Judge Amy Coney Barrett, Donald Trump’s choice for some last-minute Supreme Court packing, spoke five times at a training program for young Christian law school students put on by a right-wing extremist organization. But, while it’s certainly troubling that a likely Supreme Court justice repeatedly participated in an event intended to teach law students a “distinctly Christian worldview in every area of law” including “how God can use them as judges, law professors and practicing attorneys to help keep the door open for the spread of the Gospel in America,” the significance of the event goes well beyond Barrett.
Barrett’s own presentations at the Blackstone Legal Fellowship focused on originalism, The Washington Post reports. But over the years, the reading lists for the fellowship have included characterizations such as the idea “that homosexuals once had to remain in the closet was a sign of sanity in the society.” A former Blackstone fellow wrote in a memoir that “Just like the Greeks inside the Trojan Horse, the idea seemed to be an attempt to carefully sneak these budding Christian legal warriors into the courts to change the culture through judicial opinion.”
Barrett’s participation in this event is in line with everything we know about her: troubling, but not a bit surprising. But it’s also a marker of success of the organized and well-funded right-wing effort to dominate the legal profession—an effort liberals desperately need to emulate. It’s not just about confirming judges. It’s about supporting people from law school through their careers to the point where they do become influential federal judges.
The Blackstone Fellowship, run by the Alliance Defending Freedom, has trained more than 2,400 law students. It pays law professors, like Amy Coney Barrett was when she spoke there, thousands of dollars for their presentations. People go on from the Blackstone Fellowship to become judges, including recently confirmed judges on the 9th Circuit and the 4th Circuit Courts of Appeals. This is an incredible feat of organization to contest the concept of separation of church and state—and a founder of the Alliance Defending Freedom literally has, in a book that was for some years on the Blackstone Fellowship’s reading list and referred to “so-called separation of church and state”—and take over U.S. law by running it through an overtly Christian filter.
The liberal legal movement needs to catch up. At The American Prospect, Jay Swanson makes the case for how to lay that groundwork, starting with Democratic politicians all the way up to a prospective Biden administration. It would include hiring and elevating lawyers who have been part of the American Constitution Society, just as Republicans have long done for Federalist Society members; recruiting clerks from liberal judges; reaching out to underrepresented legal communities; and in other ways building a bench of the kind Republicans have so benefited from constructing. That still doesn’t equal the investment involved in something like the Blackstone Fellowship, but it’s a start. Because the thing about Amy Coney Barrett isn’t that she is such a unique figure. It’s that she’s a perfect product of a long-term organizing project on the right.