Even though it was pricey—and early on we operated on a shoestring budget—I always tried to videotape those depositions because their reactions were just priceless.
I remember one guy—I think he was a gender studies professor—telling me how he loved evangelical Christians, how he respected them, and how he was spiritual himself. I just nodded as he droned on, and when he was finished I reached into my bag to get my social media research out. It seems he was so proud of his achievement that he had to post on Facebook (remember Facebook?) his elevation to chair of something called the Organization of Academic Atheists. His entry contained several references to Jesus as a “zombie messiah,” which he thought was very clever, and he insisted on spelling “Christian” as “Xtian.”
We had a settlement within a week. I think we received a dozen slots on the faculty for conservatives as part of the deal. Settlements like those were conservatives’ foot in the door, our beachhead onto those hostile shores.
Oh, that professor had to attend “religious sensitivity” training to ensure he could get along with his new academic coworkers. It was glorious.
We worked with friendly legislators very closely to shape the laws to support our legal campaigns. For example, we made sure that the laws provided that prevailing plaintiffs in cases like ours were awarded their attorney’s fees. Remember, as my old law partner used to say—in fact, he had a sign hanging in his office to that effect—“It is about the money.” While we sought injunctive relief—court orders for the other side to do or not do something—money really makes the world go ’round in litigation as in everything else.
Our clients needed money for damages, the bad guys needed to pay money so they would have a disincentive to reoffend, and we needed money to fund our campaign. The one-way fee shifting laws we worked to pass were huge for us. Progressives loved them in regular discrimination and consumer cases because they put pressure on the defendant to settle while the plaintiff had almost no disincentive to sue, since win or lose he wasn’t paying the other side’s fees. They did not enjoy contending with fees provisions when we asserted them.
In contrast, we loved our new laws. We could force change in anticonservative sectors of society and make progressive institutions pay for it!
We didn’t always win, especially at first. We lost a lot. I mean, sometimes it seemed like we’d never win a case, but in reality we were winning big time where it mattered in the larger scheme of things. Our legal campaign was not about just getting verdicts—it was about showing the public what was happening in their country. We wanted to get on the news showing our carefully selected plaintiffs going up against a noxious, liberal government and private institutions. And we did, always in conservative media, often in the mainstream.
It was messaging. And what was key was that big donors started getting that the payoff from one of our successful cases was exponentially greater than the value received for all the cash they used to squander on mainstream Republican consultants. Once things started changing and we started winning, our legal campaigns started tearing up the welfare state. We crippled Obamacare well before Congress killed it dead.
It was a fun time. [He smiles and chugs the rest of his Guinness.]
Darcy Mizuhara McCullough (Former Missouri Governor)
The former governor fusses over her granddaughter as she recalls her turbulent tenure as a red state governor during some of the toughest years of the insurgency. Now 72 years old, she still displays the energy she brought to her office when it came to fighting the liberal federal government.
We were very aggressive in passing laws to address health care as a state concern, rather than implementing Obamacare. The Obamacare Supreme Court decision upheld the individual mandate as a tax, but Justice Roberts left a huge door open with his Commerce Clause holdings. We targeted the implementing regulations. And there were a lot of targets!
The federal government hated what we were doing in the state to reform social programs, not because it wasn’t effective but because it was. They sued us to stop our reforms, and we sued right back.
We played hardball. The feds sued us and we fought. I must have doubled the size of the attorney general’s office. All we did was sue the feds and fight them when they sued us. We didn’t always win, but we made it so the bureaucrats started to try to avoid messing with us because they knew the second they did we’d file and serve.
Michael Ambarian (Supreme Court Justice)
The justice motions for another pint of Guinness Stout. I pass—I’ve had two already, and I have never trusted auto-drive to operate my car for me.
Carrie Marlowe did not pack the Supreme Court. It was Hillary Clinton who packed the Court. Carrie Marlowe unpacked it.
You had a situation where three Supreme Court justices were utterly unwilling to pay even the most minimal respect to basic constitutional values. These were progressive ideologues who simply ignored the Constitution. So President Marlowe and the constitutional conservatives had a choice, and they made the right one—my bias at being a direct beneficiary notwithstanding, since I received my appointment to one of the vacated seats.
In the past, progressives used to say that the Constitution was a “living document,” but these progressives pronounced it dead. Literally dead.
In the Bloomberg gun case, they held, and I’m quoting the most offensive line, which I am particularly familiar with because I argued the case before them: “Archaic provisions and interpretations of the Constitution cannot bind the hands of Congress as it seeks to guide the progress of the nation.”
Can you think of a statement more at odds with the nature of our Constitution? Those “archaic provisions and interpretations” are expressly intended to “bind the hands of Congress.” That’s why they are there—they are not suggestions or guidelines or vague principles to be disregarded when they become inconvenient with regard to whatever policy preference you have this week.
It was the same thing when they upheld the Internet censorship laws in Loesch v. United States—“The Bill of Rights is vital, but not so vital as to allow unreasonable interference with the legitimate prerogatives of government in the pursuit of social justice.”
A reasonability test for the First Amendment? Unbelievable. Yet the progressive establishment cheered because it could stop pretending to observe norms and rules and the rights of its opponents and simply do what it always dreamed of doing—exercise raw power as it saw fit without limits and without constraints. After all, we constitutional conservatives were evil, wicked, immoral, or whatever foul adjective you can think of. Why, who ever could think that we might actually have rights worthy of constitutional protection?
And these jackasses were actually surprised when President Marlowe and her Congress went ahead and impeached them.
It was clear they had to go. I was advising the Senate majority and the leaders were reluctant to do it—no one had tried to impeach a Supreme Court justice since Samuel Chase over 200 years before. I was there when President Marlowe met with the Senate leadership and told them that they were playing a role in an informal system that was long dead. Progressives had destroyed the norms and rules that governed us, and it was not only foolish but empowering to the progressives for the Senate to try and pretend otherwise.