How Four Conservative Architects Reshaped the Federal Judiciary During the Reagan Era
Recent Supreme Court decisions—from the overturning of Roe v. Wade to the end of affirmative action and the curtailment of federal regulatory power—have fundamentally reshaped American law. According to political analyst Alex Wagner, this rightward shift was not happenstance. In her upcoming book, The Steal: Four Right-Wing Hard-Liners, One Republican Presidency, and the Raid on America’s Courts, Wagner argues it was the result of a well-planned, “harebrained” but disciplined long game to build conservative institutions that gained momentum during the Ronald Reagan years.
Those efforts helped elevate organizations such as the Heritage Foundation, the architect of Project 2025, and the Federalist Society, which became a key pipeline for conservative judicial talent. Every current Republican-appointed Supreme Court justice has ties to the Federalist Society. In this exclusive excerpt, Wagner introduces the four men who conceived, developed, funded, and built the institutions that have fundamentally changed today’s courts.
Ed Meese: The Inside Man
Ed Meese was moving into a corner office in the White House. Ronald Reagan had seized the presidency in a landslide, and his conservative foot soldiers were no longer barbarians at the gate. They had stormed past it—in the most spectacular fashion imaginable. They had won the White House, the Senate and, most importantly, the American public.
It was 1980, and the right wing was going to make sure that this decade would be their decade. The rest of the country had turned its attention to Dallas and was glazing its eyeballs over something called Pac-Man. Up until this point, liberals thought the second half of the 20th century would be theirs to shape—through civil rights, equal rights and sexual freedom. But Reagan’s ascension had thrown cold water all over the smugness and self-confidence with which the hippies believed they would inevitably shepherd the progress of this great country. The left lost.
Meese, named the head of the new administration’s transition effort the day after the 1980 election, had the enviable task of rounding up the sharpest and shrewdest minds in conservative America and offering them White House positions. The man himself was disheveled and disorganized, a middle-aged former DA who worshipped cops and hated protesters, an individual who did not cut an imposing figure on the national stage but would be an instrumental player nonetheless. He was ruthlessly effective at quelling rebellion, summoning the troops and keeping his eye on the ball.
President-elect Reagan had chosen a former George Bush man, a darling of the establishment named Jim Baker, to be his chief of staff, but Meese had the real power: both the confidence of the president and the trust of the right-wing hardliners who formed the bedrock of Reagan’s support. Inside the White House, Meese was dubbed the “Prime Minister.”
He was ambitious and clear-eyed, one of Reagan’s right-hand men during his time as governor of California who was subsequently imported to the Beltway once Reagan won the presidency. The two men had been aligned in their conservative vision from the start.
A Law-and-Order Conservative Before It Was Mainstream
While other Yale graduates were self-radicalizing in the middle sixties, newly awoken to the Civil Rights Movement and campaigning for social justice, Meese was not. In 1966, at the ripe old age of 35, Meese already believed American society to be in steep decline, a free-for-all where the rules no longer applied.
Giving the keynote address to the International Association of Auto Theft Investigators—a room clearly primed for this kind of message—Meese warned:
“Too often a concept of permissiveness has pervaded society, which no longer holds individuals responsible for their actions nor penalizes those who commit transgressions against the rest of society.”
Meese, even as a young man, was an avatar of law-and-order conservatism in the middle of the Mamas and the Papas bohemianism, a crew-cut antidote to the liberalism of the day.
“We must return to a social climate where the law is respected and obeyed, where the individual is held responsible for his acts, and where criminal offenses are followed by just punishments.”
In 1967, his first year in office, Governor Reagan hired Meese, a deputy district attorney and army reservist, as his “extradition and clemency secretary.” Meese would not look to soften criminal sentences. He aimed to make them tougher, as someone who believed that “deterrents to criminality” had been removed to the degree that “the dedicated lawbreaker knows he has a good chance of escaping any type of real punishment.”
As Governor Reagan looked to reorient the justice system away from leniency and rehabilitation, and toward harsher sentencing and more cellblocks, Meese was his man, heading up initiatives like Project Safer California in the mid-1970s, and acting as an adviser for a “fixed-term sentencing” task force at the end of the decade. This focus on the courts and the decisions granted within them ultimately led Meese to what would become, in many ways, the focus of his years in the Reagan White House: the judges themselves.
Meese knew that the gavel was the hinge point in determining whether a society was protected or not, whether its citizens followed a wholesome path or were lured astray. Judges could set precedents and parameters, act as guardrails or remove them entirely. For Meese, they were the whole ballgame.
While Reagan was still governor, Meese worked to enhance the quality of judicial nominees, ensuring that the men and women who sat on the California bench met a rigorous standard and “understood and believed in the law,” however Governor Reagan decided to define that.
Once Reagan was elected president, this project would become a mission. Meese himself would later call his work to overhaul the judiciary “one of the most important and constructive legacies of the Reagan era.”
He was not wrong.
The Blueprint: Targeting the Judicial Branch
By the end of 1980, Republicans controlled the executive branch. They had made significant inroads in capturing the legislative branch, as well: The GOP held the Senate and the New Right had begun influencing policymaking in Congress. But the judicial branch—and the federal courts, specifically—were virgin territory with extraordinary potential. These courts ran independent of an election season; their rulings held far more permanence than legislation that could be amended or repealed depending on who was in power and what was the vanguard of the day.
From his perch just down the hall from President Reagan—evidence of his established authority in Reagan’s inner circle—Meese was well-positioned to remake American law and justice, but he needed help. He’d get it. Before Reagan’s first year in office was complete, Meese would ensure that the Justice Department was fully engaged in the battle for the bench.
The Builders: Money, Power, and Activism
The work of transforming the courts would require money, power and activism. The men who helped Ed Meese in this mission were not formally engaged in his plot, but they worked in concert all the same.
On the outside, there was Joe Coors, the wealthy Colorado beer magnate who detested the desegregation and secularization of the country almost as much as he hated organized labor. When he wasn’t trying to break unions, Coors was supporting nascent conservative campaigns—like Ronald Reagan’s presidential one—and bankrolling movement efforts to unwind civil rights and social progress. One of Coors’ main investments was in Paul Weyrich.
Weyrich was young, not yet 35, a railroad enthusiast and former radio reporter from Racine, Wisconsin, a deeply religious conservative who was once described as having the manner of a “formal, slightly constipated owl.” Weyrich was a Barry Goldwater acolyte who became a deep skeptic of squish conservatives like Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. His party had gone soft and so Weyrich would dedicate his life to finding its backbone—by working outside the system to force change within it.
Judge Robert Bork of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, a Marxist-turned-Marine-turned-conservative radical, would be the man on the ground, embedded in the heart of conservative law circles. By the time Reagan was measuring drapes in the White House, Bork was a semi-famous professor at Yale Law School—where he served as a faculty adviser to a fledgling conservative law school student group that was calling itself the Federalist Society.
In this small circle of unlikely warriors—a disheveled police enthusiast with a punitive streak; an ultrareligious college dropout with a thing for trains; a joyless, paranoid beer magnate who believed that ZIP codes were an insidious government plot; a testy conservative contrarian who was a onetime advocate for the New Deal—the plan to take the courts was put in play. Meese was the Inside Man, the one who could operate from the center of the machine they were all trying to rewire. Weyrich would draw the blueprints and Coors would fund the larger operation with his bottomless pockets. Bork’s jurisprudence was a compass and his lawyerly pipeline an army of recruits to help execute the plan.
The Results: A Conservative Judicial Monolith
Like the best heists, the work of these men was stealthy: Their progress mostly remained unnoticed until the alarm bells began ringing, long after they had left the building. While America’s system of justice was slowly being perverted, the country Aqua-Netted its hair and traded stocks, snorted coke and danced to Boy George—laughing at Reagan or praising him over the course of a decade, never really understanding that the red-sweatered president was merely a sunny figurehead atop a movement more cutthroat and angry than the glasnost-and Madonna-loving public could ever imagine.
The full effect of the work of these strange thieves would not be understood for decades to come, but it was in the shadows of the Reagan White House that the foundations were laid for the conservative judicial monolith that has, nearly half a century later, reoriented American society away from its expected magnetic north. As you read this, the conservative majority of the Supreme Court has finally overturned Roe v. Wade, brought religion back into the public square, ended landmark civil rights protections and sanctioned discriminatory policies across the country.
It is an outcome more spectacularly effective than even Weyrich and Meese and Bork and Coors could have imagined, back when they began their work in earnest, in 1981: a federal judiciary so deeply at odds with American public opinion—to say nothing of the last half century of social progress—that to envision it would have been, perhaps, delusional.
Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books, a division of Macmillan Publishers, from The Steal: Four Right-Wing Hard-Liners, One Republican Presidency, and the Raid on America’s Courts. Copyright © 2026 Alex Wagner. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Read Newsweek’s interview with Alex Wagner here.
