I first heard about the Federalist Society when profiling Judge Tim a couple posts back. Then I saw it mentioned again in a comment on Dalrock’s:
https://dalrock.wordpress.com/2018/11/17/now-we-are-haggling-about-the-price/#comment-291476
Perusing their website, it appears to be the loosely knit think tank I expected. Wikipedia has a more informative description than their own portal:
The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, most frequently called the Federalist Society, is an organization of conservatives and libertarians seeking reform of the current Law of the United States in accordance with what the organization says is a textualist or originalist interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. Founded in 1982, it is one of the nation’s most influential legal organizations…
The society began at Yale Law School, Harvard Law School, and the University of Chicago Law School in 1982 as a student organization that challenged what its founding members perceived as the orthodox American liberal ideology found in most law schools.
That screams “controlled opposition”.
The society was started by a group of some of the most prominent conservatives in the country… Its membership has since included Supreme Court justices Antonin Scalia, John G. Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh. The society asserts that it “is founded on the principles that the state exists to preserve freedom, that the separation of governmental powers is central to our constitution, and that it is emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is, not what it should be.”
No mention of God. The state exists to be the secular implementation of God’s Will for humanity. It does not exist for “freedom” or other such nebulous, morally neutral terms.
Libertarianism is already a dead letter, its adherents having failed to even test their ideas. Doesn’t help that most outsiders have trouble understanding the concepts of libertarianism, which is why the bulk of their voting membership has been the Legalize Marijuana people.
In The Federalist Society: How Conservatives Took the Law Back from Liberals by Michael Avery and Danielle McLaughlin, the authors write that every federal judge appointed by both President George H.W. Bush and President George W. Bush was either a member, or was approved by members of the society.
“We’re responsible for the Bushes!” is not a resounding endorsement. Those judges have done nothing, often less than nothing, to drain the Potomac swamp.
Well, what does the Federalist Society itself have to say?
Law schools and the legal profession are currently strongly dominated by a form of orthodox liberal ideology which advocates a centralized and uniform society. While some members of the academic community have dissented from these views, by and large they are taught simultaneously with (and indeed as if they were) the law.
So they demanded those Commie ideologues be kicked out of their tenure, yes? Or did they continue learning from the Leftoids under protest?
The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies is a group of conservatives and libertarians interested in the current state of the legal order. It is founded on the principles that the state exists to preserve freedom, that the separation of governmental powers is central to our Constitution, and that it is emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is, not what it should be. The Society seeks both to promote an awareness of these principles and to further their application through its activities.
Again, no mention of God or morality. This is classic Cuckservatism: the problem with Totalitarian monsters is they don’t follow due process when implementing tyranny. We should fix the process without disturbing the monster!
This entails reordering priorities within the legal system to place a premium on individual liberty, traditional values, and the rule of law. It also requires restoring the recognition of the importance of these norms among lawyers, judges, law students and professors. In working to achieve these goals, the Society has created a conservative and libertarian intellectual network that extends to all levels of the legal community.
“Traditional values”. Why should we want “traditional values”? Back then, the American people believed in God the Creator and Christ our Savior. They had Christian values, not “traditional” values. They were also known to use words such as “evil”. But these days, there’s no evil. The destroyers of God’s institution of marriage are “proponents of non-traditional values”.
Why should we want “rule of law”? In California, the legislators have warped the law so badly that morality increasingly requires civil disobedience to the law. When the Federalist Society was founded, Cali was a conservative state. Now, it’s the Treasonous Terrorist State. Am I consider myself obligated to obey laws that violate Christian morality?
They won’t call evil by its name.
And that’s the sum total of their “about us” page’s content. I tried looking at a few publications for more insight into the organization but every article was prefaced with
The Federalist Society takes no positions on particular legal and public policy matters. Any expressions of opinion are those of the author. Whenever we publish an article that advocates for a particular position, as here, we offer links to other perspectives on the issue, including ones opposed to the position taken in the article.
The Federalist Society is a controlled-opposition product of the Ivy League that is so Cuckservative, it preemptively refuses to side with its own authors. Are they willing to publish papers that violate their principles? Apparently so, else that notice would not be needed.
No wonder President Trump has been having trouble with its judicial appointments, if Trump has been relying on FedSoc for a supply of candidates. He would do better to offer senior judgeships on Craigslist in Des Moines.