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.
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