Constitutional History of Our Democratic Federalist Capitalistic Republic

"A consortium of students and professors based at Yale Law School founded the Federalist Society in 1982" to helped recruit and provide career support for bright legal minds. It provided social-professional networks to connect law students with influential senior mentors. Reagan's Attorney General Edwin Meese helped with the administration�s selection of 400 federal judges using ideological profiling that made a conservative criteria important. Meese succeeded in the selection process and convinced many they were fulfilling founding father intentions. The Institute for Justice, the Center for Individual Rights and rightward philanthropists/organizations Joseph Coors, Charles, David Koch, and the Olin Foundation contributed much money to law schools like George Mason University. Schools with supportive of conservative professor whose research and ideas would educate students.

How Conservatives Won the Battle Over Government

Prelude: Conservative President L. Johnson accomplished J. Kennedy Liberal Agenda changed the game.

Uniting Business Interest

1971 Powell Manifesto from soon to be Supreme Court Justice Louis Powell

"Though Powell�s memo was not the sole influence, the Chamber and corporate activists took his advice to heart and began building a powerful array of institutions designed to shift public attitudes and beliefs over the course of years and decades. The memo influenced or inspired the creation of the Heritage Foundation (1972)... Cato Institute(1974) ...." There success was enhanced by the Reagan Administration�s �hands-off business� philosophy.

1972 Business Round Table created to encourages business political activity.

The Chicago Boys represented a similar consortium fostering neoliberal (conservative in US) economics.

Justice Sandra Day O�Connor preceded Justice Anthony Kennedy as the �swing vote� votes of the Supreme Court. Some feel a swing-vote brings greater responsibility because their existence come into being in close and
therefore consequential decisions.

This generation has seen Justices O�Connor and Kennedy cast the deciding vote making said decision possible and in doing so kept alive the Court�s non-partisan legitimacy. For two generations the court has made decisions that changed the original written document, its amendments, all unwritten agreements and court decisions that determine how those documents were to be interpreted.

The following controversial decisions that needed a swing vote exemplify our "managed constitution."

Fourth Will the Court Finally Kill the Lemon Test Ghoul? 3/7/19

In Everson v. Board of Education (1947), Justice Hugo Black clearly proclaimed that the �First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state. In hopes of bringing some clarity to its Establishment Clause jurisprudence, justices created an analytical test in Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971). The Lemon Test permits laws and policies that benefit religion if they have (1) a secular purpose; (2) do not have a �principal or primary effect� of advancing or inhibiting religion; and (3) do not foster �an excessive entanglement between government and religion.� Supreme Court Justices have used it to strike down and uphold a variety of very similar practices,

Since the mid-1980s, largely at the urging of Justice Sandra Day O�Connor, some jurists have held that the Establishment Clause is best understood as prohibiting governments from doing things that a reasonable observer might understand to be endorsing religion.

This approach is sometimes merged with the Lemon Test, as it was by the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in The American Legion v. American Humanist Association. In spite of, or because of, all of these tests, many observers agree with Justice Clarence Thomas�s remark last year that �this Court�s Establishment Clause jurisprudence is in disarray.�

The American Legion v. American Humanist Association involves a forty foot Latin cross erected by private citizens on private land to commemorate the 49 men from Prince George�s County, Maryland, who died in the First World War.

Due to safety concerns, Maryland took over the memorial, known as the Bladensburg cross, in 1961.

Michael Carvin, representing the American Legion stated because the purpose of the cross in question is to memorialize soldiers and not to coerce or covert, it is constitutional. T the American Humanist Association, stressed that a cross is a uniquely religious symbol... amounts to endorsing Christianity." Pending

The Supreme Court could face a �legitimacy deficit�