The Conservative Farm System, the Federalist Society.

Once a little-known fraternity of conservative law students, the Federalist Society has become a major player in the fight to reshape the courts and the law. Why has it been so successful?
12/9/2005

What is the Federalist Society?
The group humbly calls itself “a debating society,” but it’s far more than that. In the past three decades, the Federalists have helped forge the legal and philosophical doctrines at the heart of the conservative movement. Nor is it merely a think tank: With 35,000 members and chapters at every major law school in the nation, the Society has groomed the lawyers and judges who have turned conservative doctrines into law. Its members include newly minted Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito, and several powerful players within the Bush administration. Current Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas are longtime members. “They have been unbelievably successful in a short time,” says Nadine Strossen, president of the liberal American Civil Liberties Union. “If you go to their meetings, you see the attorney general, senators, the solicitor general. I wish we had the same kind of presence.”

How does the society gain influence?
The same way as most organizations—by networking. As Republican presidents from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush have filled judicial vacancies with conservatives, they’ve looked to the society as a likely source of judges who will reliably agree with conservative principles. Those judges, in turn, fill clerkships with eager young conservatives from the Society. Judge Alex Kozinski, a Federalist Society member who sits on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, says seeing the Society on a résumé “tells me you’re of a particular philosophy, and I tend to give an edge to people I agree with philosophically.” Such favoritism, many conservatives say, is long overdue.

What do they mean by that?
Conservatives contend that for decades, the legal establishment was dominated by liberals, from law schools to the courts. In fact, it was in protest of what they called “orthodox liberal ideology” that a handful of law students at Yale and the University of Chicago started the Society in 1982. Co-founder Steven Calabresi recalls that only two of the 88 members of his first-year class at Yale raised their hands when asked if they had voted for Ronald Reagan. “I think some others in that room had voted for him,” says Calabresi, “and I realized that we needed an organization to encourage others to come forward.” Many others did, with dramatic results.

What happened?
The group’s timing could not have been better. With Reagan in the White House, conservatives were feeling their oats. But they were also frustrated that much of their agenda—from overturning Roe v. Wade to curtailing the power of federal regulatory agencies—was hitting a wall in the courts. The solution, many felt, was a long-term strategy of sharpening legal tactics and nurturing and “credentialing” a new generation of lawyers. At Yale, law professor Robert Bork (a future Supreme Court nominee) stepped forward to serve as the group’s faculty advisor. In Chicago, law professor (and future justice) Scalia jumped in. Soon, conservative organizations such as the Scaife and Olin foundations were anteing up hundreds of thousands of dollars to spawn chapters across the nation. Programs were established for law professors and practicing attorneys.

What, exactly, do the Federalists want?
Their name provides a major clue. “Federalism” refers to the idea, first advanced by Alexander Hamilton, that the federal government should not encroach on the powers of the states. But the Society embraces a wide range of conservative causes. Some members favor libertarian notions of individual liberties over “big government.” Others advocate “strict constructionism,” which holds that only rights explicitly outlined by the Founders should be enshrined in constitutional law—and that abortion and privacy are not on that list. But they all share the conviction that, starting with the Warren Court in the 1950s, liberals have twisted the law and the Constitution beyond recognition.

Are they turning things around?
Indeed they are. The Society brings together academics who hone legal theories, activists in the trenches of Washington’s policy wars, and highly motivated litigators. These lawyers are widely credited (or blamed) with producing a number of important court decisions, from curtailing the scope of the Clean Air Act to limiting the use of racial preferences in college admissions. In coming years, the Federalists’ influence is sure to grow.

Why is that?
About a third of Bush’s nominees to the appellate courts have been Society members. This is no fluke. For decades, presidents relied on the American Bar Association to vet potential nominees to the bench. But ever since the ABA gave a mixed report on Reagan nominee Bork, whom the Senate ultimately rejected, conservatives have accused the ABA of liberal bias. When President George W. Bush came into office, he brought with him such prominent Federalists as John Ashcroft, his first attorney general, and Theodore Olson, his first solicitor general. In short order, the administration said it would no longer rely on the ABA, but rather would seek input on judges from a variety of groups, including the Federalist Society. The Society has become “the legal intelligentsia for the Republican Party,” says American University law professor Jamin Raskin. “Liberals do well issuing broad-minded statements of principle, but the conservatives know how to organize in military style and get the job done.”

http://www.theweekmagazine.com/article.aspx?id=1245

Patriarchy
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Protection of the Wealthy


This group is a danger to everything that's good about this country.

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:kick:

...and completely ignorant of history.

The Federalists were, by and large, northeasterners who were dedicated to preventing the encroachment of "pure democracy" into the government of the brand-new republic of the United States. They had carefully placed many barriers against what they thought of as "mob rule" into the Constitution, and done their best to ensure that the vote franchise, and the power of political determination, would stay in the hands of the "educated" men, those who were prepared and fit to take on the "responsibility" of citizen-sovereignty. They wanted the northeastern and mid-Atlantic states, where the seats of economic and social power rested, to control the destiny of the infant nation. They worried that the southern states, with their lopsided agrarian economies dependent on slavery, and the western states, with their obsessive focus expansion (and shoving the Indians aside to make it happen,) would use the tool of majority rule to support and/or implement policies disastrous to the economic structure that supported the northeastern/midatlantic states.

They wanted a strong Federal government with clearly defined areas of authority to keep the individual states from pursuing economic, judicial, and legal initiatives that would promote state goals at the expense of the larger union. Most of the Federalist initiatives, read in the context of the times (i.e., the late 18th/early 19th centuries) were intended to abrogate specific powers and authorities to the Federal government, clarifying matters which the early Federalists felt had been insufficiently delineated in the Constitution. Because they knew how unpopular attempts to build a strong central government would be, they surrounded the kernels of clarification with rhetorical flourishes about how defining specific Federal powers would actually "increase" state powers and freedoms under the "powers not specifically" Constitutional provisions. Today's neo-Federalists take the rhetorical flourishes at face value as a statement of intent.

The point remains that early Republicans didn't want ANY powers, with the possible exception of negotiating (but not accepting or finalizing!) foreign treaties, to be specifically spelled out as the prerogative of the central government. Then as now, they felt that a strong central government was a tool of "educated elites" to deny "the common man" full exercise of his right to self-determination through state governments. The paradoxical effect of these ideologies THEN was to make the Republicans eager to promote all the "democratic" reforms they could, in order to maximize the power of numbers. They fought for electoral college reform to make the choice of the electors dependent on the outcome of popular votes, they agitated for proportional representation of electors and nomination processes based on popular selection. They were big on "the will of the People" back then, because they saw it as the tool that would allow them (in each State) to continue their various individual courses to whatever they saw as their proper economic destiny, be it dependence on slavery, genocide of the native population to clear land for settlement, etc. By being "democratic" and permitting greater majority rule, they saw the path to their goal.

The Federalists, on the other hand, resorted to all kinds of shenanigans (including some of them actually scheming to reach some kind of accommodation that would allow Britain to maintain control of areas west of the Mississippi, continue their meddling in Spanish Florida, and possibly even revert the Louisiana territory to British control as a result of British victories in the Napoleanic Wars,) to maintain economic and political power, and engaged in all kinds of elitist and corrupt practices to prevent the Republicans from implementing "mob rule." They got their comeuppance when the War of 1812 turned popular sentiment rabidly anti-British, and some Federalists' pro-British pre-War maneuverings were brought to light. They more or less died as a coherent political coalition then, and disbanded into a number of splinter groups that influenced various factions within the Republicans and the newly-rising Democrats. De Tocqueville covers it pretty thoroughly.

The original Federalists were anti-democratic elitists for ends that today's liberals and progressives would probably approve and today's conservatives and libertarians recoil from; the original Republicans struggled to bring a more representative democracy into existence for reasons that would horrify today's liberals and progressives and delight today's libertarians and conservatives. One has to wonder whether the original Federalists would make of today's "Federalists"-- would their approval of the means outweigh their horror of the ends, or vice-versa?

speculatively,
Bright