Young Federalist Society members spout 'radical new theories' at 'alarming' gathering: report

[turbinetree]

By Matthew Chapman
Published March 17, 2023

A Texas-based gathering of the right-wing legal group the Federalist Society saw members pushing "radical new theories" about election laws — and possibly secession from the United States, reported POLITICO on Friday.

The Federalist Society -- which is best known for training an army of conservative lawyers for jobs on the federal bench, where they have undermined everything from abortion rights to labor laws to the basic ability of the civil service to pass rules -- was long a champion of "judicial restraint," as it was founded in an era when the judiciary was far more liberal than it is today.

Now, wrote, Ian Ward, their gathering for the National Student Symposium in Austin — an event that brought out Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to give a speech, the tables have turned — and it's "alarmingly clear" that attendees are more interested in using judicial power to overrule liberal democracy itself.

https://www.rawstory.com/federalist-society-2659612468/

So now can this POS organization be called / classified as an terrorists organization.....

[dlk]

1. They are fascists at heart

It’s been clear for some time they don’t believe in democracy and will continue making inroads turning our country into an autocracy. After co/opting the Supreme Court, their march to remake our country into something very different continues. We are watching domestic terrorists in expensive suits

[turbinetree]

2. Being backed from jerks that donated $1.6 billion to achieve this BS.....

I think they are a terrorist organization.....and I lay this right at the feet of John Roberts and Citizens United ruling......

[dlk]

21. Dark money in politics has thoroughly corrupted the system

Until that changes, I’m afraid the corruption it buys will only increase.

[RAB910]

3. These fascist assholes want to turn America into a dictatorship

[Me.]

4. SEcession Is Looking Better And Better

[Rebl2]

14. Maybe

they should secede and then they get no help from the US government any longer for many things for example you forfeit your social security, medical benefits, have a tornado or some other natural disaster, no help from the United States.

[Artcatt]

18. We can have them as a protectorate for our security

[Celerity]

16. My theory of the case has held for years that Blue State secession movements are more perhaps more

likely than Red state ones, although it would still be a definite possibly of Red states doing it as well .

Let's posit that the RW christofash SCOTUS decides a case that makes foetal personhood the law of the land (thus, on a nationwide basis, ending almost all abortion).

If there is a Rethug POTUS in office, then we immediately come to a massive inflection point:

IF they send in federal agents or even use troops in Blue states to enforce that, you likely will have kinetic violence and massive Blue state secession movements will likely start up.

If the Rethug POTUS does not do that, and the Blue states ignore (as they very, very likely will) the new SCOTUS decision, you likely will have Red states start to do the same thing with SCOTUS-upheld laws THEY detest. Again chaos, kinetic violence, etc, likely ensues.

If we have a Dem POTUS then, the Blue states will likely NOT have troops/agents sent in, and the Blue states very likely will simply ignore the ruling, which leads us back to the Red states then ignoring the laws they hate. At that point, IF the Dem POTUS tries to stop that Red state recalcitrance via federal agents/troops, then you also will have massive kinetic violence and Red state secession movement spring to life.

Finally, the true (and extremely unlikely) wild card, wherein a DEM POTUS tries to bring the Blue states to heel via force, which will likely result in the same things (Blue state kinetic violence, Blue state secession movements, etc) that would occur had a Rethug POTUS done the same thing.

Foetal personhood is just one example where the SCOTUS could kick these nightmare possible scenarios all off.

[Initech]

19. Pretty sure Putin's goal is to breakup and destabalize the US.

Which would allow him to further his goal of conquering Europe. Secession would be a massive aid in helping his plan to succeed.

[mountain grammy]

5. A very clear and very present danger

to all of us..

[dalton99a]

6. Federalist Society membership should be treated like Nazi or KKK membership.

It is a gang of anti-American terrorists in black robes

[SheltieLover]

7. Should be classified as a terrorist organization!

[turbinetree]

8. Agreed ........got my vote....

[SheltieLover]

10. Should have been declared as such from the beginning of the USA

They've always hated democracy.

[Wednesdays]

9. Yeah, right. Go ahead and secede

That worked out so well the last time in 1861.

[SheltieLover]

11. And all those qpuke voters canmot connect the dots

Leaving the USA means no gobmint check the majority depends upon.

[OMGWTF]

17. These Red "Taker" States can leave. For us in the Blue states, it is like a bad marriage.

Red states treat us like garbage, are unappreciative of anything we do for them, and are trying to undo whatever progress the Blue states have made, despite the fact that most of them couldn't survive without that sweet Blue state money. Fuck them. Fuck them all. These assholes are irredeemable. I want a divorce! I've wanted one for a long time.

[NowsTheTime]

30. Some Dem's can't pick up and move so easily....when I moved to Texas Ann Richards was Gov.

[Initech]

12. Fuck the Federalist Society!

[jayschool2013]

13. Link to the real reporters' work

In Politico.

Let's make sure real reporters are getting some clicks and not just the aggregators.

[bronxiteforever]

15. With apologies to Black Sabbath

Lawyers gathered in their masses
Just like witches at black masses
Evil minds that plot destruction
Sorcerer of death's construction

[iscooterliberally]

20. They should be called "The FederaLIARist Society". n/t

[Caliman73]

22. "Judicial Restraint"

Like so many other things right wingers do when they play with words, this idea of "judicial restraint" was always thinly veiled lies. What right wingers mean by "judicial restraint" is that when judges want to interpret the law as actually applying equitably to all, they need to retrain themselves because the law is meant to uphold the power structures as is in Conservative worldview.

We need to get it through our heads that the Conservative worldview is at the end of the day, not compatible with democracy. It is a top down, hierarchical worldview, where "the best" in society are in charge. Remember that it was the historical descendant of Monarchical and Aristocratic rule.

[keep_left]

23. Whatever happened to Scalia-style "constitutional originalism" and "strict constructionism"?

What about "judicial restraint"? None of this sounds like legal conservatism to me.

And what are we to make of this?

Later on in the same panel, Joel Alicea, a law professor at the Catholic University of America, diagnosed the apparent threats facing American democracy today — political violence, abuses of governmental power, and attempted election subversion, to name a few — as symptoms of a deeper malaise, and threw in a jab at transgender rights, saying, “At this point in our society, we can’t even agree whether somebody is a man or a woman.” Alicea advised the attendees to embrace conversion rather than coercion, but in the question-and-answer session after the panel, an audience member proposed a third option: a full-scale national divorce, of the sort recently proposed by Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.

This is just the college-educated version of the hee-haw trans-and-gay-bashing abusiveness seen daily in the internet cesspools of Reddit/4Chan/8Chan/whatever-the-hell-they-call-it-now. It's the more "respectable" fainting-couch version: "oh, dear, what can we do about the gays, they can't even agree about what's male or female", which is very shortly followed up with "we need to go back to the days when men were men: not the 1950s--the 1350s".

I'm not at all surprised to see this crap coming from a Catholic U law professor. Catholic U ceased quite some time ago to be a bastion of the more progressive wing of the Church when it began accepting funding from the usual billionaire regressives. First it was the business school, but apparently the rot has now spread into the law school as well. It should be noted that this kind of talk (as exhibited here by Alicea) is also very popular in radtrad Catholic media like Relevant Radio, the National Catholic Register, and EWTN. They're obsessed with "gays, trans, and God", and now spend even more time on that than they do abortion, particularly now that they achieved the repeal of Roe that they sought for decades.

[cynical_idealist]

24. Radical regressives

I think that's an appropriate term to replace "conservative"

[jaxexpat]

25. This was not a sudden result of immediacy.

The right's acquisition of "respectability" and influence in the court system has been an inexorable and glacial evolution. The general population remains largely unadvised and uninformed about the movement. This lack of awareness has allowed the right to assume the powers they now enjoy as if they'd been won through a secret, invisible and sudden coup.

Our nation suffers from an information shortage but people have been told so many times they live in the "information age" it is like a storm which has come without forewarning. Some have only recently taken their noses from their "smart" phones long enough to even notice.

[tornado34jh]

26. I think there are two problems

First, as far as I know, we don't really have a domestic terrorism law compared to say a foreign terrorist group. Without really putting one on the books, it's really hard to call a group one. Second, I am not sure what the process is to call one, but I will guarantee you they will be screaming they are being persecuted. We don't really have the willpower to call right-wing groups as terrorists as opposed to say Islamic groups. I have said before that we are sometimes too selective in calling groups terrorist organizations.

[applegrove]

28. And this:

By IAN WARD

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/03/17/federalist-society-democracy-opinion-00087270

03/17/2023 04:30 AM

"SNIP.......

The symposium, however, mirrored CPAC’s ambivalent assessment of the future of American democracy — even if that ambivalence was expressed in slightly more elevated terms. 

To those who have followed the Federalist Society closely since its triumphs at the Supreme Court last year, the symposium’s focus on law and democracy may hardly seem incidental. Since its founding in 1982, the Federalist Society has championed “judicial restraint,” the notion that judges should limit their roles to interpreting the law as written, leaving the actual business of lawmaking to democratically elected legislatures. 

That approach made sense for conservatives when they still saw the federal judiciary as a liberal force dragging the country to the left. But now that conservatives have secured a solid majority on the Supreme Court — and voters in several red states have soundly rejected hard-line positions on abortion — a spirited debate is underway within the Federalist Society about the wisdom of deferring to democratic majorities as a matter of principle.


........SNIP"

[NowsTheTime]

29. "That's the Ticket"....Just re-define "Democracy" like so many other "Alternate Facts"

"What democracy does not mean, Lowenstein argued, was 'plebiscitary democracy,' or simple rule by democratic majorities. Citing the Federalist Papers — the namesake of the Federalist Society — Lowenstein suggested that governance based on simple mathematical majorities would enable 'tyrannical domination of the minority by the majority.'"