Conservatives Have Been Packing the Courts for Years

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"Fighting back now means recognizing that conservatives have been playing a two-faced game for decades. They claimed to believe in an objective, neutral judiciary, but they were working very hard to radicalize the courts at the same time."

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Conservatives Have Been Packing the Courts for Years
Read the latest by Rakim Brooks.
9:08 AM · Aug 19, 2022

https://www.democracydocket.com/news/conservatives-have-been-packing-the-courts-for-years/

Public support for the U.S. Supreme Court is at an all-time low. This dismal polling follows a Court term that started with allowing Texas’ Senate Bill 8 to remain law so that public citizens could police each other’s abortions and ended with completely overturning Roe v. Wade, among other radical conservative decisions. In so many areas of law, the Court is headed in a direction completely out of step with the vast majority of Americans.

The question for the moment is: How did we get here?

Many are noticing for the first time just how politicized our courts are, but the reality is that conservatives have been laying this groundwork for over half a century. In 1971, Justice Lewis Powell authored the now legendary Powell Memo. The memo, which is really more of a treatise for conservative takeover, reads like it could have been written yesterday. It is complete with invocations against liberal “Marxists” and “Communists,” a defense of “western society” and a threat that the media, universities and racial minorities are teaming up to defeat big business. Calling for the kind of corporate influence over government that the Koch brothers would later perfect, the memo spoke of the need to better infiltrate aspects of society and secure power to protect the wealthy and powerful. It specifically highlighted a “neglected opportunity in the courts” and addressed the need for conservatives to do better in exploiting judicial action.

A decade later, in 1982, youthful Reagan enthusiasts took up that opportunity and led the charge to found the Federalist Society (FedSoc). From the start, despite its academic pretensions, FedSoc had an insurgent mission: to turn back the perceived excesses of Chief Justice Earl Warren’s Court on issues of race, religion and criminal procedure. These young lawyers wanted to be to the courts and justice system what President Ronald Reagan had been to the New Deal and Great Society — a sledgehammer.

Their movement began with fits and starts. While Reagan and his chief counselor Edwin Meese were successful in stacking the federal courts with judges like Alex Kozinski and justices like Antonin Scalia, there had been significant failures. Most significantly, in 1987, Democrats had blocked the Supreme Court nomination of Reagan nominee Robert Bork. Bork was a fierce opponent of civil rights — and a founding advisor of one of the first FedSoc chapters.

*snip*