SHIFT? THAT DOESN'T COME UNTIL STEVENS STEPS DOWN:

Conservatives See Court Shift as Culmination (DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK, 1/30/06, NY Times)

In February of last year, 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 for whomever the next Supreme Court nominee might be.

The leaders were Leonard A. Leo, executive vice president of the Federalist Society and informal adviser to the White House; Edwin Meese III, attorney general in the Reagan administration; and C. Boyden Gray, the White House counsel under the first President Bush and a veteran of confirmation battles. They had recruited 18 conservative lawyers to study the records of 18 potential nominees, including Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Judge Samuel A. Alito.

They trained more than three dozen lawyers across the country to respond to news media reports on the president's eventual pick. And they began weekly and eventually daily conference calls to fine-tune their strategy, for example, responding to the nomination of Judge Alito last October by recruiting Italian-American groups to protest the use of the nickname "Scalito," which would have linked Judge Alito to the conservative Justice Antonin Scalia.

"We boxed them in," one lawyer present during those 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 gloat publicly until the confirmation vote was cast.

With Judge Alito's all but certain confirmation Tuesday as the 110th justice of the Supreme Court, the conservative legal movement is on the brink of a triumph 25 years in the making.

It's early innings yet--there's sixty years of liberal rulings to undo.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 29, 2006 11:34 PM