POLITICO Nightly: The cloudy future of the Federalist Society

BY IAN WARD Presented by  Supreme Court Associate Justice Samuel Alito speaks during the Federalist Society's 40th Anniversary dinner at Union Station in Washington on Nov. 10, 2022. | Jose Luis Magana/AP SUCCESSION PLANNING — The intellectual headquarters of the conservative legal movement is preparing for a rare changing of the guard. Late last week, the Federalist Society’s leader Eugene Meyer announced his plans to step down as president and CEO, kicking off a high-profile national search for the group’s next boss. His legacy is far-reaching: Meyer transformed the organization from a small “debating society” for right-leaning law students into a legal and political powerhouse that has been involved in almost every high-profile conservative judicial appointment of recent decades, including those to the Supreme Court. His departure will mark a rare shift in the senior leadership of the Federalist Society, which is currently co-chaired by the conservative legal activist Leonard Leo . And it comes at a pivotal moment for the conservative legal movement, as it wrestles with the shifting political landscape of the Trumpist right and the consequences of its own jurisprudential successes. Meyer has not announced a formal date for his retirement or named a successor, though the organization is expected to begin considering candidates to replace him later this summer. With Meyer’s successor likely to be named just months before the 2024 election, the decision is expected to signal how closely the society’s leaders plan to align themselves with the MAGA movement — or whether they will lean into the organization’s traditional posture as a big-tent for the legal right. Meyer, who helped found the society in the 1980s and has served as its leader for only 40 years, has long served as a sort of elder statesman within the conservative movement, acting as a bridge between its founding generation and its current, more Trump-ified leadership. His father, Frank Meyer, was a longtime senior editor at William F. Buckley’s National Review who became best known as the philosophical proprietor of “fusionism” — the idea, central to the creation of the modern conservative movement in the post-World War II era, that traditionalist social conservatism and free-libertarianism could serve as mutually reinforcing programs. The younger Meyer made his father’s fusionist creed a cornerstone of the conservative legal movement from its creation , positioning the Federalist Society as an open forum where conservative and libertarian legal thinkers could come together to forge a shared philosophy and legal strategy. “Gene’s unassuming leadership, superb judgment, and determination to keep his eye on the long term have been in many ways the key to the Federalist Society’s becoming and remaining the extraordinary organization it is,” Steven Calebresi, the society’s co-founder and co-chair, wrote in a statement to Nightly. “We have our work cut out for us in selecting the right person to succeed him.” Yet even after the society worked closely with the Trump administration to install conservative judges across the federal judiciary , Meyer’s fusionist vision has drawn fire from more populist and Trump-aligned conservatives, who argue that the conservative legal movement should prioritize key elements of the social conservative agenda — especially immigration restrictions, protectionist trade policy and religious issues like limits on abortion, contraceptive access and gay marriage — over more traditionally libertarian priorities like free trade, tax cuts and deregulation. On the political front, MAGA-aligned conservatives have also criticized the society for being insufficiently radical since Trump left office, arguing that the group is more interested in credentialing egg-headed appeals judges and well-heeled lawyers than in aiding the “America First” political movement in Washington. Within the society itself, the debate has been tactical as well as philosophical. The society was founded to champion the idea of “judicial restraint,” the notion that judges should interpret the law as written and leave the substantive business of lawmaking to elected officials. But following the Trump administration’s successful efforts to install conservative judges across the federal judiciary, the movement has quietly divided over the question of whether conservatives should stay true to the movement’s original principles or embrace a more activist and assertive role for judges. The overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022 — which had long served as the conservative legal movement’s unifying objective — further exposed the tactical divide . In the midst of this tumult, Meyer has served as a steady-handed mediator between the society’s competing camps, even as he has acknowledged that the political winds have shifted away from judicial restraint. “I think it would be fair to say there’s been some movement over time more in the direction of interpreting the Constitution and less in the direction of pure judicial restraint,” he told POLITICO Magazine in 2023. But now, with Meyer stepping down and Roe consigned to the ash-heap of history, the glue that has historically held the Federalist Society together is slowly becoming unstuck. Leo told the Washington Post last week that he doesn’t expect Meyer’s departure from the Federalist Society to “[affect] its mission, its principles or the kinds of activities that it historically has engaged in,” but the society’s members are closely watching the selection process for Meyer’s successor as a clue to its ideological and political trajectory. The outcome of that decision may depend in large part on input from Leo, who remains the society’s primary political and financial powerbroker and who has embodied the style of bare-knuckle judicial politicking that some of the society’s members would like to see the organization as a whole embrace. Yet Leo will have to contend with other factional interests as well. Calebresi, Leo’s co-chairman, is a self-described “Never Trumper” (though he has recently adopted a somewhat more sympathetic position toward the former president) who is aligned more closely with the society’s libertarian factions. Despite the claims of its critics on the left that the society is merely a front organization for the radical right, the Federalist Society has always been — and continues to be — a melange of competing factions and personalities, where libertarian academics, ambitious law students, white-shoe lawyers and hard-driving conservative activists subtly jockey for influence and control. The selection of Meyer’s successor will indicate which faction currently has the upper hand, but it’s unlikely to end the race. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com . Or contact tonight’s author at iward@politico.com or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @ianwardreports .   A message from eBay: What makes eBay different from our peers? We don’t compete against the small businesses who rely on our marketplace. 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