of Ideational Change', in Crisis of Conservatism? The Republican Party, the Conservative Movement, & American Politics After Bush, Gillian Peele, Joel D. Aberbach (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 198
  15. Schlosser, Eric (1998-03-20). "Tales from the Inquisition The Prosecutor". Rolling Stone. Retrieved 2019-10-23.
  16. "OUR STAFF". landmarklegal. Retrieved 2019-10-23.
  17. "Landmark Legal Foundation: Forceful Advocacy for Over 20 Years", Landmark Legal Foundation Newsletter, 1 (1), Fall 1997, archived from the original on February 24, 1999, retrieved January 20, 2020
  18. "Landmark Legal Fdn. Files Complaint Against California Over Non-Citizen Voting". Landmark Legal Foundation. February 15, 2018. Retrieved January 20, 2020.
  19. Levin, Mark R. [@marklevinshow] (October 29, 2019). "Check out Landmark Legal Foundation's website, a fantastic conservative legal group I've been associated with for 28 years!" (Tweet). Retrieved April 23, 2020 – via Twitter.
  20. "Landmark Senior Staff". Landmark Legal Foundation. Archived from the original on July 9, 1997. Retrieved January 20, 2020.
  21. "Ronald Reagan Award Presented to Landmark's President Mark Levin". Landmark Legal Foundation. February 21, 2001. Archived from the original on April 8, 2001. Retrieved January 19, 2020.CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link).
  22. https://www.c-span.org/video/?162626-1/ronald-reagan-banquet&start=1927&stop=4242
  23. https://www.landmarklegal.org/people
  24. "Justice Clint Bolick". Arizona Judicial Branch. Retrieved April 23, 2020.
  25. Bolick, Clint (1991), "Opportunity 2000: Making Affirmative Action Truly 'Affirmative'", The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights: Hearing Before the Subcommittee on the Constitution of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, One Hundred First Congress, First Session...July 13, 1989, Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, pp. 49–61 – via Google Books
  26. Teles, Steven M. (2008). The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. pp. 85–88. ISBN 978-0-691-122083 – via Google Books.
  27. "Nonprofit Explorer: Landmark Legal Foundation". ProPublica. Retrieved April 23, 2020.
  28. Levin, Mark (December 1, 2016). "Landmark Legal does not receive a penny of government money, nor would ever accept it..." Facebook. Retrieved April 23, 2020.
  29. Segal, David (June 10, 1998). "Foundation Gave $550,000 To Anti-Clinton Group". The Washington Post. p. A06. Archived from the original on August 16, 2000. Retrieved April 23, 2020.
  30. Thornburg, Ryan (August 24, 1998). "Blue Dog, Brewer Differ on Clinton Scandal". Washington Post. Archived from the original on August 19, 2000. Retrieved April 23, 2020.

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