I have written this piece at Slate with Dahlia Lithwick. It begins:

The right-wing legal network spawned by the Federalist Society has finally gone full Trumpian. It has morphed from a group of apparently principled conservatives debating high-minded theories of legal interpretation, into a secretly-funded cabal spouting conspiracy theories such as the myth of widespread voter fraud. We’ve certainly seen hints that this was the case and also signals that it was coming. But we have now approached peak-hackery, and that hackery is now being directed at manipulating elections. That part really is new, and it is a dangerous development that threatens the rule of law…

One early sign of the turn away from normal politics and toward dirty tricks occurred when conservative legal activist Ed Whelan advanced an unhinged conspiracy theory that used Zillow pages, Facebook, and yearbook photos to claim that it was not Kavanaugh who committed the attack on Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, but rather his classmate, whom Whelan named outright. Whelan later apologized and after doing a short period of social media penance is now back at work pushing the Federalist Society agenda. The unsupported claim of a different attacker was taken up by commentators and Republican senators who claimed they believed Dr. Ford about being attacked but cast doubt on whether she was correct about the identity of the attacker. The baseless theory injected just enough confusion into the allegations, Kavanaugh was confirmed, and Whelan has paid no price for it.

Now things have taken a turn from court-packing to a side-grift in vote suppression. According to new reporting from The Guardian and Open Secrets, Leo, Carrie Severino of the Judicial Crisis Network, and their dark-money backers are promoting the Orwellian-named “Honest Elections Project” to pressure elections administrators to limit access to the ballot and to undermine trust in elections. The messaging echoes Trump’s baseless claims that various states’ efforts to let people vote by mail are fraudulent – and turns these lies into policy. “The project announced it was spending $250,000 in advertisements in April, warning against voting by mail and accusing Democrats of cheating,” the Guardian explained.  “It facilitated letters to election officials in Colorado, Florida and Michigan, using misleading data to accuse jurisdictions of having bloated voter rolls and threatening legal action. Calling voter suppression a ‘myth’, it has also been extremely active in the courts, filing briefs in favor of voting restrictions in Nevada, Virginia, Texas, Wisconsin and Minnesota, among other places, at times represented by lawyers from the same firm that represents Trump.”…

That the conservative network is suddenly engaged in spouting unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud to support suppressive voting laws and cast doubt on the legitimacy of elections in which Democrats can win is an activity fundamentally at odds with the spirit of honest debate that is supposed to animate the Federalist Society. It is also the kind of fundamental dishonesty in the service of political aims that is the polar opposite of the rule of law values Justice Scalia and others had professed as being at the beating heart of the conservative legal movement’s mission. It takes an immense amount of cynicism to move from debating conservative jurisprudential theories to taking secret money to buy and sell judicial nominations. But the cynicism required to use that once-vaunted perch from which to shut down free elections is still breathtaking, even if it should no longer surprise us at all.