00:00You know primarily I am here in this collection of lawyers and how many law
00:03are there any lawyers here? Good, thank you because on election night there was a
00:08congressman that said we all needed to lawyer up so here we are. Thank you very
00:13much, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you very much, thank you,
00:24thank you, thank you, was that cool or what? My kids, I used to bring them on stage and show
00:34them off,
00:35now they're introducing, I don't know where she got this, that's no stage fright, she's not afraid
00:40to speak, I mean I don't really like public speaking that much but she on the other hand,
00:47that's fantastic, that's great, thank you, Danielle, you did very good, she's a third-year
00:52law student at the University of Virginia, I heard that's a good law school, I hope it is,
00:58I hope it is because it's expensive law school, it's a, I hope it is, no she's great and of
01:04course
01:05my wife Jeanette is here as well and you know I was also a lawyer but I was a different
01:10kind of
01:10lawyer, I was a land use and zoning attorney and I always tell them as a land use and zoning
01:16attorney
01:16if you ever wind up in court something went horribly wrong, she on the other hand is
01:22going to be like a real lawyer, so she's fantastic and it's an honor to be with all of you
01:26here
01:26today and thank you and you know primarily I am here in this collection of lawyers, are there
01:32any lawyers here? Good, thank you because on election night there was a congressman that
01:37said we all needed to lawyer up, so here we are, anyway anyway so and that's on a serious topic
01:52you
01:52know you know less than two years into Ronald Reagan's first term in office you know that
01:59everything sort of seemed headed in the wrong direction, it's hard for us to remember that
02:03right now but that's what it was like after his first two years in office, things seemed headed in
02:07the wrong direction, he had won a stunning landslide victory, he had been hailed as a conservative,
02:12which was hailed as a conservative revolution and upended the political establishment, he'd been
02:18swept into office with this ambitious political mandate, he survived an assassination attempt and he
02:24promptly delivered on a signature campaign promise which was a historic tax cut and he did all of this in
02:29the
02:29first eight months of his presidency. But by early 1982, which by the way I think I was in sixth
02:36grade,
02:38but by early 1982 celebrations had given way to a growing sense of gloom. The Reagan administration
02:44was facing its first major political crisis in less than a year. The approval ratings of the
02:50Reagan administration had plummeted from by 25 points from 68 percent down to 43 percent. By March of 1982,
02:59think about this what I'm about to tell you for a moment, by March of 1982, President Reagan was
03:06four points less popular than Jimmy Carter at the same point at his term. The economy had taken a
03:14nosedive, in fact it faced a full-fledged recession, unemployment was approaching double digits,
03:20the worst it had been in 40 years, with many fairly or unfairly blaming the president for all of this.
03:27Even his foreign policy ambitions were beginning to lose ground, with rising fears of nuclear war,
03:33with Russia spilling out into a popular revolt against his efforts to take on the Soviet communism
03:39around the world. On all fronts, the Reagan administration and the conservative movement at
03:45that time was on the defensive. But it was against that backdrop that I just described to you in 1982,
03:52which, by the way, also culminated in a devastating losses for the president's parties in Congress.
03:58It was against that backdrop, amid the plummeting morale, the anxiety, the despair, that something new
04:04began to stir. And it was, at that time, it was little more than just an idea. It was germinating
04:10in
04:10just a few law schools, common, in the law, in the common rooms of several law schools and lecture halls.
04:15But soon, what was stirring would remake the whole landscape of American politics and law,
04:22forever changing the course of the nation. In April of 1982, in the middle of everything I just described
04:30to you, there were four law school students that organized this symposium on federalism in New Haven,
04:37Connecticut. About 200 people came. One of the speakers that came was this 46-year-old professor from Chicago,
04:45his name was Antonin Scalia. And he diagnosed a basic problem to the room. He said conservatives
04:52have simply been outgunned at the federal level for half a century. And of course, nowhere was that
04:59more obvious at the time than in the courts. Republicans had won three of the last four
05:04presidential elections. Seven of the nine justices at the time on the Supreme Court had been appointed by
05:09Republican presidents, and yet none of it seemed to matter much at all. Nine years earlier, the court
05:17had delivered its ruling in Roe v. Wade. Five of the seven votes for the decision were Republican
05:22appointees. The majority opinion was written by a justice who had been nominated by President Richard
05:28Nixon. The most consistent conservative on that court was William Rehnquist. And he spent much of
05:36his time as the lone voice of dissent, so much so that his law clerks gifted him a doll of
05:42the Lone Ranger.
05:45At the time, only one major law school in the country had a conservative student journal.
05:51By the way, it happened to be Harvard. It had been founded four years earlier. And the very term
05:57originalism itself was only two years old. And it wasn't coined by an originalist. It was coined by a
06:03liberal Stanford professor in an article written to criticize and refute the concept. Just a few years
06:08later, a sitting justice in the Supreme Court would dismiss this idea of originalism. He would dismiss it
06:13as, quote, little more than arrogance cloaked as humility, sneering that its advocates were persons
06:20who have no familiarity with the historical record. This was how the Federalist Society began.
06:29But your critics aren't sneering anymore. The Federalist Society helped to change and advance
06:35America. And there are many lessons for us to learn today from that success. One of those lessons
06:42is that politics requires more than simply winning elections. Because the government is not the only
06:51source of political power. Power also lives in the universities. Power lives in the press. Power lives
06:58in the whole expanse of civil society. All of the institutions that define and shape our understanding
07:04of ourselves as a nation and as a people. Every society, and I mean every society, has an elite, has
07:14a ruling class. And in ours, that class resides not just in the White House, not just in Congress,
07:21or the courts. It also resides in academia, in powerful not-profits, and in non-government organizations.
07:29It resides in corporate boardrooms, and c-suites, in think tanks, and journals, in foundations,
07:37and in mass media, stretching across the commanding heights of business and education and culture.
07:45This is something that the left, over the last six decades, has frankly often understood better than
07:52the right. Elections. Elections decides who holds office for a season. But elections, they do not,
08:00they do not decide by themselves what our institutions teach, or what our lawyers believe, which ideas are
08:10treated as respectable or normal, and which are deemed beyond the pale. The government, of course, can and
08:18does play a critical role in shaping these things. But the government can't fundamentally transform them
08:24into two or four, or it can't transform them in just two, four, or eight years. That kind of change,
08:31that kind of change is implemented over the course of a generation or more. And even then, only through the
08:38dedicated work of a coalition of allies across institutions working together, both inside and
08:46outside of the state. The Federalist Society's victories were built on this insight. It's not just about
08:54placing good judges in positions to interpret the law. It's about shaping the world in which they do so.
09:01It's about shaping the norms and the values, the ideas and beliefs, the expectations and the assumptions
09:08that underpin how they think and reason and act. Who defines these things? And to what end?
09:18That is what power is. That's not unique to our country's legal system. At the State Department,
09:26we have seen the same thing firsthand in the realm of what is called international law.
09:33We've heard the concept international law invoked against nearly every major foreign policy decision
09:39or action of this administration. So, for example, when President Trump ordered our military
09:44to sink cartel boats in the Caribbean, we were told that they were violating international law.
09:50The founding chief prosecutor of the fake and illegitimate International Criminal Court,
09:56even accused us of crimes against humanity. When American forces captured Nicolas Maduro,
10:03a fugitive of American justice, and brought him to the United States to face that justice,
10:17the United States. When we did that, we heard the same accusations from the highest levels of the
10:27I'm not going to call them a name, the United Nations.
10:32Even the enforcement of our own immigration laws. Even the enforcement of our own immigration laws
10:37here on American soil has faced this attack. Earlier this year, for example, groups like the ACLU
10:42were petitioning the United Nations to investigate ISIS' blatant violations of international law
10:49here in the United States. Over the past decade, we've received an endless barrage of claims
10:53claims about America's alleged violations of international rules and norms, ranging from our foreign policy
10:59to our border enforcement, to even what they call, what they call, our systemic racism.
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