Bulwark writer Andrew Egger says the decades-long honeymoon between the Federalist Society and Republican presidents may be temporarily stalling out.
“Donald Trump’s breakup with the conservative legal movement was a long time coming,” writes Egger. “Most presidents would commit unspeakable acts to get the sort of home-field advantage Trump enjoys in the courts—most notably, a 6–3 conservative Supreme Court, a full third of whom he nominated himself.”
But Trump is a “transactional” kind of president who is too obvious about expecting favors from all the Federalist Society appointments he’s been installing across his two terms, said Eggers. Trump openly wants a “world where he can operate more or less without judicial oversight,” and this is now making the Federalist Society cringe.
“When ‘his’ Supreme Court failed to abet his attempt to steal the 2020 election, [Trump] raged that they hadn’t had the ‘courage’ to do what was necessary,” Egger said. Trump more recently turned on Federalist Society co-founder and current board co-chairman Leonard Leo when a U.S. Court of International Trade panel spit-stomped his power to enact tariffs from the White House, calling Leo a “real sleazebag” with “his own separate ambitions.”
“I am so disappointed in The Federalist Society because of the bad advice they gave me on numerous Judicial Nominations. This is something that cannot be forgotten!” the president bawled.
But Egger says Federalist Society judges are likely to perceive Trump’s attacks for what they really are: “a pledge to appoint nothing but unprincipled lickspittles in the future,” among other things. They could see “the president’s lawless actions” as “a danger requiring immediate restraint” in courts.
“A Trump who played nice with the conservative legal movement was a Trump who got goodies like a new and expansive SCOTUS-approved definition of ‘presidential immunity,’” Egger argues, but that decision might’ve been harder to nab with Federalist Society justices now seeing Trump for what he is.
Additionally, Federalist Society judges are in a position to muck up the president’s attempts to remake the judiciary in his image. Judges, said Egger, “are rational actors who are less likely to retire if they feel they’ll be replaced by presidential toadies.”
Egger cites Gregg Nunziata of the Society for the Rule of Law telling Bloomberg News that “Many judges who are eligible to retire or take senior status have been watching to see what they can expect from the White House. These are ominous signs for them.”
And as judgy eyes increasingly narrow at the president’s power-grabs, Egger said observers can expect to see more conservative courts turn on him and deliver decisions like the one in defense of law firms that refused to “bow to his blackmail,” as Eggers puts it.
Read the full report at The Bulwark link here.