The response was hilarious. Suddenly, the faculty would be filled with these deeply religious, devoutly spiritual academics who couldn’t possibly discriminate against a fellow believer. So, I would take these depositions of these freshly minted theologians and ask tough questions like, “What church do you attend?” and “When did you last attend it?” and, my favorite, “So what’s the minister’s name?”
Even though it was pricey—and early on we operated on a shoestring budget—I always tried to videotape those depositions because their reactions were just priceless.
I remember one guy—I think he was a gender studies professor—telling me how he loved evangelical Christians, how he respected them, and how he was spiritual himself. I just nodded as he droned on, and when he was finished I reached into my bag to get my social media research out. It seems he was so proud of his achievement that he had to post on Facebook (remember Facebook?) his elevation to chair of something called the Organization of Academic Atheists. His entry contained several references to Jesus as a “zombie messiah,” which he thought was very clever, and he insisted on spelling “Christian” as “Xtian.”
We had a settlement within a week. I think we received a dozen slots on the faculty for conservatives as part of the deal. Settlements like those were conservatives’ foot in the door, our beachhead onto those hostile shores.
Oh, that professor had to attend “religious sensitivity” training to ensure he could get along with his new academic coworkers. It was glorious.
We worked with friendly legislators very closely to shape the laws to support our legal campaigns. For example, we made sure that the laws provided that prevailing plaintiffs in cases like ours were awarded their attorney’s fees. Remember, as my old law partner used to say—in fact, he had a sign hanging in his office to that effect—“It is about the money.” While we sought injunctive relief—court orders for the other side to do or not do something—money really makes the world go ’round in litigation as in everything else.
Our clients needed money for damages, the bad guys needed to pay money so they would have a disincentive to reoffend, and we needed money to fund our campaign. The one-way fee shifting laws we worked to pass were huge for us. Progressives loved them in regular discrimination and consumer cases because they put pressure on the defendant to settle while the plaintiff had almost no disincentive to sue, since win or lose he wasn’t paying the other side’s fees. They did not enjoy contending with fees provisions when we asserted them.
In contrast, we loved our new laws. We could force change in anticonservative sectors of society and make progressive institutions pay for it!
We didn’t always win, especially at first. We lost a lot. I mean, sometimes it seemed like we’d never win a case, but in reality we were winning big time where it mattered in the larger scheme of things. Our legal campaign was not about just getting verdicts—it was about showing the public what was happening in their country. We wanted to get on the news showing our carefully selected plaintiffs going up against a noxious, liberal government and private institutions. And we did, always in conservative media, often in the mainstream.
It was messaging. And what was key was that big donors started getting that the payoff from one of our successful cases was exponentially greater than the value received for all the cash they used to squander on mainstream Republican consultants. Once things started changing and we started winning, our legal campaigns started tearing up the welfare state. We crippled Obamacare well before Congress killed it dead.
It was a fun time. [He smiles and chugs the rest of his Guinness.]
* * *
Darcy Mizuhara McCullough (Former Missouri Governor)
The former governor fusses over her granddaughter as she recalls her turbulent tenure as a red state governor during some of the toughest years of the insurgency. Now 72 years old, she still displays the energy she brought to her office when it came to fighting the liberal federal government.
We were very aggressive in passing laws to address health care as a state concern, rather than implementing Obamacare. The Obamacare Supreme Court decision upheld the individual mandate as a tax, but Justice Roberts left a huge door open with his Commerce Clause holdings. We targeted the implementing regulations. And there were a lot of targets!
The federal government hated what we were doing in the state to reform social programs, not because it wasn’t effective but because it was. They sued us to stop our reforms, and we sued right back.
We played hardball. The feds sued us and we fought. I must have doubled the size of the attorney general’s office. All we did was sue the feds and fight them when they sued us. We didn’t always win, but we made it so the bureaucrats started to try to avoid messing with us because they knew the second they did we’d file and serve.
* * *
Michael Ambarian (Supreme Court Justice)
The justice motions for another pint of Guinness Stout. I pass—I’ve had two already, and I have never trusted auto-drive to operate my car for me.
Carrie Marlowe did not pack the Supreme Court. It was Hillary Clinton who packed the Court. Carrie Marlowe unpacked it.
You had a situation where three Supreme Court justices were utterly unwilling to pay even the most minimal respect to basic constitutional values. These were progressive ideologues who simply ignored the Constitution. So President Marlowe and the constitutional conservatives had a choice, and they made the right one—my bias at being a direct beneficiary notwithstanding, since I received my appointment to one of the vacated seats.
In the past, progressives used to say that the Constitution was a “living document,” but these progressives pronounced it dead. Literally dead.
In the Bloomberg gun case, they held, and I’m quoting the most offensive line, which I am particularly familiar with because I argued the case before them: “Archaic provisions and interpretations of the Constitution cannot bind the hands of Congress as it seeks to guide the progress of the nation.”
Can you think of a statement more at odds with the nature of our Constitution? Those “archaic provisions and interpretations” are expressly intended to “bind the hands of Congress.” That’s why they are there—they are not suggestions or guidelines or vague principles to be disregarded when they become inconvenient with regard to whatever policy preference you have this week.
It was the same thing when they upheld the Internet censorship laws in Loesch v. United States—“The Bill of Rights is vital, but not so vital as to allow unreasonable interference with the legitimate prerogatives of government in the pursuit of social justice.”
A reasonability test for the First Amendment? Unbelievable. Yet the progressive establishment cheered because it could stop pretending to observe norms and rules and the rights of its opponents and simply do what it always dreamed of doing—exercise raw power as it saw fit without limits and without constraints. After all, we constitutional conservatives were evil, wicked, immoral, or whatever foul adjective you can think of. Why, who ever could think that we might actually have rights worthy of constitutional protection?
And these jackasses were actually surprised when President Marlowe and her Congress went ahead and impeached them.
It was clear they had to go. I was advising the Senate majority and the leaders were reluctant to do it—no one had tried to impeach a Supreme Court justice since Samuel Chase over 200 years before. I was there when President Marlowe met with the Senate leadership and told them that they were playing a role in an informal system that was long dead. Progressives had destroyed the norms and rules that governed us, and it was not only foolish but empowering to the progressives for the Senate to try and pretend otherwise.
“Decide what kind of country you want, gentlemen?” she said. “There is one remedy for this malignancy in our politics. You have to cut out the cancer. You have to impeach them, or they win and the Constitution dies. Do you want me to follow their lead? They gave me the power as president to censor
and oppress my political opponents when they gave Hillary that power. Do you want me to use it? Should I rule by executive order? The Court says that’s fine too. If they stay, you’ve signed on to that kind of governmental power, and that’s how it will be. I will use that power. Or you can stand up for the Constitution, impeach them, and allow me to appoint justices who will stop me and every future president. But you can’t have both. You have to choose, gentlemen. We are at the fork in the road. Right leads to freedom, left leads to tyranny. So, you tell me which way we go.”
I doubt President Marlowe actually would have embraced dictatorial powers if the Senate had refused her. At least I hope not—but the temptation must be great to simply outlaw opposition to your policies, and those fools had given her that power if she wished to take it. It speaks to her character that she practically begged the Senate to strip it from her.
Thankfully, they did.
They tried the three most liberal justices for violating the basic tenets of the Constitution, and all three were impeached and removed. Two of them were literally removed—they locked themselves in their offices and security guards physically carried them, yelling and thrashing, out of the building and dumped them on the sidewalk. For the next decade the three of them would hold pathetic mock court sessions billing themselves as the “Legitimate Supreme Court,” conducting little staged hearings and issuing purported rulings that the progressive press would trumpet. Ex-justice Spitzer eventually got bored and stopped showing up—the first known instance of him choosing dignity when some other option was available—and the other two passed away soon after.
The progressives still cry about the “illegitimate coup d’état” but the Constitution, as it usually is, is quite clear. The political remedy to a Supreme Court running out of control is impeachment. Impeachment is properly difficult to accomplish, so it is rarely used, but it is there when needed. The grounds are left properly vague, so it becomes a political decision, meaning the people’s representatives make the decision and are held accountable at election time. Well, at least after the Seventeenth Amendment, it’s been the people’s representatives. Score one point in favor of the Seventeenth. Of course, it’s likely to be repealed if President Patel keeps his promise.
I was nominated and appointed to Justice Spitzer’s seat, and I did not hesitate to actively prune back the progressive, extra-constitutional jungle of laws my predecessors had rubber-stamped. I was called a “judicial activist,” and I guess I proudly wear that label. To paraphrase Barry Goldwater, “Judicial activism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and judicial modesty in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
Here’s to Barry—the conservative Barry, of course! [The justice raises his pint.]
Chapter Six: Big Business
“Walmart Was Not Our Friend”
Contrary to the complaints of many critics within (and without) the movement, conservatism less redefined itself than reasserted itself during these years. One of the most important changes was how conservatism began to differentiate between “business” and “free enterprise,” and how it started ridding itself of the perception (and too often the reality) that it would reflexively excuse and defend even the most shamelessly corporatist of corporations.
The conservative breakup with Walmart and other giant companies that saw government as the tool of choice for lucrative contracts and to eliminate competitors marked a turning point that opened up conservatism to a second look by millions of Americans who formerly dismissed it. At the same time, the Democrats’ continued embrace of these rent-seekers became a huge propaganda target for the insurgents.
But this was only one area where conservatives made changes that both appealed to other Americans and were consistent with conservative values. Conservative support for people like the organic farmers who only wanted to sell their raw milk despite regulations pushed by the dairy industry brought in new allies, and it placed liberals in the uncomfortable position of defending the corporate-friendly status quo.
* * *
Billy Coleman (Activist)
Seventy-five years after the heyday of the hippie, Coleman is proud of his tie-dye fashion sense—and of his work with conservatives to counter the former retail juggernaut Walmart. Gesturing at a thriving mall of small shops on the outskirts of Denver, Coleman explains how conservatives’ abandonment of unprincipled allies led him to join.
This used to be a Walmart. Not anymore. Walmart found itself out of friends. I remember when the Republicans were killing themselves covering for Walmart and these other big companies—just killing themselves with working people who saw what these companies did to wages and communities. Yeah, they sold cheap stuff all right, most of it crap from China. They paid nothing for stuff from the US, so that drove down wages. For conservatives, making excuses for these companies was totally counterproductive.
See, the base for conservatives was always small business, but Walmart crushed small businesses. It was poison to the people who made conservatism work. Now, some conservatives thought of Walmart as some sort of capitalist success story, and maybe it was in its first few years. But then it grew so big that it started relying on the government to shift the playing field. It supported Obamacare to shift its workers onto Uncle Sam’s dime while crushing smaller competitors. It supported environmental regulations it could afford to comply with but that killed off competitors. It loved food stamps expansion—that meant more money for people to spend at its megastores.
The conservatives finally woke up to the fact that Walmart was just corporatism pretending to be free enterprise. And they stopped helping it.
Attacking Walmart was a huge step toward getting working folk to realize that conservatives were on the side of the little guy. Standing by us raw milk farmers, that was another. Hell, they made me a Republican. Can you believe it?
* * *
Dagny Eames (Libertarian Activist)
Walmart started out as a way to bring a vast array of goods at low prices to underserved markets, mostly outside the big cities. It did this by ruthlessly cutting costs and imposing efficiencies on itself and its suppliers. This was all great. But then it discovered that it was easier to hop in bed with the government than, you know, actually compete.
That was not so great.
This was a huge problem, and first the Obama and then the second Clinton administration just made it worse. Instead of fighting big business, they co-opted it. It was corporatism—corporatism where they publically slammed the people they were working hand in hand with.
Like so many giant businesses—General Motors, the banks—Walmart was a fraud, at least when it came to the issue of free enterprise. It wanted to be thought of as a torchbearer of capitalism to the suckers in the GOP who never met a company they didn’t like.
But Walmart and its ilk were no longer capitalist in any meaningful way—their path to success was no longer through competition and providing value but through government rent-seeking. They used their size and influence to shape the playing field so that competitors couldn’t even get off the bench, much less into the end zone.
As a libertarian, this really offended me. I hated the excuses the establishment Republicans made, and I detested the “understanding” these companies had with the Democrats—if we play ball, you’ll help us snuff out our competitors.
Walmart was a particularly odious example. It backed Obamacare even though that socialist fantasy was anathema to any free marketer. Why? It was good for their business. Obamacare saddled smaller competitors with huge new expenses while letting Walmart dump its workers off on the public treasury by cutting them to 29 hours per week.
And it supported green scams because it could afford to—and it knew its competitors could not. It had the capital to invest in “greening” itself, but those expenses would cripple its competitors.
Walmart even supported gun control because it wanted to corner the guns and ammo market. Small shops would be swamped by the new paperwork and record-keeping
requirements, leaving only Walmart.
By the second Obama administration, it was clear that Walmart and many other corporations were no longer about competition. They were about getting the government to kill of their competition on their behalf. And in return, there was campaign money and support when the politicians—in both parties—needed it.
What was worse for constitutional conservatives was that defending Walmart alienated conservatives’ natural allies, like us libertarians. The liberals Walmart sucked up to professed to hate it—they couldn’t say enough bad stuff about that retail monster, or about the banks or Big Pharma or any of the other corporatist frauds. The liberals got to pose as the protectors of the little guy when they were crushing the little guy.
And the Walmarts didn’t care what the liberals said; it cared how they voted, and the liberal politicians always went the way of their corporate allies in the end. So it ended up that the Republicans, including some conservatives, defended Walmart, thinking it was an ally, even as Walmart undercut everything conservatives believe in.
The thing is that the corporatists like Walmart were bringing ruin upon the working class by exporting jobs and driving down wages at home and then devastating the small business owners who formed the core of conservatism in America.
In other words, conservatives were too often siding with a liberal-aligned group that was wrecking the conservatives’ base. And all in the name of “free enterprise” that was hardly free and less an enterprise than a racket.
Conservative Insurgency: The Struggle to Take America Back 2009 - 2041 Page 13
