The Federalist Society, part 2: The Debate Club

You blame this system for what you are, instead of yourself.

You wanted revenge.

But Rome wasn't destroyed today.

You needed help.

You need money.

A lot of it.

And you'll stop at nothing to get it.

Hey, everyone, this is Leon from Fiasco and Prologue Projects.

On this episode of 5-4, Peter, Rhiannon, and Michael are back with the second installment of their series on the Federal Federalist Society.

Last week, you heard about where FedSOC came from and what it has become.

This week, you're going to hear about how it works, how it's structured, how it attracts members, and how it wields its influence to wage a multi-front war within our legal system.

This is 5-4, a podcast about how much the Supreme Court and the Federalist Society suck.

Welcome to 5-4, where we dissect and analyze the Supreme Court cases that have torn apart our country like awards season is tearing apart my household.

I'm Peter.

I'm here with Michael.

So is like Barbenheimer the big divide?

Are you the Oppenheimer guy in Lee and wants Barbie to win?

It's not that.

It's that every award season, there's a competition for the best television in the household because I want to watch the NFL playoffs.

And my wife wants to watch whatever.

The Critics' Choice Awards.

Are you kidding me?

Introduce me.

I need to come into this.

Introduce me.

And I'm here with Rhiannon Trump.

Hi, Peter.

You're wrong.

I'm on the wife's side.

Now, a major impediment to me, to my side of this, is that my wife hangs out on the couch for much of the day, which means she's already there.

When the time comes, she has this entrenched position physically that

puts me at a massive disadvantage, frankly.

She has the geographical advantage.

Yeah.

This is not something I do often, but there have been times when, like, she'll just get up to go, like, make herself some dinner or something, and I will just rapidly take over the couch.

You got to get in there.

I was going to say, you got to order seamless, and when it gets there, just like leave it on the counter.

And you sit down next to her and you start eating.

And when she goes to get it, then you're like, boom, I'm in charge.

Yeah.

It's not the tactic to get her off the couch that's hard.

It's the conversation that happens immediately afterwards.

All right.

This is episode two of our series about the Federalist Society.

In episode one, we walked you through the history of the organization, how they rose from a group of plucky young nerds to being an organization capable of sort of seizing the Supreme Court and much of the federal judiciary.

So, if episode one was the story of how the organization grew from a seed into a carnivorous flower, this episode is about how that flower traps, kills, and digests small rodents.

That's right.

Specialized acid thing.

The rodents are like voting rights and things and things like that.

I was going to say, in this analogy, the rodents are the New Deal.

Yeah.

So back in 1982, the founders of the Federalist Society proposed an organization composed of three groups, students, professors, and lawyers.

The goal was very simple.

They wanted to create networks of conservatives at law schools and among professional lawyers, including within the judiciary itself, which the founders, of course, viewed as dominated by liberals.

To this day, the organization abides more or less by that tripartite structure.

On campuses, it recruits students and provides them with resources and career opportunities if they join.

It provides professors and academics with channels for jobs and funding for research.

And it connects professional lawyers with a broad network of conservative thought.

And as for judges, it serves as both a resource and a check.

It provides a network of like-minded thinkers for judges to rely on, and it utilizes that same network to discipline judges who fall out of line.

So we're going to talk a bit about how this all works and how it connects to right-wing dark money and where Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society's most powerful figure factors into all of this yeah leonard leo is that specialized acid system within the flower right that's right capable of melting a mouse's bone

so let's talk about the first kind of building block of this tripartite structure of the federalist society think of the federalist society as not just a network that operationalizes conservative thought in the law, but also a recruitment organization for people into the conservative legal movement.

The most effective recruitment for these goals happens at the law school level.

So to some extent, the Federalist Society is a household name now in 2023, 2024, because of what was revealed about their role in picking the Trump judges, right?

But to get to that powerful of a position, this organization was built up over 30 years from the law school level to create this system of lawyers and judges that we now think of as making up the Federalist Society.

But at the law school level, they're not just getting already conservative law students to enter the organization, they are also growing, expanding the conservative legal movement by appealing to law students who identify as libertarian and centrist students as well.

And really the effectiveness, the popularity of their student chapters at law schools is a result of two things.

First, the Federalist Society's organization on law school campuses, by organization, I mean in the administrative sense, the executive organization of the student chapter.

And then secondly, it's the network that the Federalist Society student chapters open up to law students that leads to careers and professional connections that law students are looking for.

The Federalist Society currently has about 200 student chapters across the country.

And in this first aspect, the organization, the way this organization works, you know, this is a well-built, smoothly smoothly operating and highly funded organization at the individual student chapter level at law schools.

You know, we talked in episode one of the series about the big funding that Federalist Society got from the Olin Foundation, from the Skaith Foundation and others at the time of the organization's founding.

And that money gives a student chapter the ability to host better events than other student organizations on a law school campus, or at the very least, events that look better, right?

Each of us, the three of us, have our own experience with this.

And we also interviewed two people about their time at Harvard Law and how the Federalist Society operated on campus when they were in law school.

And Every one of us has really similar memories of their initial assessment of the Federalist Society in law school.

You know, this is one of, if not the most organized student organization at my law school campus.

They obviously have more money than other student organizations because they always have good food at their events.

And they're clearly a serious organization because they additionally have better speakers at their events, including, you know, the best professors, not only at the law school where you are.

And these are professors who are speaking from across the political spectrum, not just conservatives, but law professors at other law schools who are writing about new and interesting areas of the law and arguments and constitutional interpretation.

They're also bringing high-level conservative lawyers to speak on your campus as well as judges.

Yeah.

Not uncommon to see like big name federal judges show up to Federalist Society events on exactly.

These are events that are happening in the middle of the day between classes that provide lunch to students and also a speaker or a panel on a certain topic.

Yeah, come grab some Chick-fil-A at 12.30 in the afternoon and hear a very well-credentialed man talk about how the uterus is a legal fiction.

Right, exactly.

Yeah, pretty much.

Remember, the Federalist Society bills itself, especially at the law school level, as a debate club.

And yes, it's conservative, but it's also a place where you can hear different legal arguments and different constitutional interpretations being discussed.

Which is absolute catnip for the nerds who make up the legal academy.

Yes.

Right.

For the nerds who make up the legal academy and for the nerds who are new law students who want to do well in law school.

Yes.

I want you to hear from Vanessa A.B.

She is a progressive attorney, but she used to be a conservative law student.

When she was in law school at HLS, Harvard Law School, she was in the Federalist Society.

She talked to us about her experience.

Pretty much anything you invited me to, I was probably going to go.

And so it so happens that in my section, I befriended honestly lots of people because I'm pretty social.

But yeah, there was a couple of people who I think would say they identify as libertarians who were super nice to me.

And one of them invited me to a FedSOC event.

And I went.

I was like, oh yeah, why not?

You know, they were very active on the HLS campus.

They had all these lunch talks.

They were super organized.

You know, it was always free lunch, but the good stuff, like a Chick-fil-A

and like the good pizza.

So actually, their events were really well attended.

it wouldn't have been strange in 2009 to be at a fedsock lunch even if you were a liberal person like you grab your slice of pizza you listen for a half hour and then you move on with your life you know i went to a lunch talk i went to house parties and just through getting to know people i became more involved when you first get to law school and you don't have a lot of friends This kind of really organized student organization, this well-oiled machine that has events that are well attended, it starts to connect people socially as well.

Doesn't matter how awkward you are.

There will be more awkward people there.

Just like the weirdest, most awkward people.

So you will feel like a rock star.

Right.

Vanessa says she entered law school as a social conservative since she was raised in an evangelical Christian household.

So I started at Harvard law school at 20 years old after

just kind of speeding through undergrad.

And I had been fairly sheltered.

So I would say I was pretty malleable when I arrived at HLS.

Did you consider yourself a conservative at the time?

Socially conservative, I would say.

That was my primary concern because it was such a big part of my life.

So for the last eight years, I had thought a lot about like, when can we have sex and who can have sex with each other and who can consume what and when.

And I really just kind of adopted the beliefs of my evangelical church.

So I felt strongly that even if internally I

didn't feel strongly about gay marriage, for instance, which was, you know, a big deal in the mid-aughts, right?

I still felt like I couldn't diverge from the church's views publicly.

So it just made sense to identify as a conservative.

Were there social issues or legal issues at the time when you entered Harvard Law that you did identify strongly as like conservative on?

I think abortion.

I probably felt pretty strongly that abortion was immoral.

There was a lot of talk in 2009 about repealing the Don't Ask, Don't Tell Act, but I did have a couple of queer friends, and so that was one issue where I didn't feel strongly.

But I also didn't spend a lot of time thinking it through.

I really sort of avoided my own feelings.

So she really didn't have strong viewpoints either way about stuff like federalism or the administrative state or or how the free exercise clause is interpreted.

Still, because of the social function this organization played for her during law school, Vanessa was executive vice president of FedSOC at Harvard Law in her 2L year.

So I think this really speaks to the power of the Federalist Society's ability to recruit.

And like I said, not just recruit, expand the conservative legal movement.

Yeah, I think a simple way to think about what the Federalist Society is doing for

young, new law students is providing them with like a frictionless way to engage with the organization, right?

They're just sort of there on campus putting on events that seem largely non-ideological, right?

They're serving food.

They have people who are willing to talk to you about the organization.

And if you just dig a little bit, you will find that there is a large network there that you could maybe tap into and maybe use to take an early step in your young career.

I was on the Federalist Society website today.

I just want to tell you guys about the upcoming events that Federalist Society student chapters have across the country.

I'm ready, let's hear it.

We're recording this in mid-January, so these are the events coming up in the next week for Federalist Society student chapters at law schools across the country.

First up, at Georgia State Law School, this event titled The Role, Challenges, and Opportunities of American Legal Education.

Who's the speaker?

Morse Tan.

That is the Dean of the Law School at Liberty University, explicitly an evangelical Christian university, highly, highly conservative.

Founded by Jerry Falwell.

That is the opportunities of American Legal Education coming up at Georgia State.

Oh, there's an accompanying event, by the way, at Georgia State, Coffee and Conversation with Dean Morse Tan.

Remember, we said said you have personal experiences and opportunities to meet with in casual settings these speakers that are being brought to your campus.

Kissing and hugging with Morse Tan.

That's right.

That's right.

The next one at Case Western Federalist Society Student Chapter, how to secure clerkships.

At Chicago, the Federalist Society Student Chapter is hosting an event, One Nation Under Arrest.

Are progressive prosecutors rogue or righteous?

I just want to point out that that one nation under arrest pun doesn't make any sense.

No.

They obviously just thought of a pun and we're like, let's throw it in there.

Idiotic.

At Harvard coming up this week, a conversation with Chief Judge Jeffrey Sutton.

The chief judge of the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.

Big guy, powerful guy.

And finally, Kentucky, the law school at the University of Kentucky from bluegrass law to big law, career panel

nice and here's a bonus one this is from Harvard's Federalist Society for January 2025 it's executing all of our liberal colleagues

the due process implications of firing squads on campus

hanging Mike Pence a retrospective

I like never went to any events was the thing neither did I I mean yeah I was an adult I was in my 30s I had a wife.

I was just a burnout that didn't go to class either.

So let alone some kind of lunchtime events.

My friends would be like, oh, yeah, no, there's free pizza.

That's where I'm.

And I was like, okay, have fun.

And

later.

I'll be in the library.

I'll see you at class.

I think a lot of students are just sort of like, oh, interesting event.

I'll go get some free pizza and listen to that, not realizing that they are sort of.

encountering the tip of a very large and powerful organization spear.

That's exactly right.

When I was in law school, and I work on a law school campus right now, right?

So this is still happening.

There would be a Fifth Circuit judge pretty frequently coming to speak at a Federalist Society event.

And there are also very high up partners at big law firms coming to speak at Federalist Society events, attorneys who have argued in front of the Supreme Court, talking about the arguments they made, talking about their work day to day.

Conservative attorneys who work at conservative nonprofits.

These are all people who are coming for your regular kind of weekly or bi-weekly Federalist Society lunch on a law school campus.

Now, I mentioned also this second level of operation where the Federalist Society is really successful on law school campuses, and that's the network that the Federalist Society provides that flows first from the events that the Federalist Society is hosting, but also from other opportunities.

The network that is provided that leads to career options and professional connections for law students.

Peter, you said this is really a frictionless process from which, you know, a law student on day one or in their first year of law school can kind of just join up into the Federalist Society.

This is true as well for these career networking opportunities that the Federalist Society provides.

Completely frictionless, they're completely accessible, and it's very easy to go to an event where you're told you will meet people who will then help you get a job.

And I want to make clear what the difference between this and your median law school organization is how compressed it is in the sense that the average law student, when joining the Federalist Society, can very quickly make contact with prominent professors at their law school, prominent academics elsewhere, possibly even judges, right?

Just very immediate access to power.

Yeah.

So there's the way that the Federalist Society is able to present itself as a very serious, serious, respectable, and respected organization on a law school campus.

A big factor there being the funding that we've already mentioned that student chapters get from the national organization.

But in terms of appealing to law students and again, recruiting law students into the conservative legal movement, you cannot overstate the power of the FedSOC network in terms of career opportunities and professional connections that it gives law students.

Because of that tripartite structure, right, the students, professors, and lawyers all being members of the same organization, law students have access to like-minded people already in the career, either as academics or as practitioners at conservative nonprofits, at big law firms.

They might be elected officials and, of course, judges, like we've said.

And again, you have to think about someone who is in law school and wants to get a good job.

And there's this organization that not only is going to connect you to people doing the work you're interested in doing, but makes it easy.

These people are being brought to campus to speak.

You can have lunch or dinner with them.

Once you meet them, they're able and motivated as a member of that same organization you're a member of to connect you with their own professional networks, right?

And on and on.

So there's a logistical advantage to being a member of the Federalist Society in law school, in that you are being introduced to people in the network, in the profession.

But there's also a signaling advantage, which is identifying yourself through your membership in the the Federalist Society as an ideological ally to judges and other lawyers.

We talked in episode one about how membership in the Federalist Society in the early aughts began to signal a real commitment for lawyers who had been members of the Federalist Society since law school.

It began to signal your real commitment to conservatism in the law, right?

And that's true for students too.

Having Federalist Society membership on your resume means something to a judge that you're trying to clerk for.

It signals that ideologically you are allied to conservatives in the profession.

And it also signals that intellectually you're interested in these ideas.

You're interested in these arguments being put forth.

You're interested in the writing that this judge is doing and on and on.

And, you know, not that this should be any shock, but the flip side of this is also true from my experience.

You know, like, I'm not trying to brag or anything, but I was literally the number one student in my class as a 2L.

And I was applying to clerkships.

And, you know, I went to the advisor who's in charge of this stuff.

And he was like,

well, you can't apply to any of these conservative judges.

They don't care.

You were on the Obama campaign.

They won't have you.

Right.

I was willing to clerk for them and they were not interested.

Yeah.

Yeah.

At all.

One more thing that I think is important that is related to both the administrative organization and how well it works and how well funded it is at the student chapter level, but is also related to this career networking advantage that Federalist Society membership gives you.

There's sort of the concrete support systems that the Federalist Society student chapters create on campuses that work as a supplement to or are seen as actually superior to the services that are given by say the law school's academic affairs office or the dean of student affairs office, the career services office, et cetera.

You know, first, we know from our own experiences in law school and from the people we spoke to that the Federal Society is known, for example, as having the best outlines of any student organization on law school campus.

This is really academic support.

And so if you're not a law student, you should know that the vast majority of law classes and pretty much all your 10 law classes, your grade is entirely based on one exam at the end of the term that is usually at the very least open outline, if not open book.

But the outline is essentially your crib sheet to take into the exam that summarizes the entire course,

which is incredibly important for your grade since you have one shot to get your grade right.

So getting started with a good outline is an incredible leg up.

Exactly.

And the Federalist Society on tons of law school campuses boasts an outline bank that is better than other student organizations.

And how do you get access to that outline bank?

How do you get access to that tangible academic support in your first year?

You are a member of the Federalist Society.

One former Harvard law student told us something very interesting, which is that when she was at Harvard not so long ago, a really appealing thing that the Federalist Society did was that they had created this clerkship guide.

She said, quote, when I was in law school, it was the clerkships guide.

The Federalist Society chapter had their guide to clerkships, and you could pay the Federalist Society money to access it.

And a bunch of liberal law students did it because it was a good, helpful guide.

And they were then funding the conservative legal movement because it felt like the only way to support their own careers.

That's a bunch of bullshit.

Yeah, I think it's worth reiterating that that is essentially the Federalist Society sort of substituting for career services right at a law school sort of replacing this administrative apparatus within law schools with its own apparatus and just sort of signals how enmeshed they are with the system that they can essentially

serve the same functions as law schools yes right completely enmeshed not just at law school campuses but in the professions right

so we want to move to the next leg in the stool here which is professors.

So I wanted to start with a line from the TELUS book we talked about last episode, the rise of the conservative legal movement.

He says, ideas need networks through which they can be shared and nurtured.

organizations to connect them to problems and to diffuse them to political actors and patrons to provide resources for these supporting conditions.

And so professors sit at a sort of unique place in this network in that they are producing these ideas and they sit between the students and the professional side, the lawyers, the judges, the policymakers.

So they wear a lot of hats.

They're producing ideas.

They're mediating this relationship between students and actors.

a big part of the engine of the Federalist Society.

And so I want to talk about them in two different ways.

One is from the angle of how how the network helps students become professors and professors become tenured professors and tenured professors become distinguished chaired tenured professors.

And the other angle is what benefits the professors bring to the network, what their role is in the network, right?

So

starting from the first one.

How the network helps students become professors.

There are a few different paths to becoming a law professor, but all of them share one thing in common, which is the ability to publish articles in law journals.

That is like the key skill you need to have to be a law professor.

And the more prolific the publishing and the more prestigious the journals, the better.

And just so folks who aren't lawyers have a sense of law journals, legal academics publish their legal theories, et cetera, in journals the same way that like biologists do.

So one thing the network does is this sort of proliferation of conservative schools, conservative professors, and conservative journals for these ideas, for these articles to be published in, right?

This is an important piece.

If you want to become a professor, you need to publish.

And here are places where you can publish, places where it's easier for you to publish, where you don't have to write a totally kick-ass article that Harvard Law Review will be interested in.

You can just do some half-assed bullshit and, you know, Capital University Law Review will be interested in.

That's a real school I discovered researching this school.

So again, we're talking about the prerequisite for being a law professor, which is something that this legal network helps with.

And additionally, one career path will be to get prestigious clerkships, which helps when you have a network of conservative judges who are picking from the ranks of federal society members, or post-JD academic work like PhDs, for which there's an existing program of sort of conservative, what's the word I want to use here,

largesse,

right?

Foundations and money to fund conservatives to get like economics PhDs.

That's a thing that exists.

There's also practical experience with legal writing professorships, assistant teaching positions, or fellowships.

And this is a newer and increasingly popular method to becoming a law professor.

And so in the 90s, this guy from the Olin Foundation, which again is a conservative sort of money group, had a conversation with the director of the Federalist Society, Eugene Meyer, and was like, Look, how do we get more conservatives to be professors?

Like, how can we do that?

And Meyer was like, Well, we need more of these fellowships, so maybe you can just fund some fellowships.

And the Olmo Foundation was like, Okay, let's do it.

We'll make some fellowships for conservatives as a path to becoming academics.

And it was successful, it was wildly successful.

Big name conservative scholars came through that.

Adrian Vermeule, who

infamously wants to replace American government with a Catholic oligarchy.

Yep.

Yeah.

Basically a monarchist.

Yes.

Feering into that territory.

Yeah, yeah.

A pope-like figure at the head of American government.

Amy Coney Barrett,

currently on the Supreme Court.

And Kerry Severino, the president of the Judicial Crisis Network, which is like a major sort of PAC right-wing group that pours money into judicial nominations.

And works closely with the Federalist Society.

Right.

To the point where they are effectively one entity, which we'll talk about in a bit later.

Yeah.

That's right.

So we spoke with our friend at Harvard Law, John Hansen, who was an Olin Fellow briefly

before he got it rescinded about his experience.

I started law school in whatever, 1986, 87, and was an Olin Fellow at Yale Law School.

Oh, yes.

Yes.

Yes.

That rocks.

This makes you the poorest Olin Fellow in history.

Well, literally, what happened was once it became clear that I was a fan of holding manufacturers liable, you know, strictly liable for like tobacco litigation, et cetera,

I lost my designation as an Olin Fellow and I had won an Olin prize that would have entitled me to a one-year fellowship afterwards.

And Dean Calabrese comes to me and says, You know, the folks who direct the Olin program here have decided to retract it this year.

We know what's going on.

We will find a way to fund you.

Anyway, I started teaching.

I was doing this kind of work.

And without my ever saying anything, I quickly became known as a liberal legal economist.

And the invitations to the various workshops lasted for about three years until they decided that maybe I wasn't on board.

And part of the power of these ideas is that they're totally being subsidized, right?

So there are these workshops happening at many law schools that are funding a kind of network of idea dissemination across different law schools by a core group of scholars.

So we've talked a little bit about how this network operates to the benefit of conservative students and lawyers who want to be professors and professors getting ahead.

The other half of the story is how these professors then operate to the benefit of the network, what their value is.

Yeah.

The main thing they do is they are in a constant conversation with each other, with policymakers, and with the courts.

And we've talked about this in episodes before.

You will be familiar with this idea.

But, you know, I wanted to highlight something.

We did an episode on this case, Valleo Madero, which was about Social Security benefits available in Puerto Rico.

And Clarence Thomas wrote a concurrence in that case about equal protection of the laws.

And I'm going to just read a line from it, just one line from this, where he says,

while my conclusions remain tentative,

I think the textual source of that obligation to not discriminate may reside in the 14th Amendment's citizenship clause rather than the due process clause and the equal protection clause.

So this would replace our current values of equal protection with one that is centered on citizenship and allow the government to go wild on immigrants and other permanent residents.

But this is more than anything, a call to the professors in this network.

Like, hey, I have a thought.

I did some reading.

What do you guys think?

This is an invitation to write articles about the privileges and immunities clause of the citizenship portion of the 14th Amendment and how that is a replacement for equal protection as it's currently understood, due process as it's currently understood in the legal academy and in the courts.

He is asking the network for

historical research, for new thinking on this to maybe one day feature in a majority opinion.

Right?

Yes.

He's basically saying, someone write something in a law review so that I can cite that

and do what I want to do.

Bedsock professors, are you listening?

Call and response from Clarence Thomas to academia.

Right.

And this goes the other direction as well.

I want to talk about a failed example of this, but I think a very vivid one, which is the failed Obamacare challenges.

We talked last episode about Mitch McConnell going before the Federalist Society and saying, like, we want to strike down this law as unconstitutional.

There's another similar form, similar time.

This is at the American Enterprise Institute, where Michael Grieve of the AEI said,

this bastard, the Affordable Care Act, has to be killed as a matter of political hygiene.

I do not care how this is done, whether it's dismembered, whether we drive a stake through its heart, whether we tar and feather it and drive it out of town, whether we strangle it.

I don't care who does it, whether it's some court someplace or the United States Congress.

Any which way, any dollar spent on that goal is worth spending, any brief filed towards that end is worth filing.

Any speech or panel contribution toward that end is a service to the United States.

Holy shit.

Talking about a law, a statute, statute, as like a person, like, I'm going to kill this motherfucker, right?

Like, that's

so wild.

He's trying to use metaphors that are going to resonate with the crowd.

He's like, that's right.

You know how we all love to kill bastard children?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Imagine that the Affordable Care Act was one of those and everyone in the audience was like, oh, they're starting to click into plays from.

Right.

They're lighting their pitchforks as he speaks.

Also, I have to, like, when conservatives start talking about tarring and feathering as a metaphor, it just makes me a little bit nervous.

Note the word also hygiene.

This bastard has to be killed as a matter of political hygiene.

Yeah.

I don't know.

I don't even know what he's trying to evoke exactly there, but it's upsetting.

Yes, absolutely.

It's just fascist.

So, again, remember, we're at this forum at the AEI, the American Enterprise Institute.

If that sounds familiar, remember, as we mentioned last episode, not the Federalist Society, but an organization that once hosted a permanent office for the Federalist Society, a close ally.

So at this forum, a lawyer laid out some ideas for attacking the ACA.

And John Adler, Federalist Society enthusiast, case Western law professor, frequent contributor and active participant in FedSoc, he reads about this online.

He likes some of the legal theories he reads from this forum.

And so he emails up the president of the Cato Institute, another conservative think tank.

And this gives birth to a lawsuit that ends up going up to the Supreme Court, King v.

Burwell, which failed six to three

because it was a laughably, laughably bad argument, which is why they only got three votes.

But this is a good sort of, I think, illustration of this is a conversation, right?

This is a conversation between different parts of this network.

And in this case, the conservatives were like, you got to do better.

Right.

Like, you want to kill the ACA.

You got to do better than this crap.

Sorry.

Now, also, on topics where everyone agrees or most people agree, this network of professors just creates a mass of literature, a mass of publication, which like Peter said, creates the opportunity for citations.

Like on the very first episode, our very first discussion, we talk about the formalities of legal opinions and how those are used to hide what is going on in them.

So, this is the production, the manufacturing of those formalities.

This is the creation of the facade, right?

This is the nitty-gritty of that, so that you can cite these law review articles and these books and all this bullshit to make it look like you're doing real legal work and not just Christian theology.

Right, right.

The final piece of this, the role the professors play, is with the students.

The students are, like Rhea explained, the sort of next generation of foot soldiers in this political battle.

And they need to be recruited.

They need to be trained.

They need to be groomed in essence.

But this is like the identification of the talented and ideologically committed types, the bringing them into the fold and connecting them to their former students who are now professionals, who are now judges, who are now in Congress for prestigious positions, clerkships, aides on Capitol Hill,

et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, plugging them into the network.

That is a huge piece of what the law professors do.

They're not just the middle managers of this network.

They're also kind of the glue that holds it together.

Right.

So the final part of this tripartite organization is the lawyers.

For a professional network to function, of course, you need professionals.

So you have members who range from your average lawyers in private practice to lawyers at conservative nonprofits and lawyers working for Republican politicians and Republican-led governments.

And then there's also judges.

And I think it makes sense to talk about judges first because they play such a huge role here.

So a lot of the Federalist Society strategy around judges stems from their negative experiences with Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices during the 1980s.

You had Sandra Day O'Connor, David Souter, Anthony Kennedy, all Republican appointees who disappointed the conservatives to some degree or another.

Souter drifted left to the point where he was a reliable liberal vote by the end of his career.

O'Connor and Kennedy were more moderate than conservatives would have liked.

And what conservatives learned from this was that they needed to be able to vet judges better.

So, where previously you might not have wanted someone who was outspoken about their conservative ideals, you might have wanted to hide that.

They started to treat that as a prerequisite, right?

To prove that someone was a true ideological ally.

We spoke to a former federal judge, Nancy Gertner, and here's what she said about it.

Up until perhaps very recently, judges on the left and the right, Republican and Democratic judges, were oftentimes selected from the middle, right?

From the people who could get confirmed.

And who could get confirmed were generally people who had not been outspoken about the law and where it was going.

In fact, I began to feel that you got a judgeship in direct proportion to your never having said anything.

And that changes with Trump.

Suddenly, you get selected in direct proportion to what you, in fact, have said or done or stood for in an overt way, for what you have blogged about, the papers that you have written.

Another way to think about this is that what the Federalist Society has done in terms of vetting is subjugate expertise to ideology.

Yes, it's good when a judge has expertise, but the Federalist Society has decided that that is secondary to ideology.

That's how you get judges like Eileen Cannon, right, who's handling one of Trump's trials and is just sort of like a MAGA chud, right?

Yeah, exactly.

People will remember, I'm sure, judicial confirmation hearings for the federal bench during the Trump administration when there were all these judges who like their ABA rating was like extremely not experienced.

Right.

It's like not qualified.

Not qualified.

Has never been in a trial.

Right.

Just like Airbud style candidates.

Right, right, right, exactly.

Exactly.

The point of that was that, you know, for the most part, the federalist society knows that these people aren't the sharpest tools in the shed.

They're deciding that that doesn't matter.

It's secondary.

Yes.

What's important is that they are committed to this ideology.

This sort of vetted network of lawyers can be tapped not just for the judiciary, but for attorneys general,

for staffers, right?

Bolstering their resumes and further confirming their ideological commitments.

And then there's a pool of lawyers who have these ideological commitments that you can be confident about, that you can draw from for all matter of positions, right?

Whether it's in the government, private practice, nonprofits, et cetera.

And then you have what you might call the back end operation.

Once someone is on the bench, for example, the network serves as a way of managing them.

The Federalist Society's extended network essentially created a group of lawyers and academics who would criticize judges who they don't feel take the right positions.

This is what Amanda Hollis-Bruski, who has written extensively about the Federalist Society, calls the judicial audience.

These networks result in groups of people who know the judges personally, who know the judges professionally, and who will applaud them when they do good and boo them when they don't.

It creates this social and political and professional pressure to deliver the results that the movement wants.

So we spoke spoke with Amanda Holespreski, who is a professor at Pomona College, and here's how she described this.

The idea of a judicial audience actually comes from a book called Judges and Their Audiences.

The premise of that book is that judges are not Vulcan-like figures.

They are human beings.

Human beings seek approval, particularly from audiences of people that matter to them.

So the federal society, you know, part part of why they organize in the early 1980s is because they want to create an intellectual home for conservatives in law school.

And that's certainly part of the story.

But there's this other kind of conversation happening in Washington around conservative judges,

namely that Republican presidents would appoint these good conservative judges.

And those judges, particularly if they're on the Supreme Court, would move to Washington, D.C.

They'd want to hang out with the Georgetown set.

They'd want to be talked about favorably in a lot of the Supreme Court coverage coming out of DC and New York.

And because of the pull of that sort of specific liberal audience, these good conservative judges would then drift to the left.

So in political science, we called this judicial drift.

The federal society would refer to it as the greenhouse effect.

And the greenhouse effect referred to Linda Greenhouse, who was then the Supreme Court reporter for the New York Times.

And the idea was these good conservative judges would seek out Linda Greenhouse's approval, right?

Or want to be invited to the good parties in Georgetown.

So they would start drifting to the left.

They'd start moderating their conservative beliefs and principles to please the liberal elites in Washington and around the country.

And so part of what the federal society was really mindful of when they organized was not just that they wanted to create a home for conservatives and libertarians so that they could share their conservative and libertarian legal ideas, but that they could create what Stephen Calabre called a counter-elite, an alternative judicial audience, a network of conservatives and libertarians who would hold these judges accountable and hold them true to their conservative principles, so that these judges would no longer be looking to Linda Greenhouse.

They'd no longer longer want to get invited to those parties by liberal Georgetown folks because they'd have an entirely separate conservative elite audience and network that they could then plug into, seek approval from, and that would sort of discipline and hold them true to their conservatism.

This is key to understanding, like, for example, the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v.

Wade, right?

There was sort of a divide in the legal academy and among legal commentators before this decision as to whether the Supreme Court would actually go through with overturning Roe v.

Wade

or whether they might just continue the death by a thousand cuts approach to abortion regulation.

Would Brett Kavanaugh moderate?

Would Amy Quinny Barrett moderate?

And I think that divide is well explained by whether or not you understand this network and the way pressure moves up and down the network, right?

There was massive pressure on the justices to overturn Roe v.

Wade here.

They knew it, they felt it, and it would have been a disaster for them if they had not done it.

We talked last episode about how betrayed and angry the Federal Society was about Planned Parenthood v.

Casey and not just the Federal Society, but the conservative base and the conservative legal movement generally.

And they spent 30 years building to get to a point to be like, this won't be another Planned Parenthood vKC.

And if it was,

it would have destroyed the conservative legal movement.

This is why it is incorrect to think about Dobbs as some sort of failure for the Republican Party, even though they have had negative electoral effects from it in the subsequent elections.

Because the general election is not what Sam Alito and Amy Coney Barrett are trying to win.

That is not their audience.

Their audience are members of the Federalist Society.

And to the extent there's any political actor who's a close analog to that, it is Republican primary voters.

And what we see in Republican politics is that the primary voters pull them to the right.

And similarly, here, I think you see the Supreme Court being pulled to the right by their network.

Right.

Someone like Thomas or Alito is not responsive to like the median American voters.

Right.

They're responsive to right-wing interests, right?

These are the people they talk to.

These are the people that take them on vacations, things like that, right?

These are the people they party with in Kennebunkport or wherever the fuck.

Yeah, some bullshit place in Maine.

I'll never see.

Right.

Financially.

Just never see Maine.

A humble gal like me.

And before we move on, you know, I think it's useful to think about the Federalist Society as a service provider, right?

There are all of these conservative political interest groups.

Some are like the populist base.

Some are these very wealthy, dark money types.

Some are Republican politicians.

The federal society is providing services to all of them, and they do it by trying to utilize the law to make their interests come to fruition.

And to do that, they leverage this broad network.

They formulate legal theories.

They try to leverage the judiciary to make them a reality, right?

But what they are doing is providing services to the conservative political movement.

Yeah, all of these groups within the conservative movement, the base, base, dark money networks and donors, politicians, members of all of these different interest groups are part of the network already.

And that's who you go to to get connected with the law part.

The Federalist Society is the law firm and the conservative legal movement are the clients.

That's right.

That's a fucking bullseye.

So I think this is as good a time as any to talk a bit about Leonard Leo, who was the longtime head of the lawyers division at the Federalist Society?

We asked Andrea Bernstein, a reporter who covers Leo for ProPublica and has done a ton of great work, exactly what Leo was trying to accomplish with the Lawyers Division.

In order to be effective as a nonprofit, he had to play the political game and the money game.

One of the first things that he did, or his job when he started at the Federalist Society, was to head up the Lawyers Division.

And this created an opportunity for him to network with lawyers and judges and future judges all across the country and also to fundraise for the organization.

So it went from this sort of not exactly ragtag, but student organization, students don't have money, to an organization of lawyers around the country, some of them with deep pockets who would contribute.

So that was one stool of the triangle.

Another stool of the triangle that he moved to fairly quickly was to be an advisor to the George W.

Bush White House on judicial appointments.

But that wasn't enough either.

To work for a nonprofit and advise the White House, he set up a network of nonprofits, which were really groups that were vehicles for him to raise money to contribute to causes that he cared about, beginning with nominations for the U.S.

Supreme Court.

So what the Federalist Society is doing is tapping into all of these previously independent groups of lawyers.

30 years ago, you had Republican lawyers working for state governments, lawyers at right-wing nonprofits, lawyers at big corporations, judges, and the Federalist Society steadily united them under one banner, giving them common cause, a common set of beliefs, putting them into literal contact with one another.

And so if you take a step back, you can see a whole ecosystem here.

Federalist society academics float these novel legal theories.

They get picked up by Federalist Society lawyers who bring them into courts where Federalist Society judges can turn those theories into law, right?

It is a pipeline for right-wing legal theory.

So this tripartite system structure of the Federalist Society, this is coming from their founding documents.

This is on their website.

These are the three divisions that make up the structure of this network.

And so we've been talking of the Federalist Society as it conceived of itself in this tripartite structure.

But while we're on the topic of Leonard Leo and the lawyers division, it makes sense to talk about what's really kind of like the shadow fourth segment of the organization, which is the network of dark money.

The Federalist Society itself is a nonprofit.

It does not spend any money in politics or advocacy.

It does not take formal positions, right?

This is where the identification of itself as a debate club comes into play.

But they don't need to be spending money in politics or advocacy.

They don't need to be taking formal positions on politics because they coordinate with other organizations that do those things.

And in fact, those organizations are often run, at least in part, by Leonard Leo himself.

The best example of this is an organization we mentioned in the first episode and also earlier in this episode.

That's the Judicial Confirmation Network, now called the Judicial Crisis Network, which was started by close allies of Leonard Leo, most likely in coordination with Leonard Leo himself.

And it is, as we mentioned last episode, right down the hall, literally from the Federalist Society's office in D.C.

That organization, the JCN, has spent tens of millions of dark money dollars advocating for right-wing judges.

For example, what does this look like, advocating for right-wing judges?

JCN is the organization that put tons of money into advertisements, commercials, et cetera, against the nomination and appointment of Merritt Garland to the Supreme Court and four in favor of the nominations and appointments of Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett, and Brett Kavanaugh.

Right.

You know, when I was in big law, one of the things I did was like sanctions evasion and money laundering.

And literally my job was like when our clients were suspected by the federal government of engaging in sanctions violations,

disentangling money laundering networks among our clients' customer base.

And the things we looked for are all like

present here.

You know, like it is like multiple organizations with like the same core group of shareholders or stakeholders, executive board members, the same address or

different offices in the same building, often on the same floor, same phone numbers, et cetera.

This is so vivid for me.

It reminds me of finding five different

general trading companies in Dubai that all happen to be in the same building and have the same four shareholders.

And also, that building happened to be the government of Iran State Bank building.

And lo and behold, they were money laundering for the government of Iran to evade Iranian sanctions.

Who would have guessed?

Which is cool, by the way.

Very proud of my work getting the banks who facilitated this off anything other than some fines.

But it's very familiar, like down to the details, right?

And the core idea, I'm not saying that the federal society is engaged in money laundering, but that the core idea is that these are fundamentally one and the same organization.

These people are working together towards a common goal, and we don't have to engage in this fiction, even if it's a legal or financial fiction that makes sense in some, you know, specific scenarios.

We don't have to pretend like we don't know what's going on here.

Yeah.

You know, when we spoke with Andrea Bernstein about Leonard Leo's operations, there were a couple of things that we said where she said, well, keep in mind, that wasn't the Federalist Society.

That was Leonard Leo.

And she's right.

You know, there were often things that he was doing on his own.

Right.

And that's, a technicality that she, as a reporter, is well aware of.

But it's important to understand that this is all one operation.

Leonard Leo, whether or not he's sort of wearing his Federalist Society guy hat and the Federalist Society itself and JCN and this network of organizations, they are a singular operation serving a singular purpose.

And I think you lose perspective if you don't view it that way.

If you really want to understand it, you should watch a scene between Tom Cruise and the late, great Tom Wilkinson in Mission Impossible, Rogue Nation,

when he explains to Tom Cruise how he could go rogue and do all these things that would be well in the interest of the federal government, but would not at all be associated with the federal government as an agent of the federal government who would be disavowed by the federal government were he ever caught.

That is how to understand when Leonard Leo is not working on behalf of the Federal Society.

Except it makes him sound way too cool.

He's not stopping nuclear apocalypse, he's getting rid of abortion rights.

Yeah.

There's very little you can't learn from Mission Impossible Rogue Nation.

That's right.

A few years ago, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse investigated some of the Federalist Society's money flows and found some interesting shit.

Lots of the money they receive is completely dark, laundered through trusts that are designed to disguise the identity of donors.

But investigations have shown that the Koch brothers, when they were both alive and now Charles Koch alone and Koch Industries, are major donors.

The Lind and Harry Bradley Foundation, a right-wing foundation based in Wisconsin that has spent tens of millions stoking conservative fears about election fraud, gave the Federalist Society as much as $3 million in a year.

The Mercer family, right-wingers who helped fund Breitbart and the Trump campaign for starters, gave as much as $2 million a year.

That's just like a little taste of the rich freaks financing this operation directly, right?

And then you have the sort of extended network.

of organizations.

The New York Times did work to uncover some of those organizations in 2022.

And what they found seems to be like a political financing network that really sprung up aggressively in the post-Citizens United era.

So you have the Judicial Crisis Network, JCN, which is most active in directly funding PR for judicial nominees.

You have the 85 Fund, aka the Honest Elections Project,

hairs should be standing up on the back of your neck,

which has focused on funding a variety of right-wing legal theories, but most notably those that entail limiting access to voting.

In 2020, that organization had a budget of $65 million.

There were several other groups, some nonprofits, some for-profits, through which a ton of shadowy donor money was moving.

But most of them were dissolved in the last couple of years, mostly for the simple reason that they've been made immaterial by one entity, the Marble Freedom Trust, which the electronics manufacturing mogul Barry Seed gave $1.6 billion with a bee dollars in 2021, the largest known political donation in history.

I want to be clear that the Marble Freedom Trust is not controlled by the Federalist Society per se.

It's controlled by Leonard Leo.

But again, the distinction between Leo himself and the Federalist Society essentially a technicality.

We are talking about a singular movement, the conservative legal movement, the interests that it represents.

Leo's work in representing the interests of this movement are what got him the 1.6 billion.

Yeah, exactly.

Right.

Again, think about Mission Impossible.

And so again, yes, the Federalist Society conceives of itself as a tripartite organization, lawyers.

professors, students.

That does a great job of obscuring who really runs this operation

and the interests that this operation serves.

And when you start to look at the sources of the money that run through and parallel to the organization, it all comes into focus a little bit clearer.

That's right.

TELUS told us that the day-to-day operations of the Federal Society, the vast majority of what they do, there's like student debates and student events and things like that.

And I'm sure that's true.

And also, if you look at the day-to-day operations of this random fishing company in Panama, probably what they do is sell bait and tackle and whatever.

But the money laundering they do for the drug cartels may be a little more important to understanding it, right?

Like, even if it's not their day-to-day regular.

Right.

Or understanding the politics of the region or that state, right?

Right.

The basement where all the dudes from Columbia pack the pounds and pounds of cocaine.

That's important, maybe more important to understanding.

The cocaine is ideas.

And law students are snorting them.

Yeah.

Sorry.

Let's flesh this metaphor out.

I do think it's worth noting.

And we are going to get more into this in detail in the coming two episodes, but this network is necessary because the ideas they want to promulgate throughout this network are politically, popularly, socially noxious.

They are unpopular.

The American public wants nothing to do with them.

The legal academy in the 80s wanted nothing to do for them.

There was no audience for them without literally spending decades building an audience for them.

You don't need to spend 20, 30 years and do millions and millions of dollars on creating an alternative ideas network for law professors to write an article about like women should have bodily autonomy.

You can just write that article and you can get it published in a normal law review.

You don't have to recruit and groom and train the random student to

get the position that women should not get the death penalty for having an abortion.

On the other hand, you do need a conservative network.

If you want to write an article seeking to overturn hundreds of years of jurisprudence and ending birthright citizenship

because of fake panics about so-called anchor babies, yeah, then you need some bullshit Capital University law review to publish your crappy piece that nobody takes seriously except Donald Trump and other members of the federal society.

Yeah, and Supreme Court justices.

Yeah.

Donald Trump and Clarence Thomas.

Yes.

The leaders of the conservative political movement.

Yeah, exactly.

But so as we're going through this, I think it's important to remember that, you know, when you think, well, how do we counter them?

We don't have to replicate everything they do because our ideas are not.

fucking politically radioactive like theirs are.

Right.

And we don't have to create an entire self-contained ecosystem to contain that radioactivity, to hide that radioactivity, to shield us from the effects of that radioactivity.

We started talking in the first episode of the series about how grievance is a mobilizing force within the Federalist Society, within the conservative legal movement.

They have a sense that liberals dominate the law, dominate politics, dominate our culture, and therefore the work of the Federalist Society and its allies are necessary and urgent, right?

In the beginning, this sort of made sense to a degree.

They were, in fact, outliers in law schools.

Their ideas were outliers in law schools and in legal academia.

But what's interesting about their sense of grievance is that it still persists today.

In late 2020, right after the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett, Sam Alito spoke to the Federalist Society's annual conference.

He complained about COVID restrictions.

He complained about a Washington state law that required pharmacies to provide Plan B, which which he claimed, quote, destroys an embryo after fertilization, which is not correct.

That's more like something that your uncle would share on Facebook.

Right.

He complained that people who opposed gay marriage are now labeled bigots, and he blamed Obergefell, the case legalizing gay marriage, for that outcome.

Again, This is all right after the six to three conservative supermajority was established, right?

Belito was more powerful than he has ever been.

All of these longtime conservative goals, like overturning Roe,

basically in the palm of his hands now.

Yeah.

And yet he's still complaining, still bitter.

If you look back, this is a theme among conservatives.

In 2015, Anthony Scalia said, quote, the whole time I have been on my court, it has been a liberal court.

What are you talking about, bro?

This is a court that decided Bush v.

Gore Gore

and just gave the presidency to a Republican.

Yeah.

Citizens United, right?

D.C.

v.

Heller, the case that created an individual right to own firearms.

Shelby County v.

Holder, where they gutted the Voting Rights Act.

Scalia thought of this as a liberal court.

It sort of boggles the mind.

Leonard Leo.

in 2022 described Catholicism as being under attack by, quote, vile and and immoral current-day barbarians, secularists, and bigots.

And he described certain elements of the left as the, quote, progressive Ku Klux Klan.

And you know who's heading up that secular attack on Catholicism?

Pope Francis.

I thought you were going to say devout Catholic Joe Biden, but that works too.

Also, in cahoots.

In cahoots.

Now, I mention this because you can look at like every component part of the Federalist society on its own and still not entirely understand how it's been so successful, right?

Like,

okay, you have network effects, and that's very important.

They are a very powerful thing.

Yeah.

You have elite money.

That's a very powerful thing, too.

But this is the secret sauce, right?

This myth.

that's prevalent in reactionary movements that the left is like always ascendant, always winning.

Back in the 80s, you could make a case that that had an element of truth, at least in the legal world.

But now it's just absurd, right?

They have bent American law to their will, and they still act like they're cornered, right?

And this serves two purposes.

First, it energizes them.

It gives them urgency at every level, right?

From the dark money billionaires to the students on campus.

Second, the belief that the left is like all-powerful and on the verge of upending their way of life, it creates a permission structure, right?

Because if the left is so dangerous, it gives them permission to be aggressive in their response, right?

You see this all the time.

That's right, that's right.

Everything's justified in self-defense, right?

Right.

Myths about voter fraud justify draconian voter restrictions, right?

Myths about indoctrinated children justify crackdowns on LGBT rights.

There was some really sharp discussion on a blue sky just about a week before we recorded this.

After this New York Times piece interviewed some Trump supporters at a rally, and one of them said, Trump is our David and our Goliath.

And people had a lot of trouble squaring that circle.

How could you be David and Goliath?

But the idea is that they view themselves as like God's chosen special

people and the underdogs under assault from the secular masses.

Yeah.

But also, like, because they're God's chosen special people, like powerful and righteous.

And it's in their framing, it's not at all incoherent.

Right.

Yeah.

And I think that's a good way to think about it.

Yeah.

You know, there's an Italian writer, Ignacio Solone.

I'm sure I'm pronouncing that wrong, who described fascism as a counter-revolution to a revolution that never happened.

That's great.

It's this sense among reactionaries

that things have gotten out of hand, right?

That's something that has motivated the Federalist Society from its very beginning.

And

all of these networks, all of this money, all of these ideas wouldn't have been generated if not for that sense of urgency that they have, that feeling that they are on the precipice of disaster if they don't act.

That's the heart of the Federalist Society's ideology.

That's why grievance and resentment and bitterness are so important to the Federalist Society and I think a huge part of their success.

Yeah.

So Vanessa A.

B., who again was a Federalist Society member at Harvard,

when we were talking to her, she shared with us a story.

that we wanted to share with you because we thought it was illustrative and sort of underlined some key things to remember about the Federalist Society.

We were at one of these annual conventions.

I don't remember if we were like in DC or outside the UVA campus or something.

All I know is I ended up in the back of a cab.

And in the front of the cab, my friend at the time, who was the president of FedSock, was like, we had all been drinking, so everyone is, you know, just loose lips.

And

he just started on going on this rant about how no fault divorce should be abolished and how it's immoral and this and that well you know when you throw a couple drinks back and you're just like you know about no fault divorce right doesn't that piss you off when you think about no fault divorce like what the fucking bullshit

and i was like wait are you joking you know i'm i literally just divorced a man like with no good reason the reason why was i didn't want to do the thing anymore and yeah and i I was like, how can you, how can you say that with me being your friend?

And also like, why should I stay in a marriage with a random person?

You know, and like you have no stakes in it.

And yet like, you should have a say on whether I stay or not.

And, you know, it's not like he really backed down, but I was just like shocked.

Right.

I think your story is actually a good example of why they dislike.

no-fault divorce.

You're exerting your autonomy.

You're thinking for yourself.

And that is weakening their position ever so slightly.

right now you're like a leftist author yeah

this is it's worst case scenario what a fucking disaster this guy knew exactly what he was doing yeah

we need to keep her under the thumb of her boring ex-husband

i love the idea of someone who like i don't know like you just get drunk and like your brain is like stripped down to its bare essentials and like you only have a few neurons firing and he's just like no fault divorce like right, like, that's the issue.

How is that in your head, dude?

Yeah.

So, that's who you have in the Federalist Society, right?

That's why you need the conservative legal network.

That's how all of this works is because people with these viewpoints get to be the president.

Harvard Law Federalist Society, one of the best-funded student organizations at Harvard Law.

This is who this structure selects for, right?

People who either believe noxious like this or at least will tolerate it right like vanessa is on her way out because of situations like this so the only women who last in the federal society are women who are fine hearing this right and the other thing is again to my earlier point this is why you need to spend decades and millions and millions of dollars for a network like this is because

in normal polite society, someone like that just gets told they're an asshole to shut the fuck up.

Right.

They don't get elevated to leadership and have their opinions published and circulated as important.

Yeah.

And, you know, remember that earlier I described the pipeline, right?

Academics formulate these conservative legal ideas.

Conservative lawyers take them to court.

Conservative judges make them into law, right?

That pipeline is an end run around polite society.

Right.

That pipeline is designed to get the ideas of assholes into American law.

Yeah.

We wanted to include that little anecdote because that was in something like 2011 or so.

That is before the Trumpian political moment has arrived, right?

And that was the president of the Harvard Federalist Society, maybe the most prestigious branch in the country.

The point is that this organization is and has been far to the right of the median American.

And what they do, generally speaking, is obscure how far to the right they are until the very last second.

Yes.

And I think that's an important thing to know about the Federalist Society because they do present themselves not really as moderate, but as restrained.

And they are not a restrained organization.

They are distinctly unrestrained.

And I think someone who feels like lecturing his fellow student about no-fault divorce at like 2 a.m.

in a cab somewhere when everyone's drunk.

Somebody who's supposed to be his friend.

Right.

Yes.

To me, I just think it's evocative.

Yes.

And if you're in a liberal law prof and you go to their events, you're doing that work for them.

Right.

You're doing that work of making them look more reasonable and moderate for you.

Right.

You are the maybe the sticky stuff in the plant that traps the rodent in the flower.

That's right.

Yeah.

That's right.

Or the bright color that attracts them.

This metaphor is really starting to sing.

Next week, we're going to talk about what they have wrought.

We're getting into the deets.

What the Federalist Society has accomplished, both in terms of the actual law and how they have changed the interpretation of the law.

Sort of a retrospective on the whirlwind of the federal society ripping through our judicial system and our law schools.

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Bye, everybody.

Five to four is presented by ProLog Projects.

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Leon Napok and Andrew Parsons provide editorial support.

Our researcher is Jonathan DeBruin, and this episode was fact-checked by Arielle Swedback.

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So, I guess, last question.

Did you meet Jeffrey Epstein?

No.

I've not met Jeffrey Epstein and I've never been on his plane.

Excellent.

Okay.

Good to get on the record.

We ask all of our guests.