This is a good op-ed, and another illustration of why I think Republicans should just discuss the Federalist Society on its merits, rather than playing the Democrats' own game by resorting to shrill cries of McCarthyism.

Aww, Frank, that's so cute.

My experience of the FedSoc leads me to believe that it contains an equal proportion of people who think that smoking pot and filesharing copyrighted IP should be legal and people who enjoy listening to Judge Bork read the Seamus Heaney translation of Beowulf.

Actually, I think everybody would enjoy listening to Judge Bork read Beowulf. I sure did.

But the idea that FedSoc is a monolithic group with any kind of orthodoxy (other than a modicum of civility) is poppycock.

I think that it was Volokh conspirator David Bernstein, in his book, "You Can't Say That" who explains why the ACLU seems so scitzoid so much of the time, and that is that it is a collection of local (mostly state level) chapters, and each chapter has a lot of latitude on what they do and don't do. So, one chapter might sue on one side of an issue, and another, in the next state, on the other side of an equivalent issue. Free Speech was the subject at hand, when he asked how the ACLU could sometimes back it against Civil Rights, nondiscrimination, etc., and sometimes oppose it.

Hopefully, David will see this and correct me where appropriate.

But the key question remains unanswered; Why in heck (see rules below) do they call it the federalist society. My understanding of American history would indicate that most of these guys would have stood with Madison in the antifederalists. Now of course they might mean that they support the sentiments of the Federalist Papers but that is just confusing since the two main authors came to understand the meaning of the constitution in diametrically opposed ways.