SO FAR, HE’S DOING PRETTY WELL: Inside the mind of Leonard Leo, Trump’s Supreme Court right-hand man.
He’s been called the “judicial puppet master,” “Trump’s Supreme Court whisperer,” and the “conservative pipeline to the Supreme Court.” He has played roles big and small in the confirmations of four of the nine U.S. Supreme Court justices, including the most recent, Justice Neil Gorsuch. . . .
“There are lots of countries around the world that have very long enumerations of rights, social and economic rights, political rights, civil rights. The Soviet Union had a Bill of Rights that was multiples longer than ours. Most of these countries around the world sign on to lots of [United Nations] charters that contain fundamental rights and other freedoms,” Leo said. “But at the end of the day, those are parchment barriers without serious limitations on government powers that can be enforced. And that’s what I came to realize, that the structural Constitution was the genius of the American founding and was ultimately going to protect our freedom and our dignity as people.
“That’s why I wanted to get involved,” he said of his decision to work at the Federalist Society. “I felt that was an important enterprise, and that this was the institution that was really promoting that idea in a way that no other institution had or was going to.”
Leo accepted the job offer 26 years ago, and today, serves as the organization’s executive vice president.
“This is someone who has fallen in love with the Constitution, with the American principles, and has spent his life trying to advance those,” Carrie Severino, chief counsel of the Judicial Crisis Network, told the Washington Examiner. “He had so many opportunities. He could have gone down a route of a high-paying firm. But he was crazy about the Federalist Society, and he ended up trying to follow his heart and his patriotic impulse there, and how amazingly successful that has become.”
I hope he reads this piece.