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Another way of putting is is that for more than a century, the Supreme Court has been the primary instrument of transforming the federal government and its sphere of influence following the progressive program. Conservatives only in our lifetimes wised up enough to set up the pipeline, as you put it, and it has only just borne any fruit in the form of walking back a bare handful of the most extreme points of that program.
We shouldn't be surprised that progressives would turn on it so quickly, because it has always been a question of what means would achieve the necessary end of transforming America and being on the right side of history. The Supreme Court was their darling because it was the most effective tool, not because of any underlying principles about the primacy of the judiciary over other branches of government.
Pre-Reagan, there was no conservative pipeline to set up. Not a lot of libertarian lawyers, after all.
It was the aftereffects of Roe that gave the federalist society ammo. When Catholics broke with the democrats there was suddenly a source of lawyers who had gone to the kinds of law schools judges go to. Before all this, there simply weren’t strongly conservative lawyers to appoint as judges.
It's a great point that the conservative judicial pipeline is almost exclusively Catholic and that Roe v Wade had a huge role in motivating intellectual Catholics to rethink their progressive association.
In Latin America, where abortion was simply off the table until quite recently, the Catholic Church tended to be associated with either the authoritarian right or center left.
This is largely because the center right is a ‘free markets first’ phenomenon, which jives poorly with Catholic teaching. Both authoritarian right wing priorities and the broad centrist center left do much better. In the USCCB there’s a division between bishops that align themselves as extremely moderate democrats and the currently dominant wing which is basically eccentric right wing republicans. Neither are particularly libertarian.
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