It seems a hundred years have passed since President Trump picked Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett to serve on the Supreme Court and started what was supposed to be the Great Conservative Years of the Trump Era. Long after the Donald left office, there was going to be a young gun block of Textualists and Originalists making the liberals cry in decision after decision, and even rolling back Roe v. Wade eventually. Finally, we owned the courts. How wrong we were.

It wasn’t Trump’s fault. He had done his part and turned over the process of selection to the conservative legal movement — and the Federalist Society in particular. Leonard Leo and the other law nerds were trusted to locate a reasonable facsimile of Antonin Scalia, or two, for the new president. This was exactly what Trump was always being blamed for not doing: relying on the experts. We wanted a short list of his judges, and he gave us one. And we were all happy.

Nobody among the conservative establishment wondered if the Federalist Society knew what it was doing. Was Gorsuch actually a libertarian with a soft soft for transgender employment discrimination cases and native Indian property rights? Would he, for instance, suddenly rule that half of Oklahoma was actually a Creek Indian reservation? Would he decide that the term “sex” found in legislation passed in 1964 actually covered sexual orientation and gender identity — which no lawmaker in 1964 would have ever countenanced — and enshrine the LBGT movement’s dearest wishes into law?

Of course not. Not only were these questions not asked, they were not even entertained. They were unthinkable. Gorsuch was considered one of the golden boys of the Federalist Society. Underneath all of that Textualism and Originalism we were assured that there was plenty of Conservatism, and even some Christianity. We were guaranteed that there was bedrock common sense hiding under that Harvard law degree. We were told the Federalist Society existed so that a mistake like David Souter (the infamous George H.W. Bush pick who became a turncoat and voted liberal for decades) would never happen again.

So you can imagine the astonishment and the anger now that Gorsuch has actually turned out to be another Souter. How could that happen? And what else has the Federalist Society got wrong? Let’s see: there’s John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh and even Amy Coney Barrett is not looking very good these days. So Leonard Leo at least got Samuel Alito right. That’s batting .200 on Supreme Court picks — which means the Federalist Society should be benched. You don’t need to fund an entire legal movement to strike out so many times.

https://emeralddb3.substack.com/p/how-the-federalist-society-betrayed