Washington – In 1982, a year after Samuel Alito joined the Reagan administration, a handful of legal scholars gathered at Yale for the first meeting of the Federalist Society, a newly formed conservative legal group.
Now, taking stock of Alito’s almost certain confirmation Tuesday as the 110th justice of the Supreme Court, Spencer Abraham, former secretary of energy under President Bush and one of the society’s founders, said, “It would have been beyond our best expectations.”
For the conservative legal movement, nurtured by the Federalist Society and the Reagan administration, Alito’s likely ascent to the high court is a triumph 25 years in the making.
A movement that in 1982 sought only a haven from what its members considered the prevailing liberalism of the law schools and the federal courts has become a major force in the law. And with their likely victory in the Alito confirmation process, conservatives hope they may have at last begun to shift the balance of the Supreme Court in their direction on matters like abortion rights, school prayer, the death penalty and the limits on federal power.
That Alito marched steadily toward confirmation as the successor to Justice Sandra Day O’Connor reflects not only the strength of the Republican Senate majority but also more than a year of intensive behind-the-scenes efforts by the network of conservative lawyers that grew out of the Federalist Society.
They executed a plan laid out in February 2005 by a team of grassroots organizers, public-relations specialists and legal strategists. They assembled conservative lawyers to study the records of potential nominees.
Alito’s anticipated confirmation is also the culmination of a disciplined campaign begun by the Reagan administration to seed the lower federal judiciary with like-minded jurists who could reorient the federal courts toward their view of the original intent of the Constitution’s 18th-century authors – a philosophy that became the gospel of the Federalist Society and the emergent conservative legal movement.
Both Chief Justice John Roberts and Alito were among the young conservative lawyers attracted to the Reagan administration’s Justice Department.
“It is a Reagan personnel officer’s dream come true,” said Douglas Kmiec, a law professor at Pepperdine University who worked with Alito and Roberts in the Reagan administration. “These individuals have been in study and preparation for these roles all their professional lives.”