In Alito, G.O.P. Reaps Harvest Planted in '82

January 30, 2006

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

Last February, as rumors swirled about the failing health of Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, a team of conservative grass-roots organizers, public relations specialists and legal strategists met to prepare a battle plan to ensure any vacancies were filled by like-minded jurists.

The team recruited conservative lawyers to study the records of 18 potential nominees — including Judges John G. Roberts Jr. and Samuel A. Alito Jr. — and trained more than three dozen lawyers across the country to respond to news reports on the president's eventual pick.

"We boxed them in," one lawyer present during the strategy meetings said with pride in an interview over the weekend. This lawyer and others present who described the meeting were granted anonymity because the meetings were confidential and because the team had told its allies not to exult publicly until the confirmation vote was cast.

Now, on the eve of what is expected to be the Senate confirmation of Judge Alito to the Supreme Court, coming four months after Chief Justice Roberts was installed, those planners stand on the brink of a watershed for the conservative movement.

In 1982, the year after Mr. Alito first joined the Reagan administration, that movement was little more than the handful of legal scholars who gathered at Yale for the first meeting of the Federalist Society, a newly formed conservative legal group.

Judge Alito's ascent to join Chief Justice Roberts on the court "would have been beyond our best expectations," said Spencer Abraham, one of the society's founders, a former secretary of energy under President Bush and now the chairman of the Committee for Justice, one of many conservative organizations set up to support judicial nominees.

He added, "I don't think we would have put a lot of money on it in a friendly wager."

Judge Alito's confirmation is also the culmination of a disciplined campaign begun by the Reagan administration to seed the lower federal judiciary with like-minded jurists who could reorient the federal courts toward a view of the Constitution much closer to its 18th-century authors' intent, including a much less expansive view of its application to individual rights and federal power. It was a philosophy promulgated by Edwin Meese III, attorney general in the Reagan administration, that became the gospel of the Federalist Society and the nascent conservative legal movement.

Both Mr. Roberts and Mr. Alito were among the cadre of young conservative lawyers attracted to the Reagan administration's Justice Department. And both advanced to the pool of promising young jurists whom strategists like C. Boyden Gray, White House counsel in the first Bush administration and an adviser to the current White House, sought to place throughout the federal judiciary to groom for the highest court.

"It is a Reagan personnel officer's dream come true," said Douglas W. Kmiec, a law professor at Pepperdine University who worked with Mr. Alito and Mr. Roberts in the Reagan administration. "It is a graduation. These individuals have been in study and preparation for these roles all their professional lives."

As each progressed in legal stature, others were laying the infrastructure of the movement. After the 1987 defeat of the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Robert H. Bork conservatives vowed to build a counterweight to the liberal forces that had mobilized to stop him.

With grants from major conservative donors like the John M. Olin Foundation, the Federalist Society functioned as a kind of shadow conservative bar association, planting chapters in law schools around the country that served as a pipeline to prestigious judicial clerkships.

During their narrow and politically costly victory in the 1991 confirmation of Justice Clarence Thomas, the Federalist Society lawyers forged new ties with the increasingly sophisticated network of grass-roots conservative Christian groups like Focus on the Family in Colorado Springs and the American Family Association in Tupelo, Miss. Many conservative Christian pastors and broadcasters had railed for decades against Supreme Court decisions that outlawed school prayer and endorsed abortion rights.

During the Clinton administration, Federalist Society members and allies had come to dominate the membership and staff of the Judiciary Committee, which turned back many of the administration's nominees. "There was a Republican majority of the Senate, and it tempered the nature of the nominations being made," said Mr. Abraham, the Federalist Society founder who was a senator on the Judiciary Committee at the time.

By 2000, the decades of organizing and battles had fueled a deep demand in the Republican base for change on the court. Mr. Bush tapped into that demand by promising to name jurists in the mold of conservative Justices Thomas and Scalia.

When Mr. Bush named Harriet E. Miers, the White House counsel, as the successor to Justice O'Connor, he faced a revolt from his conservative base, which complained about her dearth of qualifications and ideological bona fides.

"It was a striking example of the grass roots having strong opinions that ran counter to the party leaders about what was attainable," said Stephen G. Calabresi, a law professor at Northwestern University and another founding member of the Federalist Society.

But in October, when President Bush withdrew Ms. Miers's nomination and named Judge Alito, the same network quickly mobilized behind him.

Conservatives had begun planning for a nomination fight as long ago as that February meeting, which was led by Leonard A. Leo, executive vice president of the Federalist Society and informal adviser to the White House, Mr. Meese and Mr. Gray.

They laid out a two-part strategy to roll out behind whomever the president picked, people present said. The plan: first, extol the nonpartisan legal credentials of the nominee, steering the debate away from the nominee's possible influence over hot-button issues. Second, attack the liberal groups they expected to oppose any Bush nominee.

The team worked through a newly formed group, the Judicial Confirmation Network, to coordinate grass-roots pressure on Democratic senators from conservative states. And they stayed in constant contact with scores of conservative groups around the country to brief them about potential nominees and to make sure they all stuck to the same message. They fine-tuned their strategy for Judge Alito when he was nominated in October by recruiting Italian-American groups to protest the use of the nickname "Scalito," which would have linked him to the conservative Justice Antonin Scalia.

In November, some Democrats believed they had a chance to defeat the nomination after the disclosure of a 1985 memorandum Judge Alito wrote in the Reagan administration about his conservative legal views on abortion, affirmative action and other subjects.

"It was a done deal," one of the Democratic staff members of the Senate Judiciary Committee said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the staff is forbidden to talk publicly about internal meetings. "This was the most evidence we have ever had about a Supreme Court nominee's true beliefs."

Mr. Leo and other lawyers supporting Judge Alito were inclined to shrug off the memorandum, which described views that were typical in their circles, people involved in the effort said. But executives at Creative Response Concepts, the team's public relations firm, quickly convinced them it was "a big deal" that could become the centerpiece of the Democrats' attacks, one of the people said.

"The call came in right away," said Jay Sekulow, chief counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice and another lawyer on the Alito team.

Responding to Mr. Alito's 1985 statement that he disagreed strongly with the abortion-rights precedents, for example, "The answer was, 'Of course he was opposed to abortion,' " Mr. Sekulow said. "He worked for the Reagan administration, he was a lawyer representing a client, and it may well have reflected his personal beliefs. But look what he has done as judge."

His supporters deluged news organizations with phone calls, press releases and lawyers to interview, all noting that on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, Judge Alito had voted to uphold and to strike down abortion restrictions.

Democrats contended that those arguments were irrelevant because on the lower court Judge Alito was bound by Supreme Court precedent, whereas as a justice he could vote to overturn any precedents with which he disagreed.

By last week it was clear that the judge had enough votes to win confirmation. And the last gasp of resistance came in a Democratic caucus meeting on Wednesday when Senator Edward M. Kennedy, joined by Senator John Kerry, both of Massachusetts, unsuccessfully tried to persuade the party to organize a filibuster.

No one defended Judge Alito or argued that he did not warrant opposition, Mr. Kennedy said in an interview. Instead, opponents of the filibuster argued about the political cost of being accused of obstructionism by conservatives.

Still, on the brink of this victory, some in the conservative movement say the battle over the court has just begun. Justice O'Connor was the swing vote on many issues, but replacing her with a more dependable conservative would bring that faction of the court at most to four justices, not five, and thus not enough to truly reshape the court or overturn precedents like those upholding abortion rights.

"It has been a long time coming," Judge Bork said, "but more needs to be done."