MASTER PLAN, Ep 7: The Federalist Society Strikes Back

In the 1990s and 2000s, a series of court rulings spotlighted the trend of Republican-appointed justices periodically siding with liberals on everything from abortion to civil rights to campaign finance. But when George W. Bush was installed as president, the master planners knew they had a rare chance to try to permanently change the game.

In the first of two episodes about the creation of the Roberts Court, we use never-before-reported internal emails to expose how the master planners plotted to install new judges who would be guaranteed to deliver the rulings they wanted. 

The political environment of the early Bush era provided master planners with a pivotal opportunity to mobilize the legal machine they had been building since the Powell Memo era. Their machine had started small: just a handful of student clubs at law schools around the country. But by 2000, the Federalist Society had become the nation’s most powerful network of conservative lawyers. 

The group had allies working within the Bush White House and set about installing their most loyal acolytes in lower-level federal courts, where they could issue conservative rulings and potentially be on a glidepath to the Supreme Court. One of their first and most prized lower-court judicial nominees was a polite, soft-spoken lawyer who depicted himself as an impartial umpire — but who master planners saw as their ideological Terminator.