What Is The Federalist Society And Their Concept Of Federalism, Really?
(Photo collage: top, former Attorney General and Federalist Society leader, William Barr. Bottom, Nazi Jurist, Professor Carl Schmitt, Barr's model of jurisprudence)
What Is The Federalist Society And Their Concept Of Federalism, Really?
(A comment in response to Professor HCR's letter this morning, in which she details the bloody Putin-style police state measures that TFS and the GOP would impose on the US. HCR quotes John Daniel Davidson in "The Federalist," outlining the various categories of persons who should be charged with felonies and arrested, jailed and suppressed, based on their choices of lifestyle and personal beliefs)
It is no coincidence that The Federalist Society venerates the infamous German law professor and jurist Carl Schmitt, who was Adolph Hitler's legal adviser. Schmitt was the person originating the concept of the "unitary executive" theory of government, claiming that the head of state should be able to invoke emergency powers and rule by decree in times of national emergency. (And as history has shown, fascists are highly skilled at "creating" their own emergencies to justify assuming dictatorial powers) Schmitt was otherwise known for writing and issuing legal decrees on behalf of Hitler and Goebbels, in order to defend the legality of both the post-Reichstag Fire "Enabling Act," and the following year's "Night Of The Long Knives" massacres and imprisonments of thousands of Hitler's rivals, purging even his own Party. Schmitt's argument was "the Führer makes the law."
William Barr is an admirer of Schmitt. This is what the Federalist Society has always been. They are racist Social Darwinists who follow the ideas of 19th century philosopher Herbert Spencer, characterized by his term, "survival of the fittest." They have openly praised the Confederate Constitution, called for rolling back the gains of the civil rights movement and reviving states rights. They, just like Hitler's fascists, revile the memory and policy outlook of Franklin Roosevelt.
When you read these proposals for conducting mass arrests of those considered "undesirables" and filling up the prisons with dissidents, be informed that this was how the Nazis began their economic program of prison slave labor being used in camps and industrial parks. (under the direction of Hermann Goering and Albert Speer, which worked people to death under horrid conditions and expanded the concentration camp system) That was the opening salvo of Hitler's elimination of trade unions and the savage reduction of the cost of labor.
In other words, the counter-revolution which this Federalist writer Davidson is pushing for a law and order regime, is one directly in opposition to our Constitution's Preamble and the "General Welfare" clause, and intended as the opening phase of a transition to a slave labor economy in an expanded privatized prison system. Their "culture wars" are complimentary to their economic program, which is emphatically fascist, and will heavily rely on prison labor, thereby driving wage scales down to nothing.
The people who fund the Federalist Society are the fascist Billionaires such as the Koch interests, who are also ironically self-described Libertarians, and therefore demand elimination of any role of the Federal government in advancing economic protections, regulations, or interventions into the economy which promote the general welfare. They want government out of the economy in order to have free reign to loot and steal. They are funding the GOP's pseudo-religious culture wars to use them to not only crush dissent, but to create an economic system which relies on a police state to enforce their brutal austerity measures, to gouge the standard of living of those people considered "less fit."
This is why if you scratch the surface of a Libertarian, underneath you will find a fascist. They are Social Darwinists at heart, like Spencer, whose goal is to "get rid of the dead wood." And the Federalist Society is their legal arm, their "fascist judge factory" for churning out the Jacobins in black robes whose job is to tear down the constitutional role of the Federal government. As Davidson honestly describes, they are indeed "counter-revolutionaries," but will not admit to being deployed against the American Revolution.
Behind them are the Billionaires whose belief in "shareholder value" today is simply the recycled "slaveholder values" of their models, the Confederacy and Nazi Germany, under whose banners and symbols the enraged mob of Trumpian shocktroops rioted on January 6th.
It's all one poisonous tree, which needs to be pulled out by the roots.
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https://thefederalist.com/2022/10/20/we-need-to-stop-calling-ourselves-conservatives/
From the Federalist Society Book List of research sources and documents:
["Adrian Vermeule, Our Schmittian Administrative Law, 122 Harv. L. Rev. 1095 (2009). Vermeule draws from Carl Schmitt's thoughts on emergencies and legal black holes to draw insights into American administrative law. Part I gives background on Carl Schmitt and his thought. Part II suggests that administrative law is Schmittian, in the sense that it is built around a series of black holes and grey holes that are integral to its structure. Part III suggests that for practical and institutional reasons, administrative law cannot realistically be otherwise. These claims require clarification."]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Schmitt
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Spencer
https://www.nybooks.com/online/2020/01/15/william-barr-the-carl-schmitt-of-our-time/
