No Secrets Here: Federalist Society Plots In the Open

So no secret handshakes in the Mayflower this week. Just the lawyer's uniform of charcoal or blue wool, and everywhere the black silhouette of James Madison, the patron saint of the society -- looking left, by the way. The hotel was thick with Democratic filibuster-bait: Priscilla R. Owen, Brett M. Kavanaugh, William H. Pryor Jr. -- all appellate judges with past confirmation battles.

"It's a great morale boost for me to get out of California and come to the real world," said William J. Emanuel, a lawyer from the Los Angeles chapter.

Washington? The real world? Emanuel said he meant the real intellectual world of the society.

The Federalists like to debate, and they take pride in disagreeing, a hallmark of intellectual honesty, they say.

At the panel yesterday morning on "Executive Power in Wartime," for example, Richard Epstein, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, said that "the president's claims to extensive powers . . . are woefully overstated. . . . This is a country of limited government, and this is sounding awfully despotic to me."

John Yoo, a University of California at Berkeley law professor and former Bush administration lawyer responded by asking, "Would you be willing to reverse all these decisions Lincoln made on his own authority?" referring to Lincoln's power grabs in the heat of the Civil War. In wartime, he said, it makes sense for the executive branch to have "a fair amount of room to run."

Which brings us back to Cheney's speech, and the little matter of those elections.

Cheney's talk was the sixth annual lecture in memory of Barbara K. Olson, who was killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Her widower, former solicitor general Ted Olson, who recently remarried, was in the audience.

The traditional theme of the address includes "limited government," but Cheney enumerated the many ways government power has been expanded to fight terrorism. Judging by the applause-o-meter, many Federalists agree with the administration's choices, including wiretapping suspected terrorist international calls.

"Some in our country may believe in good faith that retreating from Iraq would make America safer," Cheney said. "Recent experience teaches us the opposite lesson."

The Federalists admired the vice president as much for his message as for his steadfastness, wherever the political chips may be falling. Here was a man arguing from principle, they said, not politics. The vice president was playing the long game, too.

"No matter what happened a couple weeks ago, he made it clear why we need to do what we need to do," said Jeffrey Eilender, a lawyer from New York.

As for what actually did happen on Election Day, Eilender continued, "I don't see a lot of depression. The sense I have is we're very gratified for what has happened on the Supreme Court and the [federal appeals] courts."

The Federalists seemed possessed of the same old idealistic energy. One panelist compared intellectual property to sex -- an analogy we cannot pretend to grasp, but a ballroom full of Federalists chuckled knowingly.

"I feel good," said Robert Paul Koehler, a lawyer from Crawford, Colo. "I'm at a convention where people are talking about issues. Good smart people, and you hear both sides."

As for Republican losses at the polls, maybe they deserved it, Koehler said. "What happened to the Republican Party, it was no longer standing up for first principles."

How un-Federalist of the GOP.