Calabresi, Steven E S Q

CANNON: By contrast, Trump, who appointed Cannon in 2020 to the Fort Pierce courthouse, has praised her brilliance, and Federalist Society founder Steven Calabresi called her a heroine for throwing out the criminal case against Trump.

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AN 6 25

Countless Democrats are vehemently critical of the steep tariffs that President Donald Trump is imposing on the United States' trading partners, warning that a variety of imported goods are going to get a lot more expensive in the months ahead. But criticism is coming from parts of the right as well, including some conservative and libertarian legal scholars.

According to New York Times legal reporter Adam Liptak, a friend-of-the-court brief submitted back in April laid out right-wing concerns about Trump's trade policy.

Those who signed the brief, which was filed in the U.S. Court of International Trade, included, among others, Steven G. Calabresi, who was a founder of the Federalist Society in the early 1980s; former U.S. Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey; and Richard Epstein, a libertarian legal scholar at New York University. The brief, Liptak reports, was prepared by Michael W. McConnell, who now teaches at Stanford Law School in California and is an ex-federal appeals court judge appointed by former President George W. Bush.

Epstein told the Times, "You have to understand that the conservative movement is now, as an intellectual movement, consistently anti-Trump on most issues."

IFrame Content

Some liberals and progressives, according to Liptak, signed the brief as well, including Yale University law professor Harold Koh. But much of the participation came from the right.

Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University in Virginia, told the Times, "The brief unites big-name constitutional law scholars across the political spectrum in a way I have rarely seen. I never would have expected to see Richard Epstein, Steve Calabresi and Harold Koh all on the same brief on a major issue. But here they are, together, opposing 'taxation by proclamation.' Donald Trump brought them together."

One of the brief's main criticisms of Trump's trade policy is that he carrying it out by executive order and failing to get Congress' input.

The brief read, "The powers to tax, to regulate commerce and to shape the nation's economic course must remain with Congress. They cannot drift silently into the hands of the president through inertia, inattention or creative readings of statutes never meant to grant such authority. That conviction is not partisan. It is constitutional. And it strikes at the heart of this case."

*Read Adam Liptak's full New York Times article at this link (subscription required).

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omfg

1 25 an

On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon issued a ruling temporarily blocking the release of Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith's final report in the waning days of President Joe Biden's administration.

The three-page order prevents Smith, Attorney General Merrick Garland, the Biden DOJ and "all of their officers, agents, and employees, and all persons acting in active concert or participation with such individuals” from “releasing, sharing, or transmitting the Final Report or any drafts of such Report outside the Department of Justice.” But as Politico's Kyle Cheney reports, Cannon — who then-President Donald Trump appointed to the federal bench in 2020 — may not have the jurisdiction to intervene in the publication of the report, which is required by the federal special counsel statute.

Whether the report sees the light of day will ultimately rest with the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, which has overturned Cannon's rulings on two previous occasions. Legal nonprofit National Security Counselors posted to Bluesky that the 11th Circuit, which meets next week, is not likely to go agree with Cannon's decision.

"[T]hey get the final say, and they're not going to play the delay game that Trump really wanted Cannon to play," the organization wrote.

Portland, Oregon-based attorney Patrick De Klotz observed that Cannon's decision was handed down right around the same time the president-elect praised the judge as "brilliant" during a Tuesday press conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate. And civil rights lawyer Subodh Chandra condemned Cannon for "aiding and abetting suppression of the truth," adding: "Shame. Shame. Shame."

Other legal experts speculated that Cannon's move was less about the report itself and more about her jockeying for a position on the Supreme Court. Attorney Jeffrey Evan Gold, who is a legal analyst for CNN, NBC, ABC and others, responded to the news of Cannon blocking the report's release by referring to her as "Justice Cannon." Northeastern Illinois University political science professor William Adler wrote that Americans should "get used to" saying "Supreme Court nominee Aileen Cannon." And Politico magazine contributor Joshua Zeitz opined that it was "pretty easy to see how this goes."

"Alito will retire, Trump will name her to the court, and she’ll easily be confirmed with unanimous GOP support and a handful of older Democratic Senators who think it’s still 1978," Zeitz wrote.

Click here to read Cheney's full report in Politico, and click here to read the full text of Cannon's order.

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ref

Federal Judge Aileen M. Cannon, the controversial jurist who tossed out the classified documents criminal case against Donald Trump in July, failed to disclose her attendance at a May 2023 banquet funded by a conservative law school.

Cannon went to an event in Arlington, Va. honoring the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, according to documents obtained from the Law and Economics Center at George Mason University. At a lecture and private dinner, she sat among members of Scalia’s family, fellow Federalist Society members and more than 30 conservative federal judges. Organizers billed the event as “an excellent opportunity to connect with judicial colleagues.”

A 2006 rule, intended to shine a light on judges’ attendance at paid seminars that could pose conflicts or influence decisions, requires them to file disclosure forms for such trips within 30 days and make them public on the court’s website.

It’s not the first time she has failed to fully comply with the rule.

In 2021 and 2022, Cannon took weeklong trips to the luxurious Sage Lodge in Pray, Montana, for legal colloquiums sponsored by George Mason, which named its law school for Scalia thanks to $30 million in gifts that conservative judicial kingmaker Leonard Leo helped organize.

Current rates for standard rooms at Sage Lodge can exceed $1,000 per night, depending on the season. With both Montana trips, Cannon’s required seminar disclosures were not posted until NPR reporters asked about the omissions this year as part of a broader national investigation of gaps in judicial disclosures.

Cannon did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

In response to questions from ProPublica, the clerk in the Southern District of Florida wrote in an email that Cannon had filed the Sage Lodge trips with the federal judiciary’s administrative office but had “inadvertently” not taken the second step of posting them on the court’s website. She explained that “Judges often do not realize they must input the information twice.”

The clerk said she had no information about the May 2023 banquet.

“Judges administer the law, and we have a right to expect every judge to comply with the law,” said Virginia Canter, chief ethics counsel for the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

Cannon’s husband, Joshua Lorence, a restaurant executive, accompanied her to the 2021 and 2022 colloquiums, which featured noted conservative jurists, lawyers and professors as well as lengthy “afternoon study breaks,” according to records obtained by ProPublica. Cannon emailed university staff to submit airport parking expenses and inquire about rental car reimbursement.

The rule for paid seminars is among the policies set by the Judicial Conference. Federal judges are also required by law to file annual financial disclosures, listing items such as assets, outside income and gifts.

Cannon’s annual disclosure form for 2023, which was due in May and offers another chance to report gifts and reimbursements from outside parties, has yet to be posted. (Cannon reported the two Montana trips on her annual disclosure forms, but the required 30-day privately funded seminar reports had not been posted. In 2021, Cannon incorrectly listed the school as “George Madison University.”)

The court’s administrative office declined to say if she requested a one-time extension to give her until Aug. 13 to file. A spokesperson would not discuss whether she met the deadline or the status of her disclosure, which must be reviewed internally.

Cannon’s performance during almost four years of a lifetime appointment has drawn criticism from lawyers, former federal judges and courtroom observers who told ProPublica that she doesn’t render timely decisions and has made unpredictable rulings in both civil and criminal matters. On July 15, she threw out the case brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith that alleges Trump mishandled classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago residence; Cannon called Smith’s appointment unconstitutional since he was not nominated by the president and approved by the Senate.

Smith is appealing to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has asked the court to remand her decision and replace her.

By contrast, Trump, who appointed Cannon in 2020 to the Fort Pierce courthouse, has praised her brilliance, and Federalist Society founder Steven Calabresi called her a heroine for throwing out the criminal case against Trump.

For decades, judicial education programs sponsored by George Mason’s Law and Economics Center have drawn in 5,000 state and federal judges and four current Supreme Court justices, according to its website. The school says its programs strive for balance and intellectual rigor. But conference agendas and speaker lists that the university must file with the courts detail lectures and panel discussions built around Federalist Society principles that are associated with conservative legal movements.

Ken Turchi, associate dean for external affairs, said the law school plays no role in judicial disclosures. “Judges’ decisions to submit (or not submit) disclosure forms are theirs alone — it’s a self-reporting process,” he said.

The guest list for the May 2023 Scalia Forum included William H. Pryor Jr., chief judge of the 11th Circuit, which is now hearing Smith’s appeal. Pryor and dinner speaker Kyle Duncan, a 5th Circuit judge, did file their required disclosures for the Scalia dinner.

Pryor’s court has overruled Cannon twice in the Trump case. It sided with the government in September 2022 on a motion for a stay and found that it “had established a substantial likelihood of success on the merits.” In December 2022, it ruled that she erred in naming a special master to examine classified documents seized from Mar-a-Lago. After that decision, Cannon had to dismantle an expensive operation set up by her special master, a senior federal judge in New York.

Gabe Roth, who directs Fix the Court, a nonprofit judicial reform group, said compliance with the privately funded seminar rule has improved in some circuits since his group pressed for compliance with the Administrative Office of the Courts.

“They’re a more effective way for litigants and the public to get a sense of what types of individuals and groups a judge might be hanging out with and learning from,” he said.

Records show that Cannon submitted minor reimbursement requests related to the Scalia Forum trip after she returned, including the 158 miles she drove round trip to the airport. She inquired with George Mason staff about details for an Alaska excursion recommended by a former lawyer in the Trump-era White House Counsel’s Office.

Cannon registered for George Mason’s Hill Country Colloquium at a Texas resort in December 2023 but had to back out for scheduling reasons.

“I hope to join that event, and others, in future years,” she wrote.

If you have information about Judge Aileen M. Cannon, please contact Marilyn W. Thompson at marilyn.thompson@propublica.org.

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lying sack of shit

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How the Federalist Society came to dominate the Supreme Court — Harvard Gazette

mar 2021

In a new audiobook, Law School professor explores the rise of the Federalist Society and why its sway may be waning

Beginning in the early 1980s, when it was not exactly cool to be a conservative law student, a small group of students started a club, named in honor of The Federalist Papers, where they could safely discuss their right-of-center views. Fast-forward 40 years and six of the nine sitting Supreme Court Justices are current or former members of that club.

In “Takeover: How a Conservative Student Club Captured the Supreme Court” (Pushkin Industries), Harvard Law School professor and “Deep Background” podcast host Noah Feldman explores the rise of the most influential legal organization in U.S. history and how it has managed to shape judicial policy over the last three decades.

Feldman, one of the four legal scholars called upon to testify at the first impeachment hearings on former President Trump, with “Deep Background” co-host Lidia Jean Kott, takes listeners into the offices and chambers of the people who know the organization best.

Listen to the preface and start of Chapter 1, “How to Start a Revolution.”

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yale

When former President Donald Trump began the review process for nominating a Supreme Court justice in 2017, Leonard Leo — the former vice president and current co-chairman of the Federalist Society — worked with the Trump administration and Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee to propose potential candidates.

Under Leo’s guidance in 2018, Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh ’87 LAW ’90, who has been connected with the Federalist Society for at least 24 years. In 2017 and 2020, Leo’s creation of a list of potential Supreme Court nominees for Trump helped to advise the appointment of two other Federalist Society affiliates, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett.

By 2024, six of the nine Supreme Court justices considered themselves members or affiliates of the Federalist Society — the culmination of a longstanding pipeline connecting members of Federalist Society chapters at America’s top law schools to high-level judgeships and political offices.

But how exactly does this pipeline work, and how has it shaped conservative thought within the American judiciary?

The Federalist Society, a debating organization that hosts political events and acts as a network for conservative and libertarian students and professionals, was founded at Yale Law School in 1982 by three Yale alumni: Steven Calabresi ’80 LAW ’83, David McIntosh ’80 and Lee Liberman Otis ’79. Today, the Society is represented at all 204 ABA-accredited law schools in the country, has established communities of affiliated lawyers in 60 cities and has over 70,000 members.

The organization is divided into three divisions — students’ division, lawyers’ division and faculty division — allowing for collaboration between law students, practicing lawyers and judges and law school professors.

From humble beginnings to political heights

In April 1982, the Federalist Society held its first event: a referendum entitled “A Symposium on Federalism: Legal and Political Ramifications.” Held over the course of a weekend, it featured a series of speaker events, debates and workshops.

The Federalist Society has since defined itself as a “group of conservatives and libertarians interested in the current state of the legal order,” according to its website. According to its three founders, the Federalist Society’s original goal was to provide a space on law school campuses for debating ideas across the political spectrum.

“It’s fair to say that none of us, when we started it, had any idea how large it would eventually grow to be,” Calabresi said.

With six of the nine current Supreme Court justices serving as members or affiliates of the Federalist Society — Clarence Thomas LAW ’74, Samuel Alito LAW ’75, John Roberts, Kavanaugh, Barrett and Gorsuch — the group’s impact on the national judiciary is notably more significant than its founders anticipated.

Other affiliates include former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, FBI Director Christopher A. Wray ’89 LAW ’92, former U.S. Attorneys General Edwin Meese ’53 and John Ashcroft ’64 and senator Josh Hawley LAW ’06.

An “affiliate relationship” to the society is defined by membership in one of its divisions, regular attendance at events or speaking at events.

The idea for the Federalist Society originated when Calabresi, McIntosh and Liberman Otis, all Yale College graduates, started their legal studies — Calabresi at Yale Law School and McIntosh and Liberman at the University of Chicago Law School. They felt that libertarian and conservative perspectives on issues were not represented on their campuses.

All former members of the Yale Political Union in 1978 and 1979, they noted the “debate and discussion” that fueled their time in the YPU was not present at their respective law schools.

“The Political Union, at the time we were active in it, … was very different from what it is now,” Calabresi said. “We really believed in the value of debate and discussion that the Yale Political Union fostered and wanted to bring it to our law school campuses.”

The three began reaching out to prominent professors and thinkers on the political right to organize their first event: a “Symposium on Federalism” hosted on Yale’s campus. They managed to secure a speaker lineup that included Robert Bork, a candidate for a Supreme Court nomination during Ronald Reagan’s presidency; Scalia, who was a high-level UChicago Law School professor at the time; and Morton Blackwell, president of the Leadership Institute, an organization committed to “turn[ing] principled conservatives into powerhouse leaders,” according to the organization’s website.

A funding sum of $24,000 from the John M. Olin Foundation and the Institute for Educational Affairs — an organization run by Irving Kristol, a prominent neo-conservative thinker— allowed the Federalist Society to pay for the travel expenses of 60 students and 20 legal scholars to the symposium, which was co-sponsored by the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy.

On April 23, 1982, the News published an article announcing the symposium, which was to be held on the last weekend of April. “Several hundred law students are expected to attend a conference on ‘Federalism: Legal and Political Ramifications’ this weekend,” the News wrote. “The symposium, including speeches, debates, and discussions, will provide students and the speakers with a forum for discussing the proper balance of power among federal, state, and local governments.”

Topics covered at the first symposium included originalism — a philosophy of constitutional interpretation that believes in reading the law as it would have been understood at its birth — and best practices for high-level success for right-wing students.

Blackwell shared reflections on how to get “better people” on law school faculties and how to reshape cultures on law school campuses, according to records by the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. Bork spoke about political issues, including abortion and the “gentrification of the Constitution.”

At the symposium, Scalia said that “conservatives had been outgunned at the federal level for half a century.”

On May 2, 1982, the event was featured in The New York Times — an instance of high-profile coverage that foreshadowed the Federalist Society’s subsequent momentum and a new era of conservative thought on law school campuses, one defined by concentrated and organized representation, events and programming.

Within two years of its first referendum, the Federalist Society had officially filed for national nonprofit status and was operating on dozens of new elite law school campuses, including Harvard, Georgetown University, the University of Virginia and Stanford University. It hosted another symposium in 1983 at Harvard Law School and a third in 1984 at the University of Chicago. By the 1990s, the Federalist Society operated a branch at every law school in the country.

A pipeline from law school to the courts

As original members began graduating from their respective law schools and entering the national court system, they maintained their ties to the Federalist Society.

The development of the Lawyers’ Division of the organization in 1986 ensured that graduates could still maintain their intellectual ties to the society through organized speaker events and annual conventions. The creation of a Faculty Division in 1999 allowed law school professors to take an invested stake in “encourag[ing] constructive academic discourse,” according to the Federalist Society’s website.

This led to a high-powered pipeline to the national court system facilitated by the Federalist Society’s vast alumni and affiliate network.

Noah Feldman, a law professor at Harvard, participated in a number of Federalist Society events as an “arguer on the other side” of the society’s stated political affiliations, he said. A self-identified “liberally-inclined” thinker and debater, Feldman authored the audiobook “Takeover: How a Conservative Student Club Captured the Supreme Court” in 2021 alongside co-author Lidia Jean Kott, wherein they unpack the Federalist Society’s “pipeline” to high-level national politics.

Feldman told the News that the Federalist Society’s community of thinkers with similar intellectual, political and legal commitments enables members to support one another over the course of their careers.

“It basically creates a framework in which there can be a clear path to go from smart, first-year law student with conservative leanings to law clerk to a Court of Appeals judge or to the Supreme Court,” Feldman said.

High-powered connections like those between the society and national judiciary politics abounded over the course of the society’s early years. During Ronald Reagan’s presidency, Attorney General Edwin Meese was known to give key positions in the Justice Department to members of the society, helping to ensure that judicial nominees were “compatible with the philosophical and policy orientation of the President,” according to an article published by the Federalist Society Review.

During the presidency of George H.W. Bush ’48, Otis, co-founder of the society, was selected as an associate White House counsel. The role of a White House counsel is to advise the president on all legal issues concerning the president and their administration, including judicial candidates, according to the Federal Register.

“Organizations and institutions, if they’re small enough and have a sense of community, are very good at creating a sense of reputation and of mutual trust,” Feldman said.

Calabresi echoed Feldman’s sentiments.

“The Federalist Society has kind of grown into an extended family, and so it’s a bit of a network of sorts,” Calabresi said.

He explained that he believes that people with right-of-center political views often feel isolated and marginalized at Yale Law School. According to Calabresi, the society allows people to form friendships with “other people who agree with them.” Additionally, he explained that the society puts students in touch with judges who share similar views, whom students can then “go on to clerk for.”

This relationship, according to Calabresi, has reciprocally shaped judges’ vetting processes for potential clerks.

“Judges and thinkers who are right of center often find that they’re in a minority in the courts that they’re on, and they equally draw sustenance from being part of a group that is a national group of people who think the way that most Federalist Society members do,” Calabresi said.

Despite this unforeseen pipeline of power, Calabresi emphasized that the Federalist Society’s day-to-day operations still echo its original goal of fostering debate on college campuses.

He pointed to an event hosted by the Federalist Society at Yale Law School on Sept. 24, 2024, titled “Where Have All the Trials Gone? The Vanishing Jury Trial and What It Means for the Legal Profession and the American System of Justice,” which saw Judge Richard Sullivan LAW ’90 of the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals speak on the future of jury trials in America.

“The Federalist Society contributes vitally to the intellectual life of this place,” Sullivan said at the event. “I’d like to thank them for having me today and for supplementing law school students’ educations.”

Calabresi reflected on the Federalist Society’s importance on campuses, one that he sees as more powerful than the society’s operations in the legal world.

“We are, at our core, a society for debating ideas,” Calabresi said. “I just think it’s informational, both for Federalist Society members and for non-Federalist Society members to come and hear what our speakers, like Judge Sullivan, have to say on law school campuses.”

On a larger scale, the high-powered network facilitated by the society continued to manifest on the national stage. Under former President George W. Bush’s ’68 administration, two new justices with Federalist Society ties — Alito and Roberts — were appointed to the nation’s Supreme Court. Joining Thomas, a Reagan appointee, their appointments ensured that one-third of America’s highest court had ties to the Federalist Society.

Building ties to the Supreme Court

Eleven years later, in 2017, President Donald Trump began the review process for a successor for the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. During the judiciary vetting process, his administration worked closely with Leonard Leo, former executive vice-president of the Federalist Society and current co-chairman, to evaluate potential candidates.

Leo — a Cornell Law School graduate who founded Cornell’s Federalist Society chapter in 1986 — stepped down from his role as co-president of the society in 2017, when the Trump administration had just begun its review process for potential new Supreme Court justices. During this time, Leo devised a list of potential candidate names for the former president that proved to include the three justices Trump would ultimately appoint during his presidency.

As a confidant to Trump, Leo played a considerable role in the 2017 appointment of Neil Gorsuch. Trump’s later appointments of Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, also Federalist Society affiliates, were under Leo’s counseling, as well. This aligned with a promise that Trump had made earlier in 2016 during his election campaign: if elected, his judicial nominees would “all [be] picked by the Federalist Society.”

Over the course of the past 40 years, Leo has played a significant role in accelerating the Federalist Society’s rapid growth on the national stage.

After graduating from Cornell, Leo moved to Washington to take on a full-time job with the Federalist Society. He focused on identifying sources of funding for the organization, developing relationships with donors such as the Koch Family Foundation and the Scaife Foundation. As Leo’s personal career developed, he kickstarted The 85 Fund, a group that funds conservative causes nationwide. The 85 Fund donated $5.6 million in funds to the Federalist Society in 2020 and $3.5 million in 2021.

Leo quickly rose within the ranks of the society, becoming vice president of operations in 1990. He took leaves of absence from this position during the judicial review processes for Bush’s Supreme Court nominations in the early 2000s, and he stepped down from his role as operational vice president to become honorary co-chairman of the organization during Trump’s judicial review processes for the Supreme Court.

“When you see that Leonard Leo … took a leave from the Federalist Society to actually go work in the Trump administration on judicial appointments, it just couldn’t be more explicit that there’s a strong tie between the society and our national judiciary,” Feldman said.

Leo, a self-identified conservative who has closely aligned himself with the Christian right, sees his ties with the Federalist Society as a means to realign national politics.

Leo did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

After receiving $1.6 billion in donations from 2020 to 2022 from Barre Seid, who is a Federalist Society affiliate and political donor, Leo has outlined a plan for a conservative takeover of the courts.

“We need to crush liberal dominance where it’s most insidious,” Leo told the Financial Times.

In Feldman’s opinion, Leo’s connections with the White House and national judiciary processes since his start at the Federalist Society are proof of the society’s strong influence on the national stage.

Calabresi clarified that despite this perceived link, the goals of the organization remain focused on hosting debates and holding conversations that feature different viewpoints.

“The Federalist Society plays no role in judicial selection under either Republican or Democratic Administrations,” Calabresi wrote to the News. “We are a 501(c)3 non-profit organization, which holds debates and conferences in which all points of view are presented as much as is possible.”

Feldman, though, described the past 20 years under Leo’s leadership at the Federalist Society as a “conservative constitutional revolution.”

Politicians like Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse ’78, United States senator for Rhode Island since 2007 and chairman of the Senate’s Judiciary Subcommittee on Federal Courts, see Leo’s political influence as setting a dangerous precedent.

In a statement to the News,Whitehouse, who has been outspoken in his criticisms of the Federalist Society pipeline, critiqued Leo’s contributions to national judiciary politics.

“Leonard Leo’s secretive judicial selection and confirmation operation use[s] the Federalist Society’s name as a cover,” Whitehouse wrote to the News.

He described Leo’s influence as an advisor to President Trump as a “covert operation … to control Republican judicial appointments.”

Whitehouse claimed that the Federalist Society is a “pawn” in what he perceives to be Leo’s efforts to expand conservative influence over the national court system. In Whitehouse’s opinion, Leo’s actions do not align with the stated goals or values of the national Federalist Society as it operates today.

Calabresi specified that the role of independent actors like Leo in judicial processes did not reflect the stances or positions of the society at large.

“Contrary to the press reports, the Federalist Society plays no role at all in judicial nominations and never has,” Calabresi wrote to the News.

He said that while individual members of the society’s board of directors have sometimes played a role in judicial decisions, this has been in a strictly private capacity.

What does this mean for the 2024 election?

Noah Feldman drew a connection between the 2024 election and the future influence of the Federalist Society.

Feldman said he believes the Federalist Society perceives conservatism as being an “underdog” in national politics. This perception, he said, is subject to change depending on the outcome of the 2024 election.

Given Trump’s strong connection to the Society, Feldman said that a Trump victory would challenge the society’s position as an “underdog” in national politics, draining energy from the movement in the long-term.

When asked about how the society might operate differently in an election year, Calabresi clarified that the Federalist Society intends to be strictly apolitical.

“The Federalist Society … takes no positions on pending legislation, cases pending before the Supreme Court or any other court, or on judicial nominations,” Calabresi wrote to the News.

Irrespective of the Federalist Society’s intentions, Feldman discussed the organization’s wide-ranging — but perhaps, inadvertent — impact on national politics. Feldman said he sees the past five years as the “apex” of the Federalist Society’s influence, with the 2024 election representing an essential turning point.

He pointed to splinterings within the national court system that exemplify this decline.

“Once you’ve gotten your main objectives, it is much harder to hold on to your place of influence,” Feldman said. “Right now, the conservative justices are starting to splinter in terms of their jurisprudential and ideological commitments, and you can see that in the court’s opinions.”

In the past, the Federalist Society was committed to the three elements of modern legal conservatism: textualism in statutory interpretation, originalism in constitutional interpretation and judicial restraint. According to Calabresi, while the society is committed to hosting debates featuring multiple perspectives, members “tend to agree on how to interpret the law.”

Feldman echoed this idea. “If there’s any other group that wants to achieve similar influence to the Federalist Society, it similarly has to have cohesion in its ideological commitments and the long time horizon and the patience to get there,” Feldman said.

However, Feldman sees this shared interpretation as being at risk. He cited examples of how justices associated with the society, like Alito and Gorsuch, have begun to deviate from textualism, contrary to the society’s stated goals.

In Feldman’s opinion, this loss of a cohesive legal stance and philosophy, coupled with the rapid growth of conservatism in national judiciary politics in the last 10 years, could foreshadow the Federalist Society’s downfall.

According to Feldman, should Trump win the 2024 election, Trump’s close ties to the Federalist Society’s network would ensure that any judge appointments within the next four years are members of the tight-knit society.

Two judges — Thomas, 72, and Alito, 74 — are approaching the age of retirement, and politicians expect a Supreme Court vacancy to open during the upcoming 60th presidency.

Alongside the presidential election, 305 appellate court seats are on the ballot in 2024, including 69 state supreme court seats this November. 32 of the candidates running for state supreme court positions are affiliated with the Federalist Society.

Feldman’s notion of the society’s “apex” cannot be disentangled from the organization’s long history of judicial impact.

As the 2024 election approaches, the Federalist Society provides a new lens by which to view the growth of conservatism as a concentrated body of thought on the national scale.

This April will mark the 43rd year since the Federalist Society’s founding.

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an 8 23

...According to CNN reporters Jamie Rangel and Jack Forrest, "the Republican credentials of [the amicus brief] authors fly in the face of the former president’s repeated argument that his trial’s timeline is a partisan exercise against him.”

In the brief, the 11 Republicans — including former U.S. attorney general Alberto Gonzales, co-founder of Federalist Society Steven Calabresi and former 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals judge J. Michael Luttig— insist Smith’s proposed date “respects and serves the former president’s own interest in a speedy trial.”

...

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/gop-insider-explains-why-5-prominent-trump-allies-finally-turned-against-the-president/

no lnx

Alex Henderson September 14, 2020

Some Republicans who were blistering critics of President Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential election have since turned into devoted supporters, including Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida. But with some other prominent Republicans, the opposite is true: they went from being Trump allies to being vehement critics. Amanda Carpenter, a Never Trump conservative who formerly served as Cruz’s communications director, takes a look at some of those defectors in an article published in The Bulwark on September 14 and explains the reasons for their defections.

“For all the loyalty Donald Trump enjoys from his most sycophantic followers, many prominent figures who famously assisted him have given up on the president altogether,” Carpenter explains in her article. “It’s worth taking a look at the breaking points for these various White House staffers, cabinet secretaries, political advisers and others — the moment when each decided he or she just couldn’t stick with Trump anymore. Because we can learn a lot about Trump and the overall effect he is having on our country by studying what made these individuals — from revered military leaders to Trump’s sleazy surrogates — finally snap.”

Here are five of the former Trump allies who, according to Carpenter, reached a breaking out.

Elizabeth Neumann

AD REMOVED FOR SUBSCRIBED USER

In 2016, conservative Republican Elizabeth Neumann voted for Trump. But now, Neumann — who served as assistant secretary for counterterrorism and threat prevention at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under Trump — is making no secret of the fact that she plans to vote for former Vice President Joe Biden in 2020’s presidential election. And she endorsed Biden in an anti-Trump attack ad by the group Republican Voters Against Trump.

Neumann, Carpenter notes, has stressed that a white nationalist’s August 2019 terrorist massacre at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas did a lot to turn her against Trump. The shooter killed more than 20 people, mostly Latino, in response to what he called the “Hispanic invasion of Texas.” Carpenter told The Bulwark, “The point at which my position changed and I said ‘No, at this point, you are culpable’ was after El Paso…. Post-El Paso, there is no excuse.”

John Bolton

John Bolton was an odd choice for Trump’s national security director: while Trump has been greatly influenced by the isolationist and hypernationalist Patrick Buchanan, Bolton is a devout neocon and an unapologetic war hawk. Nonetheless, having Bolton in his administration was a way for Trump to thumb his nose at liberals — that is, until Bolton reached the point where he could no long stomach Trump’s foreign policy views. Bolton, Carpenter observes, “decided he had to leave in September 2019, after Trump made plans to invite the Taliban to Camp David public.”

Bolton, Carpenter notes, has said of Trump, “The day after the election, whether Trump wins or loses, we face a real debate — maybe an existential debate — about what the future of the Republican Party is. I just think it’s important for the Republican Party to separate itself from Trump and for the conservative philosophy to separate itself from Trump.”

Gen. James Mattis

Like Bolton, former Defense Secretary James Mattis left Trump’s administration because of the president’s views on foreign policy. Carpenter explains, “Mattis walked out on Trump in December 2018 when the president ignored his advice and abruptly pulled troops out of the Middle East. Mattis is quoted in Bob Woodward’s new book, ‘Rage,’ as saying, ‘When I was basically directed to do something that I thought went beyond stupid to felony stupid, strategically jeopardizing our place in the world and everything else, that’s when I quit.’”

Miles Taylor

Miles Taylor, who served as chief of staff at DHS, told The Bulwark, “The total tonnage of bad Trump ideas that never materialized were enough to crush anyone’s hopes about a successful presidency. But the one that broke my desire to continue serving was his perverse insistence on resuming family separation at the border — and making it worse. It was sick, wrong, and un-American. That’s when it became clear that saying ‘no’ to Trump was no longer enough.”

Like Neumann, Taylor has appeared in a pro-Biden ad from Republican Voters Against Trump:

5. Steven G. Calabresi

Steven G. Calabresi, co-founder of the right-wing Federalist Society, turned against Trump when, in July, the president suggested postponing this year’s presidential election. In a July 30 op-ed for the New York Times, Calabresi wrote, “I have voted Republican in every presidential election since 1980, including voting for Donald Trump in 2016. I wrote op-eds and a law review article protesting what I believe was an unconstitutional investigation by (former Special Counsel) Robert Mueller. I also wrote an op-ed opposing President Trump’s impeachment. But I am frankly appalled by the president’s recent tweet seeking to postpone the November election. Until recently, I had taken as political hyperbole the Democrats’ assertion that President Trump is a fascist. But this latest tweet is fascistic and is itself grounds for the president’s immediate impeachment again by the House of Representatives and his removal from office by the Senate.”

calabrisi

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/trump-supporter-and-co-founder-of-the-federalist-society-says-the-presidents-latest-tweet-is-grounds-for-impeachment

Cody Fenwick July 30, 2020

Steven Calabresi is not among the usual slate of conservative critics of the president. He doesn’t appear on MSNBC to lambast the Republican Party or write denunciations of the White House for The Bulwark. But in a new piece for the New York Times on Thursday, he offered a blistering rebuke to President Donald Trump’s suggestion on Twitter that he may seek to delay the November election.

Calabresi started with his Trumpist bona fides, confirming that he’s not inclined to criticize the president:

I have voted Republican in every presidential election since 1980, including voting for Donald Trump in 2016. I wrote op-eds and a law review article protesting what I believe was an unconstitutional investigation by Robert Mueller. I also wrote an op-ed opposing President Trump’s impeachment.

Then he continued, cutting to the heart of the matter:

But I am frankly appalled by the president’s recent tweet seeking to postpone the November election. Until recently, I had taken as political hyperbole the Democrats’ assertion that President Trump is a fascist. But this latest tweet is fascistic and is itself grounds for the president’s immediate impeachment again by the House of Representatives and his removal from office by the Senate.

The United States has never in its history delayed a presidential election, he pointed out, and there’s no justification to do it now. Calabresi noted that it’s not even within Trump’s power to delay or cancel the election, and it’s up to states whether they want to use mail-in ballots, which the president has decried.

But unlike some political commentators who dismissed the president’s comments because he lacks the official capacity to carry them out, Calabresi took Trump’s threat seriously.

“President Trump needs to be told by every Republican in Congress that he cannot postpone the federal election,” he wrote. “Doing so would be illegal, unconstitutional and without precedent in American history. Anyone who says otherwise should never be elected to Congress again.”

Republicans in Congress — the people necessary to make good on the threat of impeachment that Calabresi raises — should follow his lead and hold the president’s feet to the fire. They ought to tell him: Back down or be replaced.

no lnx

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/fb-9176491/CAN-BUTCH-SAVE-TRUMP-CONVICTION-MAGA-WILD-BUNCH.html

beware BS

no lnx doc ltr

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9176321/Federalist-Society-founder-says-constitutional-convict-Trump-leaves-office.html

More than 150 scholars from the Federalist Society say it IS constitutional to convict Donald Trump after he leaves office

More than 150 constitutional scholars wrote saying the trial is constitutional

Trump's Senate trial could start within days

They cite Congress' 'sole power' of impeachment

Constitution provides not just for removal but prohibiting holding future office

Trump has not ruled out another run in 2024

Framers feared 'demagogue' intent on 'overthrowing republican government'

By GEOFF EARLE, DEPUTY U.S. POLITICAL EDITOR FOR DAILYMAIL.COM

PUBLISHED: 09:28 EDT, 22 January 2021 | UPDATED: 12:33 EDT, 22 January 2021

More than 150 legal and constitutional scholars – including a co-founder of the conservative Federalist Society – have joined in a letter arguing that President Donald Trump can be impeached despite being out of office.

The letter comes as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has spelled out his preferences on a Senate trial for former President Donald Trump, who was impeached in the House just days before the end of his term.

They point to the text of the Constitution, precedents, as well as the intentions of the Founders in providing a remedy to stop a 'demagogue' who might seek to overthrow the U.S. government.

Among the signers of the letter is Northwestern University Law Professor Steven Calabresi, a cofounder of the conservative Federalist Society, a group that generated lists of many of the conservative judicial nominees Trump installed in the courts.

'More broadly, a singular concern of the Framers in devising our constitutional system was the danger of a power-seeking populist of the type they referred to as a "demagogue" rising to the highest office and overthrowing republican government,' they write.

Steven Calabresi is a confounder of the conservative Federalist Society

'The Framers further understood that the source of such a person's power does not expire if he or she is expelled from office; so long as such a person retains the loyalty of his or her supporters, he or she might return to power. The Framers devised the disqualification power to guard against that possibility, and would surely disagree that a person who sought to overthrow our democracy could not be disqualified from holding a future office of the United States because the plot reached its crescendo too close to the end of his or her term.

Trump would be the first U.S. president impeached after leaving office, but not the first U.S. official.

Trump was acquitted of his first impeachment in February 2020

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has proposed an impeachment schedule that will start early next month

CAN BUTCH SAVE TRUMP FROM CONVICTION FOR THE MAGA WILD BUNCH?

Trump found his new impeachment attorney Karl 'Butch' Bowers through Lindsey Graham.

The South Carolina senator knows Bowers from Republican politics, and also from both serving in the National Guard.

Bowers, 55, has defended two prominent South Carolina GOP figures accused of wrongdoing.

The first was Mark Sanford, then the governor, who faced impeachment when he infamously vanished in 2009 and turned up in Argentina spending time with his mistress.

Sanders was investigated by the South Carolina House but, represented by Bowers, escaped impeachment.

Bowers also represented Nikki Haley before she was South Carolina's governor, when she was accused of using her role in its House for personal gain.

Bowers' hiring suggests Trump may try to defend or at least justify some of his fraud claims. The attorney was briefly a Department of Justice special counsel on voting under George W. Bush and worked for the John McCain campaign in Florida in 2008.

A married father-of-four, he is the state staff judge advocate general corps in the South Carolina Air National Guard.

Another key part of the argument is that the Constitution provides not just for removal but for denying future office.

It states that impeachment 'shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States.

Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer has already said 'there will be a vote on convicting the president for high crimes and misdemeanors; and if the president is convicted, there will be a vote on barring him from running again.'

Other prominent signers on the letter, which was reported by Politico, included Ronald Reagan solicitor general Charles Fried and Michigan State University law professor Brian Kalt, an expert on peculiarities of the Constitution such as impeachment of former officials and the 25th Amendment.

Calabresi, who calls himself an originalist Republican, also penned an op-ed in the New York Times calling Trump's pardons of former chief strategist Steve Bannon as 'corrupt' and possible obstruction of justice, since the longtime advisor could have potentially incriminating information on Trump.

The signers cross the political spectrum, and take no position on whether Trump should be convicted, only on the validity of the procedure, which Trump loyalist Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) has said is unconstitutional.

'The Constitution's impeachment power has two aspects. The first is removal from office, which occurs automatically upon the conviction of a current officer.

The second is disqualification from holding future office, which occurs in those cases where the Senate deems disqualification appropriate in light of the conduct for which the impeached person was convicted.

The impeachment power must be read so as to give full effect to both aspects of this power,' they write.

The Constitution grants the House the 'sole power' to impeach and the Senate the sole power to try all impeachments. The House impeached Trump for 'incitement of insurrection' after the MAGA riot of January 6.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/fundamentalism-and-authoritarianism-how-the-party-of-law-and-order-become-the-party-of-crooks-and-crime

no lnx many

Fundamentalism and authoritarianism: How the party of ‘law and order’ became the party of crooks and crime

Written by Paul Rosenberg / Salon November 24, 2019

Whatever happened to the Republicans as the “party of law and order”? True, Richard Nixon, who first branded the party that way, was lying when he famously said, “I am not a crook.” Both Watergate and the Iran-Contra scandal rank among the most notorious examples of executive branch lawlessness in our nation’s history. But through it all, the narrative commitment to the brand never wavered. It was a source of moral and political strength, always to be contrasted with “soft on crime” Democrats, however contrary the front-page facts might be.

But not anymore. As noted here by Jennifer Mercieca, a historian of rhetoric whose book, “Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump” (table of contents here), will be published next year, it’s the Democrats who are the party of law and order in the impeachment drama, while the GOP is the party of conspiracy:

Democrats, led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, are betting that public opinion will move toward impeachment and removal once more information is made public. To try to shape public opinion they are relying on a law-and-order frame that tells Americans that the impeachment inquiry is legitimate and legally justified.

Democrats are positioning themselves as the only ones willing to uphold the rule of law and the Constitution.

Republicans, led by President Trump, are counting on their power to frame reality to prevent the public from moving toward impeachment.

The GOP is relying on a conspiracy frame that tells Americans that the impeachment inquiry is illegitimate and part of a plot to destroy America.

Of course the rhetoric of conspiracy isn’t entirely synonymous with that of crooks and criminals — but when you start to insist that career law-enforcement officials are all in on it, and you’ve abandoned the “law and order” frame to the Democrats, the crooks and criminals stench is difficult to dispel. And it’s not happening in isolation, either — above and beyond the plethora of scandals Trump generates, and the lockstep support Republicans are giving him.

That lockstep support is perhaps the most striking difference between now and Watergate-a difference most readily understood via the role of asymmetric polarization and negative partisanship, which cautions us not to expect the kind of gradual but inexorable opinion shift seen 45 years ago in response to the buildup of evidence.

In turn, dramatically increased polarization is a predicted result of historical trends described by structural demographic theory (SDT), which I wrote about previously in October 2016, reviewing “Ages of Discord,” an analysis of American history by evolutionary anthropologist Peter Turchin. SDT identifies three underlying factors contributing to increased levels of political instability: mass immiseration (stagnant or falling wages, worsening health, declining well-being), elite overproduction (increased competition for wealth and power), and fiscal distress (a product of both public debt and trust in public institutions). Mass immiseration helps fuel elite overproduction, since stagnant or falling wages leaves more money for elites, and the increased competition that results reduces broad cooperation and intensifies elite fragmentation (which also contributes to fiscal distress). In America, political polarization is a prime indicator of that fragmentation.

The fact that polarization has been asymmetric deserves special attention, as it’s not yet implicated in SDT. But it can be credibly explained. In “The AuthoritarianDynamic,” Karen Stenner presented compelling evidence that expressed intolerance resulted primarily from two factors: an innate predisposition to intolerance, demanding obedience and conformity, (“authoritarianism”) interacting with increased societal threat, particularly dissension in public opinion and loss of confidence in political leaders. Thus, there is both a logical reason for the expression of authoritarianism to increase as political instability rises, and motivation for either authoritarian or opportunistic elites to strategically manipulate conditions to intensify this process.

One can read “The Long Southern Strategy” (Salon interview with co-author Angie Maxwell here) as a coherent history of how GOP-affiliated elites have pursued just such a strategy over the past 50-plus years.

“Authoritarian attitudes peak not only when social conditions change, but also if folks are made to feel like social conditions are changing (even if they aren’t),” Maxwell said. “The threats are recycled, renewed with a sense of urgency, stoking a fire that is always smoldering. It isn’t a natural rise in authoritarian attitudes, it is an orchestrated rise in authoritarian attitudes.”

SDT suggests that it may be both, but without the orchestration it would be much more manageable, and much less prone to produce lawless behavior.

One can also view conservative legal activism as a key component in that process, as well as a profound influence on elite politics as a whole. At the time of Watergate, authoritarians were more evenly divided between the parties, but they’ve become much more concentrated in the GOP since then. As their experience of threat has risen, they’ve become more inclined to lawlessness — although it’s not tolerated on the part of others, of course!

In short, the lawlessness at the top of the GOP isn’t new — just vastly more blatant than it was during Watergate. But the infrastructure supporting, defending and excusing it is dramatically more powerful and robust, and the authoritarian mass base is much more consolidated within their voter base.

Aside from impeachment itself, three other developments this month underscores the GOP’s broader embrace of lawlessness, in contrast to its decades-long self-branding. First, there is Trump’s pardoning of three war criminals, burnishing his brand of support for official lawlessness and thuggish brutality. He may mistakenly believe this endears him to the military — which wants nothing to do with them — but it’s also meant to hype authoritarian support among his most rabid supporters.

Second, hisRoy Cohn-style attorney general, William Barr, delivered a widely criticized authoritarian screed to the Federalist Society, portraying the impeachment inquiry as dangerous to the rule of law, rather than warranted by Trump’s self-professed crimes. Third, legal scholar Steven Calabresi, chair of the Federalist Society’s board of directors, wrote a pair of opinion articles accusing Democrats of violating Trump’s rights, one of which, according to Steven Mazie, the Economist’s Supreme Court correspondent, “reads like the first draft of an op-ed by a MAGA middle-schooler who was inspired by Jacob Wohl’s erstwhile Twitter account.”

The combination of Trump’s blatant endorsement of lawlessness and the double-whammy high-profile embarrassments of Calabresi and Barr reflects something much broader and profoundly troubling. The latter two offer striking indicators of just how seriously this is impacting establishment conservatism, in a way that can’t be fobbed off on Trump alone, while Trump’s pardons of war criminals — following earlier pardons, including that of ex-Sheriff Joe Arpaio — not only enable brute lawlessness in uniform, but points towards outright valorization in the future, especially if performed in direct support of Trump himself.

To better understand the role of the conservative legal movement, I turned to two law professors I’ve interviewed before: Eric J. Segall, author of “Originalism as Faith,” to help illuminate the role that faith has played in this process, and David Pozen, co-author (with Joseph Fishkin) of the paper, “Asymmetric Constitutional Hardball,” which starts making sense of how the political asymmetry discussed above impacts norm-violating practices, with profound systemic results. In that paper, Fishkin and Pozen write:

The “restorationist” constitutional narratives and interpretive theories promoted by Republican politicians and lawyers, [this] Essay suggests, serve to legitimate the party’s use of constitutional hardball.

While this has surely been the elite focus of the actors involved, movement conservatives have also made remaking the Supreme Court and the entire judicial branch central to their politics in ways progressives have not, and this means engaging in authoritarian mobilization via threat manipulation, as described in “The Long Southern Strategy.”

Originalismplays a key role in this, but the meaning of that term shifted sharply in the process. At first, Segall told me, the originalist position argued that judges shouldn’t be engaged in moral reasoning:

It’s not for judges to select the best moral position for a country, it’s for people who are elected to do it. Unless judges can point to something in the text of the Constitution or something clear in the history, then judges should say look, the Constitution doesn’t speak to this, vote on it.

Originalism, at first, “was inextricably tied to deference. That’s the only way that works.”

But that all changed when conservatives gained control of the court in the late ’80s and early ’90s, Segall says: “After 12 years of Reagan-Bush judges, the people who embraced originalism dropped the deference part.” That meant a return of moral reasoning, “because history cannot answer modern problems,” and while conservatives won’t admit that, “it’s true and they act that way.” The Constitution is silent about the rights of transgender people or the definition of marriage, to cite obvious examples....

quite long]

1119

...Trump supporters throwing the term “coup” around, French emphasizes, aren’t even using it correctly.

“A coup is an unlawful, often violent seizure of power,” French explains. “Impeachment is a constitutional process that can’t succeed without the affirmative votes of, first, a majority of the House, and then, a supermajority of the Senate — and every person voting is a person who won an election, also according to constitutional process. Impeachment isn’t the dissipation of constitutional government, it’s the exercise of constitutional authority.”

Another talking point on the “Trumpist right,” French points out, is the claim that under the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, Trump has the right to confront the whistleblower — a claim that is ludicrous, he says, because the Sixth Amendment deals with criminal prosecutions, not an impeachment in Congress. And French laments that even Steven Calabresi, a conservative legal scholar who teaches law at Northwestern University, has referenced the Sixth Amendment to defend Trump.

“The scope and reach of the Sixth Amendment has been extensively litigated, and it most assuredly does not apply to the House’s impeachment inquiry,” French emphasizes. “One can certainly make a good-faith argument that maintaining the whistleblower’s anonymity is unfair, but to argue that it violates the Sixth Amendment is simply and plainly wrong.”

Olin Foundation president William Simon, a former Treasury Secretary, has been a major player in these efforts. He is quoted in Justice For Sale: "Funds generated by business . . . must rush by multimillions to the aid of liberty . . . to funnel desperately needed funds to scholars, social scientists, writers and journalists who understand the relationship between political and economic liberty."

Simon and many others have orchestrated and coordinated "sophisticated media offensives, academic research, and advocacy efforts" with lavish funding from Aetna Life And Casualty Corporation, Exxon Corporation, Pfizer Corporation, RJR Nabisco Corporation, General Electric Corporation, Dow Corporation, Monsanto Corporation and other legal fictions chartered in our names in our several states.

Corporate money has also been rushed by multimillions to corporate fronts such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, the Insurance Information Institute, the Product Liability Coordinating Committee, and the American Tort Reform Association (ATRA). (The ATRA is made up of corporation trade groups such as the National Association of Manufacturers, the Chemical Manufacturers Association, the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association -- thus giving corporations a decoy and accomplice group two full steps removed from their board rooms.) Judge Robert Bork, Irving Kristol, and law schools at Stanford, Yale, Columbia, George Mason, Chicago and Virginia universities have also been beneficiaries of this corporate largess.

Corporate money created the Federalist Society in 1982, helping it to gather 10,000 members at 120 law schools. "Dedicated to purging law schools and the legal system of the `orthodox liberal ideology which advocates a centralized and uniform society,'" declares Justice For Sale,

the Society is now the principal organization for recruiting, educating and mobilizing conservative students on law school campuses and showcasing conservative legal scholarship. . . . The group's influence is perhaps best exemplified by the success of its three co-founders. As a member of the White House Office of Legal Counsel, Lee Liberman was considered the "ideological gatekeeper for the Bush Administration's process for selecting judges." David McIntosh served as Executive Director of Vice President Quayle's Council on Competitiveness, andSteven Calabresi,now a professor at Northwestern University School of Law, was a special assistant to Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese.

In sum, paying for and orchestrating law and economics professors and curricula at the nation's elite schools, sponsoring conferences, Continuing Legal Education workshops, legal research and theoretical writing, as well as for massive advertising and strategic litigation, these corporation initiatives "to make conservative economic theory the cornerstone of legal decision making," documents Justice For Sale, have set up an "institutional network that will advance and sustain their cause well into the future. Integrated and intergenerational, this infrastructure includes representatives from all segments of the legal establishment -- judges, scholars, practitioners, and young apprentices hailing from the Federalist Society."

Justice For Sale is a frightening report, meticulously documented with references to the professors, theorists, and foundations behind this campaign. "Intended to provoke debate" and "instigate true reform of the legal system," it should be a catalyst for public debate and strategizing. Read it.

Which Top Law Faculties are the Most Conservative These Days?

By Brian Leiter

This data--contributions to political candidates during the 2008 Presidential election by law faculty--is hardly decisive, but it certainly fits with what I know about the faculties in question. 100% of donations by law faculty at Harvard, Chicago, Michigan, Stanford, Texas, Berkeley, and Penn went to Democrats, 0% to Republicans. (Penn is the main surprise here, since a quarter-to-a-third of the tenured faculty there are, last time I looked, Republicans. But I guess eight years of Republican wreckage is too much even for them.)

By contrast, 64.7% of donations by Northwestern law faculty went to Republicans, a mere 35.3% to Democrats.

Since elite law faculty are typically both more educated and more cosmopolitan than the average voter, these results are hardly surprising given the current condition of the Republican Party.** Even the Northwestern result is mainly an artifact of maximum donations by just two faculty, both well-known and hardcore conservative activists: Steven Calabresi and John McGinnis.

Last month on a bright fall day, hundreds of Brown University students spurned sun and Frisbee for a debate on the constitutionality of President Obama's health care reform law.

On stage: Charles Fried, a Harvard Law School professor who argued for the measure's legality with an appealing crankiness, and Randy Barnett, a Georgetown University Law Centerprofessor who took obvious delight in picking the law apart.

This, you might think, would be de rigueur on the American campus: intellectual heavyweights doing battle on the nation's most pressing concerns. But it is remarkably rare.

The academy's political conversation is, too often, an insulated affair: partisans talking to the like-minded, with occasional breaks for aggressive, ill-considered protest against the opposition.

Brown itself made headlines just three years ago when an environmental activist tried, without much success, to pie New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman during a campus speech.

The recent health care forum served as a sort of direct rejoinder to the whipped-cream juvenility. And it helps to explain the enormous popularity of its sponsor, Brown's Political Theory Project, which has staged a series of sharp, balanced debates on everything from gay marriage to nation-building in Afghanistan.

But the project, housed in a small, brick building in the shadow of the admissions office, isn't quite as down-the-middle as the debate series — its public face — would suggest.

This year, the institute brought Steven Calabresi, co-founder of the conservative Federalist Society and former speechwriter for Vice President Dan Quayle, to the university as a visiting professor.

Amity Shlaes, a conservative author and columnist who argues that the New Deal exacerbated the Great Depression, recently spoke on campus at the project's invitation. And PTP professors and postdoctoral students teach classes on freedom, capitalism, and prosperity.

Its right-leaning donors, moreover, are not the sort you'd expect to find on the Brown campus: the Jack Miller Center for Teaching America's Founding Principles and History, the Searle Freedom Trust, the Thomas W. Smith Foundation, and the Charles G. Koch Foundation, among them.

Koch and his brother David are figures of particular scorn on the left. The billionaire businessmen are patron saints of the libertarian movement, major Tea Party financiers, and for many, proof that the vast right-wing conspiracy is alive and well.

So, which is it then? Is the Political Theory Project a Trojan Horse in the heart of liberal academia? Or is it a model of civil debate, bent on saving Brown from itself?

COMBINING 'THE UN-COMBINABLES'

John Tomasi, the well-regarded political science professor who launched the project eight years ago, sits in a high-backed chair in his office and tells the organization's founding story.

Two undergraduates who couldn't have been more different — a tall, popular liberal who worked as a model for a time and an outspoken conservative who took his lumps on the left-leaning campus — came to his office one day with a proposal.

They had designed a course they called "Knowing Right: Conservative Thought in America" — thick with readings from Russell Kirk, Friedrich Hayek, and Barry Goldwater –— and they wanted him to sponsor it.

Read more: http://thephoenix.com/boston/news/128291-conservative-donors-eagerly-fund-brown-university/#ixzz1oe2vzvmZ

:{http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/steven-calabresi:(style="background-color:#ffffff"):}:

:{Right Wing Leftovers:(style="background-color:#ffffff"):}:

SUBMITTED BY: Kyle Mantyla, Wednesday 05/06/2009, 5:39pm

You know that Alan Keyes is long-winded when even his press releases only contain excerpts of his full statement [PDF] vowing to get arrested at Notre Dame.Michael Steele's humiliation tenure at the RNC continues.The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation awarded Spencer Abraham, Steven Calabresi, David McIntosh, and Lee Liberman Otis a $250,000 prize yesterday for their role in founding the Federalist Society.Rep. Michell Bachmann's tendency to say dumb things that get her in the news has resulted in at least two candidates announcing that they plan to oppose her in 2010.The Christian Anti-... :{MORE >:(style="background-color:#ffffff"):}:

:{The GOP's Evolving Definition of "Advice and Consent":(style="background-color:#ffffff"):}:

SUBMITTED BY: Kyle Mantyla, Tuesday 03/03/2009, 12:49am

Both The Hill and Politico are reporting on a letter [PDF], signed by all forty-one Republicans in the Senate, sent to President Obama yesterday warning him that they will not hesitate to filibuster his judicial nominees if they are not consulted before he makes his picks:President Barack Obama should fill vacant spots on the federal bench with former President Bush’s judicial nominees to help avoid another huge fight over the judiciary, all 41 Senate Republicans said Monday.In a letter to the White House, the Republican senators said Obama would “change the tone in Washington... :{MORE >:(style="background-color:#ffffff"):}:

:{Federalist Society Founder Frets They'll Lose Control Over Federal Courts:(style="background-color:#ffffff"):}:

SUBMITTED BY: Kyle Mantyla, Tuesday 10/28/2008, 4:58pm

It was not too long ago that I wrote a post about how complicated it is to try and make accurate statements about judicial confirmation rates and how Republicans and right-wing judicial activists exploit that fact to make it seem as if President Bush has somehow gotten a raw deal when it comes to seeing his judges confirmed. Today comes an op-ed by Federalist Society founder Steven Calabresi in the Wall Street Journal making the same point and issuing a dire warning that if Barack Obama is elected, we're going to see a complete take over of the federal judiciary by liberal activist... :{MORE >:(style="background-color:#ffffff"):}:

:{Look Who’s Coming to Dobson’s Dinner:(style="background-color:#ffffff"):}:

SUBMITTED BY: Kyle Mantyla, Tuesday 10/16/2007, 4:09pm

Cloistered away in a not-so-secret meeting during the Council for National Policy conference in Utah last month, a who’s who of right-wing leaders, led by Focus on the Family’s James Dobson, emerged to issue a not-so-subtle message to the Republican Party: if frontrunner Rudy Giuliani gets the nomination, we’re gone. The threat alone was enough to prompt Giuliani to rethink his plans and suddenly decide to appear at this weekend’s “Values Voter Summit,” convened by Dobson’s allies at the Family Research Council. With just... :{MORE >:(style="background-color:#ffffff"):}:

:{The Last Temptation of the Right:(style="background-color:#ffffff"):}:

SUBMITTED BY: Kyle Mantyla, Thursday 07/19/2007, 9:04am

Almost from the moment he entered the Republican Primary, Rudy Giuliani’s campaign has come under fire from the Right. In large part because of his marital history and his views on reproductive choice, several high profile right-wing leaders – including James Dobson, Richard Land, Richard Viguerie, and Tony Perkins - have already publicly declared that they will not, under any circumstances, vote for Giuliani or support his campaign. In addition to this pressure, Giuliani is also coming under attack from grassroots organizations such as Catholics Against Rudy... :{MORE >:(style="background-color:#ffffff"):}:

:{Giuliani Unveils Justice Advisory Committee:(style="background-color:#ffffff"):}:

SUBMITTED BY: Kyle Mantyla, Wednesday 07/18/2007, 11:51am

Members include Ted Olson, Miguel Estrada, Charles Fried, Larry Thompson, Walter Olson, and Federalist Society co-founder Steven Calabresi, among others. :{MORE >:(style="background-color:#ffffff"):}:

- See more at: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/steven-calabresi#sthash.1hFSgtaE.dpuf

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