The Federalist Society’s War Against Americans

Why you need to know about the powerful group that picked Trump’s judges

Credit: Fred Schilling, Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons; Disappearing act photo mashup by author, but made possible by the Federalist Society.

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Jack Smith is the most special of special prosecutors because he is faced with the unenviable task of battling the depravity of the Federalist Society and their hand-picked minions on the Supreme Court.

As you may know, he recently challenged Aileen Cannon, the judge in the Trump Mar-a-Lago secret documents case, with such ferocity that some legal experts are saying there’s a chance she’ll be replaced on the case by someone who isn’t bought and paid for by the Federalist Society.

Joyce Vance takes a more sober position but still notes that Smith effectively laid waste to Cannon’s ruling that Smith’s appointment was unconstitutional when he said…

“…following prior Supreme Court precedent isn’t optional. Judge Cannon is obligated to follow the law. “Where, as here, the Supreme Court has expressly addressed an issue, lower courts are bound to follow it.”

Joyce Vance does her usual excellent breakdown, but the essence of it, and my apologies to Ms. Vance if I’m going overboard some, is that Cannon is an idiot.

But Cannon is a well-connected idiot, and as we’ve seen ever since the Orange Blowworm glided down the elevator like a two-bit Harkonnen, well-connected idiots are dangerous.

Reading Jack Smith's Brief

Cannon was put into her position by the Federalist Society, which is the same corrupt political organization that bought Clarence Thomas. If Trump somehow manages to sneak into the Oval Office a second time, the Federalist Society will go on a feeding frenzy.

If you think recent decisions affecting everything from Biden’s school loans to immigration are bad now, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

To understand why the judges of America have decided to rule by fiat, you need to understand who installed the judges in the first place.

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What is the Federalist Society?

In 1982, a group of law students from Yale, the University of Chicago, and Harvard started a little club called The Federalist Society. At first, it was just sort of a college debate club where like-minded libertarians could cry on each other’s shoulders and complain about liberal meanies.

Gary S. Lawson, who teaches at Boston University School of Law and is one of the Federalist Society’s biggest cheerleaders, explains this mood when he describes the horrors (insert sarcasm font here) he experienced while interacting with his fellow law students:

The atmosphere was, here’s the best way I can describe it.

Any time a student in class said anything that could remotely be considered right of center a good chunk of the class would hiss.

Literally vocal hisss, in fact one of my counter-lines to that, “Is something wrong with the heating system?”

More than butt-hurt by their fire-breathing libtard peers, Lawson and his ilk were also concerned about Supreme Court decisions that enshrined voting rights for Blacks, declared school segregation and Bible reading in public schools unconstitutional, and, further, dared to give criminal suspects the right to remain silent (Miranda).

In the wake of Phyllis Schlafly undermining her fellow women by bringing out the heavy artillery against the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion (and simultaneously leading the fight against child care), a quiet, smoky room began to emerge in the nation’s elite colleges.

Since those early days, the smoky room has become a lethal grab for power.

The Harvard Gazette, the official news website for Harvard University, calls the current incarnation of the Federalist Society “The most influential legal organization in U.S. history.”

I don’t know a lot about the Harvard Gazette, but I doubt, unlike me, that it is prone to hyperbole. Why, then, would it describe an organization most Americans have never heard of in such terms?

Sometimes, it’s just best to respond with pictures. Take a look at the image at the top of this article. Go ahead, scroll up. I can wait. I’ll bold the next sentence so it’s easy to get back to.

The Supreme Court justices whose faces you can see in the image were all provided to you courtesy of the Federalist Society.

The other justices, those you can’t see, are insignificant. Faceless. They’re only warming seats for the next Federalist Society justice. Who knows? Maybe Aileen Cannon, the Federalist Society judge who gave so much judicial hope to the Vermin of Mar-a-Lago.

In fact, it’s a good bet that the next Republican president will reward Cannon’s legal hooliganism with a Supreme Court seat unless the Republican Party is licking its wounds from a Kamala victory to such an extent that they finally extract the MAGA cancer.

The Federalist Society quickly morphed from a bunch of cry babies in law school to an organization whose primary aim is to seat as many conservative or nationalist judges as possible, as quickly as possible.

And this activity is nothing new. They’ve been at it since the days of Reagan.

According to Ballotpedia:

The Federalist Society has played a role in the judicial selection process for Republican presidents since the administration of former President Ronald Reagan (R).

Reagan nominated Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia, both faculty advisors for The Federalist Society, to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and the United States Supreme Court. Lee Liberman Otis, a co-founder of the society, later led the judicial selection efforts of the White House Counsel’s office under former President George H. W. Bush (R).

Former President George W. Bush (R) took The Federalist Society’s recommendations into consideration before nominating federal judges. His nominees to the Supreme Court, John Roberts and Samuel Alito, both had relationships with the society.

In addition, roughly half of Bush’s appointees to federal courts of appeals were society members. The Federalist Society also helped to assemble President Donald Trump’s (R) list of 21 potential Supreme Court nominees. His eventual pick, Neil Gorsuch, is a member of the society.

Brett Kavanaugh has been a member of the Federalist Society since his keg-soaked days at Yale Law School. Clarence Thomas has said that he’s “been a part of the Federalist Society now since meeting with them… in the 1980s”

Amy Coney Barrett, who was offered Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat just three days after Ginsburg died, and gleefully accepted, was a member of the Federalist Society until she was appointed to a federal appeals court position in Chicago.

But her association didn’t end there. The financial disclosure form she was required to fill out for Ginsburg’s seat revealed that she spoke for them four times after she technically left the group.

Big, big money is involved.

On a certain level, it’s understandable that a bunch of law students, feeling disaffected from their liberal brethren in law school, would want to start a group to try to influence things.

But it has, maybe even unbeknownst to them, become a tool of very, very big money. It is now under the direct control of a few rich people who could purchase every home in a ten-mile radius of where you live.

One of those big money dealers is a guy named Barre Seid, a 90-year-old Chicago industrialist who recently, literally, donated his entire 1.6 billion dollar company to the main financial conduit of the Federalist Society, a guy named Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society’s executive vice president.

He gave this company to Leo tax-free as part of trust in a shady but, apparently, legal transaction that is pretty much beyond my understanding.

This means that someone most Americans have still never heard of, Leonard Leo, is now one of the most powerful people in America. All because a 90-year-old mudslinger decided to piss on America one more time before he dies.

Leonard Leo doesn’t care if your daughter has to keep her baby after being raped or if the western states are in flames in perpetuity or if hurricanes batter coastal cities with ever-growing power and frequency. And he certainly doesn’t care about the home insurance crisis caused by climate change disasters.

Leo isn’t just another obnoxious American nationalist. One of his greatest admirers, Clarence “Coke Can” Thomas, has referred to him as the “third most powerful person in the world.” Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal once gushed that he was “Trump’s Supreme Court whisperer.”

He is credited by many as being a one-man Roe wrecking ball. Leonard Leo’s dark money groups spent $480 million to defeat Roe v. Wade. According to ProPublica:

Leo helped the president appoint and confirm more than 200 nominees to the federal bench, most famously Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

Thanks to Clarence Thomas and the right-wing SCOTUS’s Citizens United Decision (ProPublica again)…

…The Marble Freedom Trust is a so-called dark money group that is not required to publicly disclose its donors. It has wide latitude to spend directly on elections as well as on ideological projects such as funding issue-advocacy groups, think tanks, universities, religious institutions and organizing efforts.

What makes men like him particularly dangerous is that far-right nationalists like Leo aren’t playing the old game of running fancy ads on television. The tame stuff we once saw in political advertising, like the Willie Horton ads (insert sarcasm font again) is long gone.

They’re in the business of pure, unadulterated disinformation. Leo has known for a long time that the more often you tell a lie, the quicker it becomes the truth. He now has a $1.6 billion war chest to spread his gospel of hate and disinformation through the U.S. court system.

According to a ProPublica newsletter, Seid, Leo’s financier, has his own history of spreading toxic politics. He’s poured money into a right-wing nuthouse called the Heartland Institute, which is best known for distributing 28 million anti-Islamic DVDs in 2008 and somehow comparing belief in global warming to mass murder:

Seid and Leo are almost literally in bed together. Seid donated his entire company, Tripp Lite, to Leo’s Marble Freedom Trust. That’s where the $1.6 billion comes from.

Because Marble Freedom Trust is a trust, nobody had to pay taxes on the transaction. This means that Leo can invest more than one and a half billion dollars in spreading misinformation and nobody will know what hit them, which is what happened with Roe.

It’s not hyperbole to say that the current Supreme Court was purchased by Leonard Leo. His ties to the corrupt Supreme Court are strong enough that Clarence Thomas recently hired Leo’s PR firm to promote a new release of Thomas’s memoir.

The Federalist Society already has done a lot of damage without access to that $1.6 billion they now get to play with. So just think about what it will be able to do next.

According to the Washington Post:

Twenty-five of the 30 appeals court judges Trump has appointed are or were members of the society.

Let’s look at a few of the things the Federalist Society has “accomplished” just in the last few years through their new majority in the Supreme Court:

• Overturned Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022).

• Gutted the EPA while the West burns in West Virginia v. EPA (2022).

• Gutted Miranda in Vega v. Tekoh (2022).

• Gutted the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder (2013).

• Put the brakes on gun control in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen (2022) and McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010).

• Declared corporations people and institutionalized dark money in politics in Citizens United v. FEC (2010).

• Gave presidents full immunity for any actions taken while performing their executive duties as president in 23-939 Trump v. United States (07/01/2024)

Cannon’s string of rulings is a mere reflection of our grimmer fate.

If Smith loses his appeal, Cannon will have created her own legal standards. Other Trump-appointed judges have been doing the same. And there are a lot of them. We’ve seen it multiple times in just the last few months, especially by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Things will get much worse before they get better. Federalist judges will start saying that the law is whatever they say it is, and nobody will be able to stop them.

Soon, appeals will be exercises in futility. Judges will rule by fiat. They’ve already become an extension of the executive branch by routinely snuffing out regulations and executive orders that don’t match their ideology.

I often harp on the importance of local politics. The Republicans are masters at the game. While you and I are posting or reading screeds on Substack or Medium or whatever, Republicans are running for and winning school board seats or becoming county judges.

With this $1.6 billion cash infusion, the Federalist Society will now be able to run campaigns for every judge in every county in the country.

Can you imagine the state of judicial law if Kamala doesn’t win the presidency in 2024? Can you picture America’s most famous convict picking from among the worst that the Federalist Society has to offer after that $1.6 billion hammers away at American jurisprudence?

Aileen Cannon’s antics will seem whimsical in comparison.

So what’s the answer to this mess?

The first, most obvious answer is to get your ass out there and help register new voters and make sure you vote in the presidential election yourself. No excuses.

Vote.

That way, lawmakers might expand on ideas like this:

Congress Weighs First District Court Expansion Since 1990 (1)

The idea is simple. Expand the number of seats in every federal judicial district. Expand the Supreme Court. Believe it or not, there is some bipartisan support for expanding the number of federal district court judges, but that support is driven by an impossible caseload, not politics. So most of the plans to do that are softer than the Orange Predator’s underbelly.

America is run by corporations. It’s easy to sigh and roll over and hope it all somehow goes away. But it won’t. It’s going to keep getting worse, and worse, and worse until one day you are looking across the street and seeing your neighbors hauled away in the middle of the night.

You’ll never know what happened to that nice immigrant family that works so hard because everyone will be tight-lipped and afraid to question the menace of America’s expanding police state while you’re binging on orcs on Jeff Bezos’ broadcasting empire.

The Neighbors Beyond the Yard

Not to mention the young pregnant woman who is in prison after some other neighbors ratted on her for an abortion.

This is the tomorrow that the Federalist Society will bring you. They’ve already chipped away at Miranda. There’s more to come.

Today, in America, there is one legitimate political party. It, too, is largely controlled and manipulated by corporations.

But those who say there’s no difference between the two parties are simply wrong. One party is controlled by a few uber-rich billionaires who want to strip away rights that have taken 200 years to achieve. The other party is controlled by corporations whose main sin is that they want your money.

There actually is a big difference.

We need to reach the point, somehow, where the current version of the Democratic Party is the choice of moderate conservatives and centrists, and a new, more enlightened party of the left emerges.

The only way to do that is to completely dismember the Republican Party. It may seem impossible, but it’s not. It starts by swarming to the polls during this presidential election and voting out the nationalists who want to strip away your rights.

Creating a plurality of Democrats across the two branches that are still somewhat in peoples’ hands can lead to legislation against dark money.

After that, the work on the next phase can begin.

We need to help turn the Democratic Party into the new party of the right and centrists and help create a new party for the left. Centrists and leftists both have a common enemy here.

But there’s not much time left. America is on life support. If you allow all three branches of government to fall into the hands of The Federalist Society and their allies by not voting, you’ll only have yourself to blame.

Don’t say, “I don’t need to vote” because Kamala is gonna win or lose your state. Don’t say your vote means nothing. Local elections are more important than ever. Barre Seid and Leonard Leo are counting on you not voting.

If you’re a hard-core leftist or a Bernie Sanders social democrat, sorry to say, you’re just plum out of luck until the aspirations of white and Christian nationalists are completely extinguished.

And if you’re a centrist who’s not comfortable with Kamala, consider the future a little more carefully.

So, you know, suck it up. Vote. Even if you have to vote for someone you don’t much like. It’s the only way out of this mess.

Notes

Further reading:

One man's outsized role in shaping the Supreme Court and overturning Roe

Clarence Thomas' Strange Pick to Promote His Book Says It All

Are Heartland billboards the beginning of the end for climate denial?