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All right. We're back and we are at the point in the story where we've reached the early 90s. It's 1992. We have Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which is the case we've talked about on the podcast before. But I think you have to understand from the conservative perspective what Casey represented. To do that, you have to understand their initial reaction to Roe v. Wade as well. Because in the 70s, they thought, well, look, we won. We elected Nixon and he appointed a bunch of Supreme Court justices. And then a lot of Nixon appointees ended up in the majority in Roe v. Wade, like Lewis Powell, Warren Burger. And so that wasn't sufficient. Like finally winning a presidential election was not sufficient. Appointing Supreme Court justices was not sufficient. It turned out, Supreme Court justices, even the conservative ones, hired liberal clerks

and ended up getting swayed by their clerks on issues. The previous understanding of what a conservative justice was was insufficient. That's right. And

so this is their learning in the 70s and the 80s that they need to do more. They need to build this out more. And you get in the 80s the dominance of the Reagan years, right? And they put Scalia on the court. They put Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy on the court. They have this new network of conservative students to be conservative justice clerks. So this is like building their anticipation at this point. And they're thinking, we're finally going to do it. In the early 90s, we're going to overturn Roe v. Wade. That is the mindset of the conservative movement going into Planned Parenthood v. Casey. It's the culmination of two decades of work. And then the case comes down and does not overturn Roe v. Wade. Get fucked, losers. Instead, it's core holding is upheld, although its protections are substantially weakened. And the plurality is made up of two Reagan appointees, Kennedy and Sandra Day O'Connor, and an HW Bush appointee, David Souter, to really sort of dig the knife in. And so conservatives are looking at this and saying, well, Robert Bork goes up there and answers honestly with things we all believe and he gets voted down and he doesn't get seated. These other so-called conservatives get up there and they give acceptable answers to the political elite, the governing majority. But then when push comes to shove, they're squishes. They give under pressure. They don't tow the partisan line and they don't come through for us, the conservatives. You might think the lesson to draw from that is that what you want the courts to do is just not broadly, politically popular and maybe to find a different goal. But no, they draw a very different lesson, which is essentially that they need some sort of vetting, a vetting system where they can trust someone who goes up there and gives bullshit non-answers in confirmation hearings will nonetheless come through for them when the tough case comes down. And this is something that the Federal Society is well suited to provide because conservatives aren't the majority on campus and are, in their view, sort of sneered at being a member of the Federalist Society is almost like proof of ideological commitment. You're willing to take the disdain of your peers and professors and wear it as like a badge of honor almost means that we can trust you that when you're in the hearing and you say Roe v. Wade is settled law, that we know

you're full of shit.