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by xxpor 1581 days ago
If you don't think the conservative side doesn't have the same or more behind it, I really don't know what to tell you at this point.

Who's funding the federalist? Who's funding FedSoc?

They're just not as public about it.

2 comments

I love the mythical status liberals have elevated FedSoc to in their minds. FedSoc has about $20 million in revenue. SPLC alone had $130 million. The ACLU had $300 million. We’re outgunned 20:1 in numbers and in financing compared to liberal causes. 90% of people at any major law firm are significantly to the left of your average American, and lawyers are active donors.
Wait wait wait wait wait wait wait. FedSoc and ACLU have entirely different missions. FedSoc's liberal competitor is, as you know, the ACS. You didn't cite them because they're smaller than FedSoc, and you wanted the comparison more convenient to your argument.

I'm also not alarmed by FedSoc (or ALEC or any of this stuff), but come on, make serious arguments.

Yes and no. ACS is similar to FedSoc in that it just does thought leadership and not impact litigation. But you can’t discount that organizations like ACLU also do thought leadership in addition to impact litigation. ACS is so small in part because people who champion e.g. liberal views of immigration law can go into immigration specific organizations. In practice the entity opposite FedSoc on particular issues isn’t ACS, but those other organizations. If you go to a typical law school campus, there will be student chapters of dozens of liberal (or de facto liberal) organizations, while on the other side there will be Fed Soc, CLS, and maybe the St. Thomas Moore Society. There will also be numerous legal clinics, which are de facto liberal impact litigation shops.
But there are dozens of conservative public interest law non-profits, too, many with tens of millions of dollars in funding. We pay attention to FedSoc not because of its advocacy, but because it's a pipeline for conservative judges, like the ACS is for liberal judges. You've narrowed one side of the field but kept the other broad to set up a bogus comparison.

Again: I think the hyperventilation over FedSoc is silly, and FedSoc is doing a thing that "should" be done (I'm not a conservative).

Do you genuinely believe that conservative christians right now are on the offensive, and LGBT groups are on the defensive?
> Do you genuinely believe that conservative christians right now are on the offensive

I'm not American so i might be mistaken, but can the recent changes in abortion laws across a section of US states be explained in any other way?

Yes—Roe protects abortion through the end of the second trimester, which is out of sync with what 70% of the public believes: https://www.npr.org/2019/06/07/730183531/poll-majority-want-...

Mississippi’s 15-week ban, for example, would make the timing there somewhat more liberal than France or Denmark. It would also be consistent with the 70% of the public that thinks abortion should be legal, but only in the first trimester.

Conservatives are very much in a defensive crouch on Roe.

Do you genuinely believe the opposite? Just because more LGBT people are visible now doesn’t mean they’re winning some kind of fictional PR war.
Yes? Look at the various anti-trans laws or rules being passed, that's very much a fundamental defensive fight for LGBT. Some big companies making nice statements doesn't buy you very much if your healthcare gets killed.
They certainly are because of the Supreme Court makeup.