While Right-Wing Packed the Courts, Progressives Climbed Ladders
Ruthless, Mediocre People Leading Campaigns to Dull the Mind
Democratic Presidents since Jimmy Carter squandered opportunity to fill the U.S. court system with left-leaning and progressive judges and justices.
Carter, Bill Clinton two times, and Barack Obama, two-terms, all missed on packing the U.S. courts with leftist and progressive judges because of incompetence, and a united, engaged, and well-monied right-wing base bent on making the U.S. courts beholden to right-wing judges and legal ideologies.
For eight years I worked in the communications setup, a small one, at the American Constitution Society or ACS, which was launched in 2001, way late, to answer the concerted and well-funded effort on the Right that was already shaping the U.S. court system to the great detriment of humanity.
The right-wing effort to pack the U.S. court system with capitalists, social conservatives, and authoritarian right-wingers got under way in the 1960s picked up steam during the Nixon and two Ronald Reagan administrations. Reagan’s attorney general Edwin Meese and other attorneys in the Justice Department were instrumental in concocting legal philosophy and framework for tilting U.S. court far rightward.
Out of Meese and his attorneys’ brainstorming with fawning law students, who believed U.S. law schools were infested with leftist professors, was born the Federalist Society a little-known Washington, D.C. group, which would become a financial powerhouse and super powerful lobbying group vetting and placing through Presidents Reagan, Bushes, and Trump, conservative and right-wing judges on federal benches from coast to coast.
The Federalist Society or Fed Soc as its called in D.C. also gave the nation U.S. Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Sam Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh for example. All those justices were Federalist Society members before joining the federal bench. They are the justices who along with Amy Coney Barrett, another Fed Soc alum, invalidated Roe v. Wade, likely the biggest goal of the right-wing effort to take over the U.S. judicial system and U.S. law schools.
The American Constitution Society or ACS was founded by then a Georgetown law professor who later become a state court judge in Massachusetts. The Georgetown prof was not much of visionary beyond, “We need a counterpart to the Federalist Society.”
He set up ACS to mirror Fed Soc, but also saddled ACS with old-school bylaws that kept it from lobbying for judges or making public statements supporting people for judgeships, which did not help the organization raise money or galvanize people around a progressive fight for the court system.
Instead ACS for the biggest portion of its existence has relied on white papers, and Washington, D.C. based legal and policy discussions, including an annual conference, to push for progressive courts. The whole messaging around issues briefs or white papers and discussions among super wealthy attorneys and neoliberal law professors was tragically dull. What could a communications hack do though with boring issue briefs and even duller discussions among well-off attorneys. That kind of elite nonsense might work for the Fed Soc, but it disastrous for ACS, which remains a middling $5m effort compared to Fed Soc’s more than $24m haul.
To this day ACS remains in the shadow of Fed Soc at all levels. During my stay at ACS, I worked with Caroline Fredrickson, now a vaunted visiting law prof at Georgetown, of course.
During Fredrickson’s time at ACS she had little interest in the heavy lifting of transforming ACS into an org that could fundraise and compete with Fed Soc, choosing instead to build her own portfolio for continued ladder-climbing. Caroline came to ACS from the Washington, D.C. office of the ACLU, where she lasted less than three-years and terrorized the small staff.
Fredrickson sought to do the same at ACS, pitting departments and staff against one another while gaining more power for herself. In her third year at ACS she worked on a book with legal students from Columbia Law School, Caroline’s alma matter, and the neoliberal New York City outfit Demos, which claims to be advocate for a progressive democracy. Caroline’s book, “Under The Buss,” a 200-some-page dry missive on inequality in the U.S. work force, would help her climb to the ivory towers of Georgetown, where she no doubt puts her few students to sleep or makes them cry.
Fredrickson’s predecessor at ACS is retired Senator Russ Feingold, who just this year also published a book about U.S. democracy or something near that. Apparently, ACS knows its spot well — a place for neoliberals to build their portfolio or start families. But fighting Fed Soc? No, that is not ACS. It is not built for that, and no transformation is in sight.
There remains no united and muscular effort to fight the Right’s takeover of the U.S. court system.
