Federalist Society Fraud

Hey, Federalist Society: I got your 'Federalist' right here https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/6/25/2106429/-Hey-Federalist-Society-I-got-your-Federalist-right-here?pm_campaign=blog&pm_medium=rss&pm_source=main Dartagnan Community Saturday June 25, 2022 · 5:36 PM PDT Recommend 544 Share Tweet217 Comments 217 New WASHINGTON, DC - SEPTEMBER 27: Judge Brett Kavanaugh testifies to the Senate Judiciary Committee during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill September 27, 2018 in Washington, DC. Kavanaugh was called back to testify about claims by Christine Blasey Ford, who has accused him of sexually assaulting her during a party in 1982 when they were high school students in suburban Maryland. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images) Brett Kavanaugh, political operative and Federalist Society tool, now on the U.S. Supreme Court RSS PUBLISHED TO Dartagnan Community Contributors Team Daily Kos TAGS Conservatives Constitution FederalistSociety Recommended RoevWade SupremeCout Bruen Share this article The right-wing “Federalist Society” is one of the most colossal scams ever perpetrated on the American people. An organization born of disgruntled right-wing extremists with Yale law degrees, apparently unhappy with the idea that people of a different class or skin color might enjoy the same privileges as their mommies and daddies who paid for their pricey educations, the society grooms its fellow malcontents from tony and less-tony law schools, feeding them a contrived “jurisprudence” that just happens to fulfill every whim of its (mostly fossil fuel-oriented) deep-pocket donors. Then it churns them through its think tanks and legislators until they can pop out untrammeled, like a legal abomination, into the welcoming arms of a Republican-dominated judiciary committee for automatic elevation to our federal courts. Even their name is a crock. These people aren’t Federalists. Federalists—as in James Madison, for example—supported a strong central government in order to unify the country. These pretenders of the “Federalist Society” have, from the 1980s onward, preached the doctrine of “state’s rights,” because they found that when the federal government did things that benefitted the American people as a whole—such as environmental or workers’ protection, for example—well, it just didn’t sit too well with the people writing their paychecks (That is the very definition of an Anti-Federalist, but I guess that name just didn’t sit right with their donors). But you don’t have to take it from me. Let’s see what another “Federalist” had to say about the massive and probably irreparable damage currently being wreaked by people appointed to the Supreme Court in his and his 18th century colleagues’ names. As explained by Max Boot, writing for The Washington Post, the real “Federalists” were completely against everything that the current Supreme Court—with its majority installed by the “Federalist Society”—happens to embody and stand for: In Federalist No. 22, Alexander Hamilton warned that giving small states like Rhode Island or Delaware “equal weight in the scale of power” with large states like “Massachusetts, or Connecticut, or New York” violated the precepts of “justice” and “common-sense.” “The larger States would after a while revolt from the idea of receiving the law from the smaller,” he predicted, arguing that such a system contradicts “the fundamental maxim of republican government, which requires that the sense of the majority should prevail.” As it turns out, Hamilton was absolutely right. Except he couldn’t imagine sparsely populated states like “Wyoming,” “Idaho,” or “North Dakota” exercising their will over the millions of people in the (reality-based) real American “heartland”—that is, those who lived in or adjacent to the country’s largest population centers. Hamilton’s nightmare has become the reality of 21st-century America. We are living under minoritarian tyranny, with smaller states imposing their views on the larger through their disproportionate sway in the Senate and the electoral college — and therefore on the Supreme Court. To take but one example: Twenty-one states with fewer total people than California have 42 Senate seats. This undemocratic, unjust system has produced the new Supreme Court rulings on gun control and abortion. As Boot points out, the American people by large majorities want some semblance of control over automatic and semi-automatic firearms. The American people want abortion to be available to those who become pregnant. They’ve wanted these things for a long time. But these “Federalists” on the Supreme Court have decided for us that whatever the public wants is less important than the people who put them into power, even if those people represented a palpable minority of Americans. That’s your “Federalism,” twisted into knots by the modern Republican Party. The following point has been stated many times, but it bears emphasizing: This is not the way the founders of this country believed things should be done. In fact they are probably rolling over in their graves at the way their legacy has been corrupted. Neither Madison nor Hamilton would have ever countenanced rule by a minority of the population, which is exactly the outcome we have with the current Supreme Court, a creature of the so-called “Federalist Society.” As Boot writes: So, if the Supreme Court is going to be a forum for legislating, shouldn’t it respect the views of two-thirds of the country? But our perverse political system has allowed a militant, right-wing minority to hijack the law. As an Economist correspondent points out, “5 of the 6 conservative Supreme Court justices were appointed by a Republican Senate majority that won fewer votes than the Democrats” and “3 of the 6 were nominated by a president who also won a minority of the popular vote.” It’s bad enough that these creeps and fanatics owe their positions to the fossil fuel industry and the white evangelical right, a population that does not represent any semblance of what America actually is. But it’s doubly atrocious when they try to claim some mantle of historical authenticity. They have none. They’re just a group of extremists who found themselves in the right place at the right time, and found a whole lot of right-wing money to back them up.