In August 2022, Ron Desantis appointed his fourth Florida Supreme Court Justice, a Federalist Society Member named Renatha Francis. Since 2018, Ron Desantis has handpicked four out of the seven Supreme Court Justices moving the scale further and further right with each appointment. As controversial executive decisions are brought before the courts for judgement, many worry that this majority has leveraged Desantis unyielding power rendering the checks and balances system useless.

Republicans hold seats as Florida’s Governor, a majority in the State Senate, a majority in the State House of Representatives, The Cabinet, and State Supreme Court.

The particularly insidious undercurrent happening in the Florida Supreme Court AND the courts at every jurisdiction across the country, is the infiltration of The Federalist Society.

What is The Federalist Society? It’s a ultra-conservative legal organization of lawyers, judges and students across the country that advocate for a textualist and origininalist interpretation of the U.S. Constitution.

What does that mean? The study of law teaches there are two ways to interpret statutory law: purposivism and textualism. Purposivism identifies the intent behind the law to interpret it, asking why was this law created, what was the intent behind this law, what case law used to establish this statute. Textualism on the other hand, is what is the objective meaning of these words, how can the words used in this law be interpreted, and ignores the intended purpose of the reasoning for the stature by dissecting the words of the law. Purposivism is classically, how laws have been interpreted and create reliability and consistency which establishes precedent which is what previously gave the country faith in justice. Textualism is what the Federalist Society members practice and is the reason we are able to see laws that have been interpreted the same way for nearly a century, change meaning all of a sudden.

The organization was founded in 1982 at Yale and Harvard for students who felt that their education was pushing a “liberal and left-wing agenda”. This has now grown to over 70,000 members of attorneys, legislators, judges, governors, etc infiltrating every branch, and every jurisdiction across the country. They operate from the perspective that God and the church was not meant to be excluded from our government, and that it is necessary for order.

It is inconceivable that so many judges, that are supposed to be non-partisan are members of the Federalist Society, a clearly partisan organization, but because it’s not a party itself they are able to hide under the radar in plain sight. They have a concise and communicated process on interpreting law, and is the reason why we have witnessed several laws protecting rights, seemingly change in such a short amount of time.

They are everywhere. Five Republican Supreme Court Justices, Ted Cruz, Alex Acosta, Carlos G. Muniz (Florida’s Chief Justice), Mitch McConnell, George Conway, Ann Coulter, and judges across the country’s districts.

The current purpose of this organization is using their legal knowledge and the principle of textualism they find technicalities on the way laws were written to reinterpret them despite precedence, and secure the benefits they receive from those changes across all levels of government.

It is a bleak and sobering realization, but being informed and understanding their process is the first step at dismantling this corrupt system that allows organizations that uphold the christian white supremacy to infiltrate our justice system.