Part 1: In 1998, a legal revolution was quietly born in Texas. It would pull America’s courts rightward. | The Texas Tribune

This blog originally appeared at The Texas Tribune.

With his election as Texas attorney general, U.S. Sen. John Cornyn planted the seeds of conservatism. Gov. Greg Abbott used his tenure to cultivate them into an aggressive strain of right-wing activism aimed at driving the nation’s courts and laws to the right.

Righting the Rule of Law

In March, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott sat before the next generation of conservative legal warriors and shared with them the gospel of Texas.

The story began several decades earlier, when conservative lawyers like himself looked out over the nation’s legal landscape and saw “opinion after opinion after opinion that seemed to rewrite the Constitution,” Abbott told this gathering of law students put on by the Federalist Society.

The nation had strayed from its constitutional roots, as divined by these conservatives, and their vision of America as a Christian nation was slipping away: Federal courts were protecting abortion rights, keeping prayer out of schools, restricting gun ownership and letting the federal government rein in the liberties of states, businesses and individuals.

It was long past time to put an end to it.

“A principle that causes America to stand apart from all other countries is our Constitution and our adamant insistence on the rule of law,” Abbott explained. But the way things were going back then, “we would soon become the rule of men, whoever was interpreting and applying the law.”

The rule of law is often cast as democracy’s equalizer, a nonpartisan social contract insulated from politics and arbitrated by impartial judges. But as these conservative lawyers realized, quite the opposite is true.

Whoever shapes the courts shapes the law.

So it was to the federal judiciary, paradoxically ripe for ideological influence with its unelected, lifetime appointees, that those conservative lawyers turned for salvation. In that crusade, Texas would become their Jerusalem.

In less than a generation, the Texas Office of the Attorney General transformed into the beating heart of a nationwide conservative legal revolution. Under three occupants, including Abbott, the office barraged the federal courts with state-funded lawsuits born of increasingly overt right-wing activism. The best and brightest of the conservative legal elite came to Austin to help Texas become “the standard bearer for the United States in showing what the rule of law is,” Abbott said.

By the time Abbott spoke to this auditorium of rapt law students in March, his was a success story. Disciples of this movement — alumni of the Texas attorney general’s office and their ideological allies — now fill the federal bench, often deciding the lawsuits Texas continues to bring against the federal government.

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