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Conservative Lawyers, Long Promoters Of Racist Policies, Bemoan Loss Of Dog Whistle

Breakaway FedSoc group wants to go back to pretending we don't know what they're about.

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George T. Conway III

The Federalist Society’s annual convention is this week, and the meeting comes at a strange time for the organization. Usually, FedSoc is able to operate in relative anonymity, quietly working to destroy the equal protection rights of women and minorities, without taking the heat for their efforts visited upon people who post Pepe the Frog memes.

Nobody associated with FedSoc ever loses their job or faces any real consequences for supporting the exact same policies and legal theories as those who wave around Tiki torches. One arch-conservative law professor, Glenn Reynolds, advocated running over protesters with his car for the crime of blocking traffic. Heather Heyer is dead and James Alex Fields awaits trial on first-degree murder charges, but Reynolds still has a job, of course. And FedSoc still features him.

The Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, at least momentarily, exposed FedSoc for what it is, to an audience beyond the people who follow me on Twitter. Kavanaugh dropped the niceties and went all in on the zero-sum partisanship that his FedSoc benefactors have always wanted. It was angry, ugly, misogynist, and unapologetically white and privileged.

There is no dog whistle left for FedSoc. They can’t hide their attacks on minorities and women under the guise of “federalism” and “states’ rights,” as John C. Calhoun once did. The Federalist Society works for the advancement of white male supremacy through the limitation of Constitutional principles designed to protect the rights of non-white men, and women. Their efforts have directly resulted in the voter suppression of non-whites, the proliferation of guns and the human destruction they cause, the environmental damage of deregulation (and the human destruction the environment causes when there’s a hurricane or a forest fire), and the racist immigration policies of the current administration.

Most of these FedSoc types don’t care that their actual policies have been exposed as the racist, misogynist trash progressive lawyers have always known them to be. FedSoc is winning. With the successful obstruction of Merrick Garland and, now, the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh, FedSoc is so close to completing a generations-long goal of returning America to a near-antebellum state. These people can taste reducing women to the state of incubators with mouthparts. They can see the future minorities who are not allowed to go to school around their white children. They are engorged by the prospect of reading the 14th Amendment out of the Constitution, as their forefathers so effectively did to the 15th Amendment.

But these FedSoc victories were not won by FedSoc. They were brought to them by Donald Trump, a man with no ideological principles beyond his own narcissism. In exchange for Trump’s willingness to legally bind the country to FedSoc’s will, conservatives have had to accept Trump’s direct attacks on the rule of law itself.

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It is in that context that the myth of George Conway is being created. Conway, clearly, does not give a hot damn about Trump’s fusillade attack on minorities and women. He is married to one of the chief pushers of Trump’s racist and sexist agenda, Kellyanne Conway. Everybody likes to imagine about the personal relationship between the two. I do not imagine it is all that interesting. Like most marriages, I assume they agree on the big things — in this case that it’s okay to support the policies of white supremacy — but are different people and thus have different ways of achieving their central aims. Kellyanne thinks that lies and deceit are the effective tools in the arsenal of the president. George thinks that we must preserve a shared sense of reality and a core legal structure if the reassertion of white male patriarchy is to have a lasting effect.

George’s project is hitting a crescendo with the formation of a “breakaway” group of conservative lawyers, on the eve of the FedSoc annual meeting. They’re calling themselves “Checks and Balances.” From the New York Times:

“We believe in the rule of law, the power of truth, the independence of the criminal justice system, the imperative of individual rights and the necessity of civil discourse,” the group said in a statement. “We believe these principles apply regardless of the party or persons in power.”

The “rule of law” sounds innocuous, until you remember that these are the same people who won’t lift a pen to prevent a person who looks like me from being shot dead in the street by a police officer for the crime of having a broken taillight. Their power of truth does not extend to telling the truth about why gun violence is so much worse in this country than in other industrialized nations (hint: it’s because of our barbaric interpretation of the Second Amendment). Their support for “individual rights” does not extend to gays and lesbians.

Oh, but they do want “civil discourse.” They’re not lying about that. Every time a group of students protests one of these FedSoc types because they recognize the organization for what it is, these people become so very concerned with civil discourse that they’re willing to strip protesters of their First Amendment rights.

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The new group’s members say their goal is not to criticize the Federalist Society but to encourage debate about some of the Trump administration’s policies and actions. “This is not a separate organization,” Professor [Jonathan H. Adler] said. “This is not a rump group. This is not a disavowal.”

Of course. Of course these people are not “disavowing” a damn thing. They just want the president to sound nicer when he does their bidding.

Conway says that the group is there to combat the “perception” that conservatives have “essentially sold their souls for judges and regulatory reform.” My perception is that you cannot sell what you never had.

The Federalist Society is living in exactly the world they’ve always wanted to. Their problem is that people are noticing exactly how terrible their world is for the rest of us. Now that they’ve infused the law with their racist and sexist theories, they would see respect for the law restored.

It’s funny, one of the quiet strengths of the FedSoc on law school campuses is that their events are usually well catered. Law students are broke and hungry and FedSoc events — funded as they are by the Republican donor class — always have some of the best spreads on campus. People go for the food, and stay for the indoctrination.

Conway has become the media version of that. People, especially people in the media, are so desperate to find some conservative lawyer who isn’t a complete loon that they’ll fawn over anything Conway says as if it’s a balanced, moderate approach to a legal issue. The fact that he’s “at odds” with his own wife fits the narrative perfectly.

I will not be eating the poison that Conway and FedSoc are selling. I didn’t in law school, I’ll be damned if I start now. Wake me up one when of these guys “disavows” the organization’s racist agenda. I’ll make my own damn lobster roll until then.

Conservative Lawyers Say Trump Has Undermined the Rule of Law [New York Times]

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