A LITTLE POTTED HISTORY

I found this post, I think it's by a woman lawyer, she knows her stuff. I guess many SAVages know all this, but it's new details for me.

"Religions can have a lot of similarities - authoritarian, forcible suppression of dissent, regimentation, etc

Anyway, I was going to push back on Dr Timmer's idea {a previous post} that conservatives did not have a plan " ... to get people on the court that will give us favorable decisions" but rather because they were focused on getting Roe overturned, which requires seating radical judges to overturn the precedent and, hence, we get a host of radical decisions as a byproduct.

I would argue that a) ever since FDR and the Warren Court's decisions, conservatives have sought control of the court, b) conservative societies wrote position papers stating as such, c) the Federalist Society was one of their strategies - it was purposely created as a pipeline for grooming conservative judges. It was founded in the early 80's with seed funds from Simon and Kritol's non profit, the Olin Foundation, Scaife, Koch and so on. Their first symposium had Scalia, Bork, and Olson as speakers and all 6 current conservative justices are or were members which is not a coincidence, d) Reagan's Bork nomination. This is a guy who wasn't just implicated in Watergate, or even just against abortion, but was writing papers in opposition to the civil rights decisions as they happened, (before Roe was even decided). Bork was the opening salvo in an effort to seat justices with a radical interpretation of civil rights period - voting, segregation, worker's rights, you name it. The difference between Bork and the 6 justices we have now is that he generally followed precedent and was more liberal. He rehabilitated his image by claiming he was misunderstood because look at all my amicus briefs.

One can also look up the histories and positions of these conservative groups and foundations - look at Olin, he founded his group in 53' and one of their best investments was the Federalist Society, (his claim). AEI was founded in the late 30's in direct opposition to the New Deal and later opposed civil rights. Many of these groups had the same members - e.g. Kristol with AEI starts a group and sets up the Federalist Society, Schlafly was an AEI member who founded the Eagle Forum to oppose the ERA and abortion, (she was a long time corporatist and segregationist and was a John Bircher) - and with the same goals; opposing FDR and the later Warren and Burger Court's civil rights decisions. These groups were comprised of full on segregationists and corporatists who hopped in bed with the Xtian radicals in the 70's, (some of whom belonged to these societies, though the vast majority were racists and corporatists).

So, all of this shit started well before Roe. Roe was just latched onto because literally claiming that black people didn't have rights or rolling back FDR's New Deal was no longer a winning argument. Rolling back worker's protections, the social safety net, federal power and interference in State rights is not a bug it's a feature - hell Reagan began the assault on social security, education funding, etc to fulfill Norquist's dream - one need only look at who was funding opposition to these popular programs. What Roe provided was a means to dial back all the other decisions and they have been rolled back e.g. gutting the Voting Rights Act. These foundations' goals have been carried on by younger generations who have been groomed and until recently most of these bad actors were still alive and directing policy goals through the GW Bush admin. Christ, guys like Roger Stone, (among others see Cheney et al), date back to Nixon. This has been a generation and a half of work to get here.

Anyway, this is long, hasn't gotten into specifically how the fundies took over the Republican party, but the current Justices are not just a byproduct of wanting Roe overturned. I could write a book just about that or the history of the interlocking conservative societies and foundations we have today.