Wade to ending affirmative action and curtailing federal regulatory power, recent Supreme Court decisions have reshaped American law. But the rightward shift of the court was not happenstance, political analyst Alex Wagner argues in her upcoming book, The Steal: Four Right-Wing Hard-Liners, One Republican Presidency, and the Raid on America’s Courts. Rather, it was the result of a well-planned, “harebrained” but disciplined long game to build conservative institutions that gained momentum during the Ronald Reagan years.
Those efforts helped elevate organizations such as the Heritage Foundation, the architect of Project 2025, and the Federalist Society, which became a key pipeline for conservative judicial talent, including all current Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices. In this exclusive excerpt from her book, Wagner introduces the four men who conceived, developed, funded and built these institutions which have fundamentally changed today’s courts. Ed Meese was moving into a corner office in the White House.
Ronald Reagan had seized the presidency in a landslide, and his conservative foot soldiers were no longer barbarians at the gate. They had stormed past it—in the most spectacular fashion imaginable. They had won the White House, the Senate and…most importantly, the American public.
It was 1980, and the right wing was going to make sure that this decade would be their decade. The rest of the country had turned its attention to Dallas and was glazing its eyeballs over something called Pac-Man. And up until this point, liberals thought the second half of the 20th century would be theirs to shape—through civil rights, equal rights and sexual freedom.
But Reagan’s ascension had thrown cold water all over the smugness and self-confidence with which the hippies believed they would inevitably shepherd the progress of this great country. Meese, named the head of the new administration’s transition effort the day after the 1980 election, had the enviable task of rounding up the sharpest and shrewdest minds in conservative America and offering them White House positions. The man himself was disheveled and disorganized, a middle-aged former DA who worshipped cops and hated protesters, an individual who did not cut an imposing figure on the national stage but would be an instrumental player nonetheless.
He was ruthlessly effective at quelling rebellion, summoning the troops and keeping his eye on the ball. President-elect Reagan had chosen a former [George] Bush man, a darling of the establishment named Jim Baker to be his chief of staff, but Meese had the real power: both the confidence of the president and the trust of the right-wing hardliners who formed the bedrock of Reagan’s support. Inside the White House, Meese was dubbed the “Prime Minister.” He was ambitious and clear-eyed, one of Reagan’s right-hand men during his time as governor of California who was subsequently imported to the Beltway once Reagan won the presidency.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
