Are You Now... a Member of The Federalist Society?

It would be comical if it weren’t so mean-spirited and sad. Liberals are all worked up about
whether Judge Roberts has been a member of the Federalist Society, a group of conservative and
libertarian lawyers that promotes the idea of a “dead” constitution. The society advocates for the idea
that the consitution means what it says it means and
what the founders said it meant, and can only be amended by the constitutional amendment process and
not by the judicial amendment process.

Liberals are scandalized by the Federalist Society because they understand that it stands for a
program that would unwind 70 years of liberal Supreme Court jurisprudence
that started with a radical expansion of the power of the federal government in the 1930s with a
radical interpretation of the interstate commerce clause.

But because conservatives are relentless rather than ruthless they have not reacted to the
McCarthyesque tone of liberal inquisition: Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Federalist
Society? When used in the 1940s to probe liberal membership in the Communist Party of the United States it was
a question that provoked liberals to decades of frothing outrage.
That was a time when there really were liberals in the federal government who were
spying for the Soviet Union. So
Bob Tyrrell
laughs at the liberal obsession with secret handshakes and secret societies, and
Roger Pilon
implores Republicans not to apologize for the Federalist Society but to stand
proudly for open advocacy of ideas like the rule of law and against the “living” constitutions that
allows liberal Supreme Court justices to bend the constitution like a pretzel.

Liberals are ruthless;
conservatives are relentless.
The way to understand the ruthlessness of liberal political tactics is to understand that they
are retreating. The savage attacks are the desperate actions of a rear guard, protecting the
main liberal army from disintegration. There is always a razor’s edge between orderly retreat and
the sauve qui peut (hmm, that’s French for “every man for himself”) of an utter rout. And you never know when we
might reach the tipping point.