From the WSJ Opinion Archives
FROM THE HEARTLAND
Life in the Vast Lane
The Federalist Society, center of the right-wing conspiracy.
In preparing itself to deal with President Bush's judicial nominees, the left may finally have discovered the source of the "vast right-wing conspiracy." Are you sitting down? It is the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies.
The what? Ah, my friends, that is precisely the point. This is no ordinary conspiracy.
We're talking about 13 people in an obscure office on Washington's 18th Street, operating with a budget of only $3 million a year and headed by a guy you've probably never heard of, Eugene Meyer, who have vast influence. How could such a tiny organization, with hardly a peep from the Washington Post, persuade thousands of law school students, lawyers and judges to join up?
How else to explain that up to two dozen Bush administration members or advisers--ranging from Solicitor General-designate Ted Olson, who argued Mr. Bush's case before the Supreme Court, to Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham--are said to be members of the Federalist Society? Or that four of the nine members of the Supreme Court--Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy--reportedly belong to its ranks? (The society, like most such groups, won't confirm or deny the names of members other than officers and board members.)
True, Michigan voters didn't seem to be too concerned when liberals revealed last fall--in the shrillest possible tones--that all three of the Republican appointees to the state Supreme Court belong to the Federalist Society, as does their political patron, Gov. John Engler. They were re-elected by comfortable margins, even as Al Gore won the state. But once Americans catch on to Mr. Bush's plan to pack the courts with Federalist Society types, there is sure to be outrage! You ain't seen nuthin' yet!
Last December the New York-based Institute for Democracy Studies issued a 43-page study describing the activities of the Federalist Society, concluding that it "consists of active politicians and others whose slouching towards extremism is self-proclaimed." Can a New York Times hit piece be far behind?
The Federalist Society has long argued for reducing the ABA's influence in the judicial selection process--an argument Mr. Bush turned into reality, much to the outrage of the left (and, presumably, Mr. Tyler). The fact that Mr. Bork is a co-chairman of the Federalist Society's board of advisers attracts considerable attention in the IDS attack.
In fairness, the IDS study appears to get most of its facts right, even if its adjectives and adverbs are a bit purple. The Federalist Society was started in the early 1980s. It does have about 25,000 active members and chapters on nearly every law school campus in the country. Indeed the co-chairmen of its board of directors are Steven Calabresi, who served in the Reagan and Bush administrations, and former Rep. David McIntosh (R., Ind.), who studied under Justice Scalia at the University of Chicago Law School.
The institutional affiliations of its members amount to a who's who of academic respectability: Stanford, Northwestern, Princeton, Duke and so forth. The Federalist Society was founded at Yale and quickly spread to Harvard and the University of Chicago. It exists precisely because liberal faculties at such institutions tried for decades to freeze out anybody who didn't agree with them.
And unlike many groups on the left, the Federalist Society goes out of its way to include other voices in its forums. The society's Mr. Meyer rattles off a long list of well-known liberals and Democrats who have taken part in Federalist Society debates on campuses and elsewhere: including Bill Clinton's White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum, chief of staff John Podesta and acting solicitor general Walter Dellinger, as well as former Colorado Rep. Patricia Schroeder and Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz.
Nor does the society lobby or take positions on specific political issues, though its individual members often do so. and the Society makes no bones about its core ideals: limited government, separation of powers and a judicial restraint. Its Web site quotes Federalist 78: "The Courts must declare the sense of the law, and if they should be disposed to exercise will instead of judgment, the consequences would be the substitution of their pleasure for that of the legislative body."
The left, of course, insists that any overturning of its favorite Supreme Court rulings, such as Roe v. Wade, would amount to the very judicial activism in which the Federalist Society accuses liberal judges of indulging. But the principles for which the Federalist Society says it stands are solidly anchored in the mainstream of American jurisprudence. Indeed, far from being some sort of right-wing conspiracy, the Federalist Society is simply one more example of a familiar American phenomenon: the advocacy group. Its foes' objection is simply that it has proved so persuasive.
Mr. Bray is a staff columnist at the Detroit News. His OpinionJournal.com column appears Tuesdays.
