*The Federalist Society* Judicial Pipeline & Megadonors That Changed The Nation
"How Conservatives Built A Powerful Judicial Pipeline." The Week, Aug. 2018. - "We thought we were just planting a wildflower among the weeds of academic liberalism and it turned out to be an oak." - Antonin Scalia.
The Federalist Society built a national farm system for conservative judges that has changed the nation. Here's everything you need to know: - What is the Federalist Society? It's an organization of more than 70,000 conservative and libertarian lawyers and law students with chapters at every accredited law school in the country.
All of the Supreme Court's conservative justices - Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Chief Justice John Roberts - have been members, as has Brett Kavanaugh, President Trump's nominee to replace retired justice Anthony Kennedy. That's no coincidence: The Federalist Society exerts unparalleled influence over Republican judicial appointments, offering the definitive endorsement of a potential judge's conservative bona fides.
Its members "place a premium on individual liberty, traditional values, and the rule of law," the society states. In practice, that translates to fewer restrictions on gun ownership and campaign donations, and opposition to legal abortion, government regulation of private industry, and race-based affirmative action policies that defy a "color-blind Constitution." During his campaign for president, Trump promised that all of his judicial appointees would be "picked by the Federalist Society."
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- How did the society start? When Ronald Reagan led the conservative revolution that put him in the White House in 1981, law schools were dominated by liberal professors. A small group of conservative students at Yale and the University of Chicago banded together to challenge that status quo. The Yale students were led by professor Robert Bork, whom Reagan later nominated to the Supreme Court (he was rejected by Senate Democrats as too extreme). The Chicago students were mentored by Antonin Scalia, whom Reagan successfully placed on the court in 1986.
Scalia and Bork were the leading proponents of originalism, which holds that judges should interpret the Constitution by attempting to discern the literal meaning of the text when it was written; if the Framers - the "Federalists" - didn't specify a right to abortion or to privacy, for example, then these rights have no constitutional basis. (Liberal justices, by contrast, perceive the Constitution as "a living document," whose descriptions of basic rights can be interpreted in a more expansive way tailored to modern circumstances.)
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- Why was the society so successful? For decades, judges appointed by Republican presidents tended to drift to the left over the course of their careers. For example, one of George H.W. Bush's picks for the highest court, David Souter, ended up reliably siding with the liberal bloc, voting in 1992 in Planned Parenthood v. Casey to uphold the right to abortion established in Roe v. Wade. Originalism was created in part to guard against such betrayals by emphasizing a fixed interpretation of the law.
After George W. Bush was elected president, conservatives loudly objected to his nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, on the grounds that Miers - not a Federalist Society member- might drift to the middle like the Reagan appointee she was tapped to replace, Sandra Day O'Connor. Bush's second choice, Alito, was an active member of the society, and has been one of the court's most consistent conservative votes...
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- How does the society work? The organization claims to be a nonpartisan "society of ideas," but that it shares objectives with the Republican Party is undeniable. It receives millions of dollars from conservative and libertarian megadonors such as the Mercer family and the Koch brothers; the society reported $28 million in assets in 2017. To help seed the system with conservatives, judges who belong to the Federalist Society give prestigious clerkships to fellow members, who then have a better shot at one day becoming judges themselves...
~ Read More, https://theweek.com/articles/791928/how-conservatives-built-powerful-judicial-pipeline
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