The American Constitution Society for Law and Policy was founded seven years ago to counter a growing right-leaning legal philosophy that has reshaped the American legal landscape on issues from the reach of federal regulation to the separation of church and state. Now, as President-elect Barack Obama assembles his administration, the little-known legal organization stands on the brink of influence it once could only imagine.
Eric H. Holder Jr., an ACS board member, has been nominated to be attorney general. Executive Director Lisa Brown has been tapped to be White House staff secretary, a key slot that involves reviewing all documents that go before the president. Board member Teresa Wynn Roseborough has been prominently mentioned as a possibility for several jobs in the Obama administration, including solicitor general
It is a remarkable turn for an organization born in the frustration that liberal legal thinkers shared over the Supreme Court's role in deciding George W. Bush's contested victory over Vice President Gore in 2000. Many of them saw in the high court's decision a need to counteract the growing influence of the conservative legal movement with a movement of their own.
"Over the past generation, the conservative movement has engineered a transformative revolution in our nation's jurisprudence," said Indiana University law professor Dawn Johnsen, an ACS board member who is working in the Obama transition. "Now a generation later, they have successfully changed the terms of legal debate and are moving America toward their radical end. The time is ripe to reverse this alarming trend."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/06/AR2008120601808.html?hpid=moreheadlinesGlad they were out there. Now they can come in from the cold and help reverse
the assault on the Constitution.
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