The Federalist Society: Judicial Think Tank or Plot Against America?

That's the question posed by the Christian Science Monitor:

Suspicion that hidden groups sway the powerful and subvert democracy routinely surfaces in American life, especially at times when the country is deeply divided. In early decades of the Republic, the whispers were about Freemasons. Later, they ranged from bankers and communists to the Trilateral Commission.

Now, it's the Federalist Society. In the run-up to the first Supreme Court confirmation in more than a decade, the group is drawing fire, especially as Democrats sharpen their line of questioning about court nominee John Roberts and his links to the society.

On its face, the Federalist Society is just another think tank in a town awash with them. But critics see something more - a well-oiled juggernaut out to remake the courts in the image of Robert Bork, the Supreme Court nominee rejected by the Senate in 1987, who predicted that a new generation, "often associated with the Federalist Society," would transform the legal profession:

"It may take 10 years, it may take 20 years for the second wave to crest, but crest it will, and it will sweep the elegant, erudite, pretentious and toxic detritus of nonoriginalism out to sea," he said in a 1987 speech. Judge Bork now cochairs the society's Board of Visitors with Sen. Orrin Hatch (news, bio, voting record) (R) of Nevada, a member and former chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

"Twenty years later, the organization designed to carry forward Bork's jurisprudence is trying to get access to the top courts in the country," says Alfred Ross, president and founder of the Institute for Democracy Studies (IDS) in New York. "It's extremely dangerous."

More than a third of the judges President Bush has sent to appeals courts are members of the Federalist Society, say Democratic staffers on the Senate Judiciary Committee. (That compares with zero for his predecessor, President Clinton.) It's a talking point the Bush White House takes so seriously that it asked news organizations to retract reports that Judge Roberts has ever been a member.