[Mb-civic] CRUCIAL...

[Jim Burns]

You can be outraged, or a little scared, or start innovating ideas on
how the more positive-thinking folks in this country, can similarly
mobilize. The good-hearted moderates, still, by far, are the majority in
our home.

Could you imagine how even more remarkable our nation might be, today,
if JFK's "best and the brightest," had insured a judicial, social,
scientific and other infra-structure, for two decades down the line?

Time again, to begin dreaming, and plan!

Jim Burns
 
"In Alito, G.O.P. Reaps Harvest Planted in '82"  
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
Published: January 30, 2006

Last February, as rumors swirled about the failing health of Chief
Justice William H. Rehnquist, a team of conservative grass-roots
organizers, public relations specialists and legal strategists met to
prepare a battle plan to ensure any vacancies were filled by like-minded
jurists.

The team recruited conservative lawyers to study the records of 18
potential nominees — including Judges John G. Roberts Jr. and Samuel
A. Alito Jr. — and trained more than three dozen lawyers across the
country to respond to news reports on the president's eventual pick. 

"We boxed them in," one lawyer present during the strategy meetings said
with pride in an interview over the weekend. This lawyer and others
present who described the meeting were granted anonymity because the
meetings were confidential and because the team had told its allies not
to exult publicly until the confirmation vote was cast.

Now, on the eve of what is expected to be the Senate confirmation of
Judge Alito to the Supreme Court, coming four months after Chief Justice
Roberts was installed, those planners stand on the brink of a watershed
for the conservative movement.

In 1982, the year after Mr. Alito first joined the Reagan
administration, that movement was little more than the handful of legal
scholars who gathered at Yale for the first meeting of the Federalist
Society, a newly formed conservative legal group. 

Judge Alito's ascent to join Chief Justice Roberts on the court "would
have been beyond our best expectations," said Spencer Abraham, one of
the society's founders, a former secretary of energy under President
Bush and now the chairman of the Committee for Justice, one of many
conservative organizations set up to support judicial nominees.

He added, "I don't think we would have put a lot of money on it in a
friendly wager."

Judge Alito's 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 a view of the Constitution much closer to its 18th-century
authors' intent, including a much less expansive view of its application
to individual rights and federal power. It was a philosophy promulgated
by Edwin Meese III, attorney general in the Reagan administration, that
became the gospel of the Federalist Society and the nascent conservative
legal movement.

Both Mr. Roberts and Mr. Alito were among the cadre of young
conservative lawyers attracted to the Reagan administration's Justice
Department. And both advanced to the pool of promising young jurists
whom strategists like C. Boyden Gray, White House counsel in the first
Bush administration and an adviser to the current White House, sought to
place throughout the federal judiciary to groom for the highest court.

"It is a Reagan personnel officer's dream come true," said Douglas W.
Kmiec, a law professor at Pepperdine University who worked with Mr.
Alito and Mr. Roberts in the Reagan administration. "It is a graduation.
These individuals have been in study and preparation for these roles all
their professional lives."

As each progressed in legal stature, others were laying the
infrastructure of the movement. After the 1987 defeat of the Supreme
Court nomination of Judge Robert H. Bork conservatives vowed to build a
counterweight to the liberal forces that had mobilized to stop him. 

With grants from major conservative donors like the John M. Olin
Foundation, the Federalist Society functioned as a kind of shadow
conservative bar association, planting chapters in law schools around
the country that served as a pipeline to prestigious judicial
clerkships. 

During their narrow and politically costly victory in the 1991
confirmation of Justice Clarence Thomas, the Federalist Society lawyers
forged new ties with the increasingly sophisticated network of
grass-roots conservative Christian groups like Focus on the Family in
Colorado Springs and the American Family Association in Tupelo, Miss.
Many conservative Christian pastors and broadcasters had railed for
decades against Supreme Court decisions that outlawed school prayer and
endorsed abortion rights.

During the Clinton administration, Federalist Society members and allies
had come to dominate the membership and staff of the Judiciary
Committee, which turned back many of the administration's nominees.
"There was a Republican majority of the Senate, and it tempered the
nature of the nominations being made," said Mr. Abraham, the Federalist
Society founder who was a senator on the Judiciary Committee at the
time.

By 2000, the decades of organizing and battles had fueled a deep demand
in the Republican base for change on the court. Mr. Bush tapped into
that demand by promising to name jurists in the mold of conservative
Justices Thomas and Scalia. 

When Mr. Bush named Harriet E. Miers, the White House counsel, as the
successor to Justice O'Connor, he faced a revolt from his conservative
base, which complained about her dearth of qualifications and
ideological bona fides. 

"It was a striking example of the grass roots having strong opinions
that ran counter to the party leaders about what was attainable," said
Stephen G. Calabresi, a law professor at Northwestern University and
another founding member of the Federalist Society.

But in October, when President Bush withdrew Ms. Miers's nomination and
named Judge Alito, the same network quickly mobilized behind him. 
Conservatives had begun planning for a nomination fight as long ago as
that February meeting, which was led by Leonard A. Leo, executive vice
president of the Federalist Society and informal adviser to the White
House, Mr. Meese and Mr. Gray. 

They laid out a two-part strategy to roll out behind whomever the
president picked, people present said. The plan: first, extol the
nonpartisan legal credentials of the nominee, steering the debate away
from the nominee's possible influence over hot-button issues. 

Second, attack the liberal groups they expected to oppose any Bush
nominee.

The team worked through a newly formed group, the Judicial Confirmation
Network, to coordinate grass-roots pressure on Democratic senators from
conservative states. And they stayed in constant contact with scores of
conservative groups around the country to brief them about potential
nominees and to make sure they all stuck to the same message. They
fine-tuned their strategy for Judge Alito when he was nominated in
October by recruiting Italian-American groups to protest the use of the
nickname "Scalito," which would have linked him to the conservative
Justice Antonin Scalia. 

In November, some Democrats believed they had a chance to defeat the
nomination after the disclosure of a 1985 memorandum Judge Alito wrote
in the Reagan administration about his conservative legal views on
abortion, affirmative action and other subjects.

"It was a done deal," one of the Democratic staff members of the Senate
Judiciary Committee said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because
the staff is forbidden to talk publicly about internal meetings. "This
was the most evidence we have ever had about a 
Supreme Court nominee's true beliefs."

Mr. Leo and other lawyers supporting Judge Alito were inclined to shrug
off the memorandum, which described views that were typical in their
circles, people involved in the effort said. But executives at Creative
Response Concepts, the team's public relations firm, quickly convinced
them it was "a big deal" that could become the centerpiece of the
Democrats' attacks, one of the people said.

"The call came in right away," said Jay Sekulow, chief counsel of the
American Center for Law and Justice and another lawyer on the Alito
team. 

Responding to Mr. Alito's 1985 statement that he disagreed strongly with
the abortion-rights precedents, for example, "The answer was, 'Of course
he was opposed to abortion,' " Mr. Sekulow said. "He worked for the
Reagan administration, he was a lawyer representing a client, and it may
well have reflected his personal beliefs. But look what he has done as
judge."

His supporters deluged news organizations with phone calls, press
releases and lawyers to interview, all noting that on the United States
Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, Judge Alito had voted to uphold
and to strike down abortion restrictions.

Democrats contended that those arguments were irrelevant because on the
lower court Judge Alito was bound by Supreme Court precedent, whereas as
a justice he could vote to overturn any precedents with which he
disagreed. 

By last week it was clear that the judge had enough votes to win
confirmation. And the last gasp of resistance came in a Democratic
caucus meeting on Wednesday when Senator Edward M. Kennedy, joined by
Senator John Kerry, both of Massachusetts, unsuccessfully tried to
persuade the party to organize a filibuster.

No one defended Judge Alito or argued that he did not warrant
opposition, Mr. Kennedy said in an interview. Instead, opponents of the
filibuster argued about the political cost of being accused of
obstructionism by conservatives.

Still, on the brink of this victory, some in the conservative movement
say the battle over the court has just begun. Justice O'Connor was the
swing vote on many issues, but replacing her with a more dependable
conservative would bring that faction of the court at most to four
justices, not five, and thus not enough to truly reshape the court or
overturn precedents like those upholding abortion rights.

"It has been a long time coming," Judge Bork said, "but more needs to be
done."


© Copyright 2006 The New York Times