This Politico article by Michael Kruse on the formation of the Federalist Society in 1982 is a curious piece. It conveys what I assume are the general facts—that a bunch of far-flung conservative law professors, judges, and law students met together at Yale in order to share ideas and try to get more conservatives into the legal and judicial fields—while at the same time subtly insinuating that such a meeting and such a plan was something vaguely underhanded and not altogether cricket.

It’s a long article, and only some way into the piece does it mention the reality that led to this meeting, which is that by 1982 liberals almost completely dominated the legal profession:

In the fall of 1980, Calabresi would recall in an interview with the ABA Journal, he was struck by what happened when the 88 members of his first-year class at Yale Law were asked whether they had voted for Reagan: Only two people raised their hands…

It had been this way for decades. “The law schools were exceedingly one-sided,” McConnell, the Stanford law professor, told me. Being a conservative then at a college or a law school, Scalia later said to biographer Joan Biskupic, made one feel “isolated, lonely … like a weirdo.”…

“It is an intellectual debate,” Bork said in his talk [at that initial meeting in 1982].

And at that point, it was one they were losing. “Conservatives have simply been outgunned at the federal level for half a century,” Scalia said.

“When liberals are in power,” he added, “they do not shrink from using the federal structure of what they consider to be sound governmental goals.”

The solution, according to Blackwell, the veteran organizer of young conservatives? “Study how to win,” he told the symposium audience.

In other words, the relentless liberal/left Gramscian march through the legal profession and the judiciary, that had taken hold during the administration of FDR fifty years earlier, had succeeded in completely dominating those fields, so much so that this 1982 get-together (of only about 200 people, and that included students) was one of the very few times a group of conservative law scholars had assembled in any significant numbers.

And what did they do? They decided to use a more practical approach than their previous “Sir Galahad theory: ‘I shall win because my heart is pure.’” They decided to organize their geographically-dispersed forces and focus on winning.

What a novelty for the right in the legal profession. Till then, the technique had been owned by the left.

However, the fact that they have succeeded to a certain degree in transforming the Supreme Court by getting many of their picks on it has been dependent on the election of GOP presidents to nominate them and also on a GOP Senate (or at least one with fairly moderate Democrats) to approve them. If that had not happened, the Federalist Society would have been spinning its wheels as far as SCOTUS justices and other federal judges are concerned.

The election and re-election of Barack Obama undermined whatever inroads the conservatives had made (the following was written shortly before the inauguration of President Trump):

Republicans cannot wait to begin dismantling President Barack Obama’s accomplishments, but there’s one thing they can’t undo, even with full control of Congress and the White House: his judicial legacy.

Obama will leave office with 329 of his judicial nominees confirmed to lifetime posts on federal courts. That includes two U.S. Supreme Court justices and four judges on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, the two most powerful courts in the nation. Because of Obama, Democratic appointees now have a 7-4 advantage on the D.C. panel, and those judges will play a major role in deciding cases during the Trump administration related to environmental regulations, health care, national security, consumer protections and challenges to executive orders.

Obama also tilted the partisan makeup of circuit courts. Nine of the country’s 13 appeals courts now have majority Democratic appointees, compared with just one when he took office in 2009.

The Politico article states that Trump’s SCOTUS nominees were made on the recommendation of the Federalist Society. The author writes that Trump “subcontract[ed] this task to the Federalist Society, which had performed this duty for previous Republican presidents but never so explicitly.” Would the left have preferred Trump to have drawn the nominees’ names out of a hat? Winged it and found them on his own? Perhaps; then they could have criticized him all the more. Presidents ordinarily get advice from legal experts, and Trump did the same. The only reason it was more explicit in this case was that Trump made a point of publishing his picks before the election, in order to burnish his previously non-existent conservative credentials, and the MSM made a big deal of that process as well.

Kruse goes on to say that “the architects of the Federalist Society have attained a level of influence on the courts they never could have imagined, in a way they never could have envisioned.” Well, I doubt that they—or anyone else except Trump—envisioned Trump as the mechanism by which they would increase their influence, but they certainly did imagine that they could ultimately come back, at least to a certain extent, from the relative nadir of their influence at the time of their formation as a formal group.

How far does their influence extend? Further than liberals and the left would like it to, because liberals and the left seem to think that it is their own right to dominate the legal profession and judiciary almost entirely. Anything else is considered a usurpation. If my quite elite law school alma mater is any indication (I get regular mailings of their magazine which updates me on happenings there), the domination of the faculty and student body by liberals and the left is still nearly complete.

[NOTE: The comments to that Politico article are quite instructive. Just looking at some of the first few right now, I see these sorts of criticisms:

What did you expect from a bunch of ” self entitled kids” with no doubt fathers who were already right wing money grabbers…

The issue is that the GOP to stack the Supreme Court is allowing a tainted President to appoint a nominee who may not have the authority to do so.

An organization whose explicit goal is to politicize the federal judiciary should be considered subversive. Membership in the Federalist Society should disqualify would-be nominees to the bench.

what happened? a few rich little pricks living off mommy and daddys $ decided to never help anyone again but themselves.

So, basically, let’s make sure only the rights and whims of the white and wealthy are counted in 2018 by enshrining as perfect a document created when only the white and wealthy counted. That about it?

A group of Selfish sexist Rich or wannabe Racist AynRand Libertarians who Sold their Souls for money to Tea Bag MILLIONAIRE Fascist Republicans !!! Scumbag Dumbo TRUMPO is GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY LOCK THEM ALL UP !!! Scumbag Dumbo TRUMPO is a LYING Sexist BIRTHER Racist piece of Trash & a Tax CHEATING Wife CHEAT Business CHEATER Draft Dodger Chicken-Hawk COWARD !! LOCK HIM UP & his Band of BreitFART Fascist Republicans !!! REMEMBER this scumbag Dumbo TRUMPO opened CONCENTRATION CAMPS for Children !!!…

Etc., etc., etc..]