The Steal

Alex Wagner, a journalist and political analyst, argues that the conservative supermajority on the U.S. Supreme Court is not the result of lucky timing but the product of a decades-long, coordinated campaign by four right-wing hard-liners who began their work during the Reagan era. The book traces how Ed Meese, a law-and-order enthusiast who served as Reagan's closest advisor; Joe Coors, the wealthy Colorado beer magnate; Paul Weyrich, an ultrareligious conservative organizer from Wisconsin; and Robert Bork, a legal scholar and federal judge, worked in concert to reshape the federal judiciary and reverse decades of liberal social progress.

Wagner begins by establishing how each man's worldview was forged. Meese grew up in Oakland's insular, White, German American community, where his family's church relocated to a Whiter neighborhood rather than integrate with Black parishioners during the Second Great Migration of the 1940s. As a deputy district attorney in 1964, Meese helped orchestrate the police crackdown on UC Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, and five years later, under Governor Reagan, he directed a deadly response to the People's Park protests, where one protester was killed by police gunfire. These experiences cemented the partnership between Meese and Reagan, built on a shared hostility toward counterculture liberalism.

Coors, who opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and broader social changes, began channeling his beer fortune into conservative causes, winning a seat on the University of Colorado's Board of Regents to combat liberal campus influence. A chance letter from Coors's political assistant reached Weyrich, then a junior Senate staffer who envisioned building a conservative counterpart to the liberal advocacy networks he had watched operate on Capitol Hill. With Coors's funding, Weyrich launched the Heritage Foundation, a conservative policy think tank, in 1973, along with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), an organization that crafted conservative model legislation for state legislatures. Weyrich later co-founded the Moral Majority, an evangelical conservative political organization, with televangelist Jerry Falwell.

When Reagan won the presidency in a 1980 landslide, this infrastructure was in place. Two days after the election, Meese received the Heritage Foundation's Mandate for Leadership, a 20-volume blueprint for reshaping the federal government, and placed a copy on every cabinet member's chair at the first official meeting. An internal battle quickly erupted between the New Right, the hard-line conservative wing of the Republican coalition represented by Meese, and establishment moderates led by Chief of Staff James Baker. Coors used his position on Reagan's Kitchen Cabinet, an informal circle of wealthy outside advisors, to install hard-line conservatives in the administration, including Interior Secretary James Watt and EPA chief Anne Gorsuch, both of whom became liabilities and resigned under pressure.

Reagan's first Supreme Court appointment further exposed these tensions. When Justice Potter Stewart retired in 1981, a rushed vetting process produced Sandra Day O'Connor, an Arizona judge whose position on abortion was unknown to the administration. The New Right erupted, but O'Connor was confirmed unanimously. Within a week, Attorney General William French Smith delivered a speech questioning the use of the Fourteenth Amendment to protect rights he considered merely implied by the Constitution, including abortion. Wagner draws a direct line from Smith's 1981 arguments to Justice Samuel Alito's 2022 majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade.

The book traces the simultaneous creation of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal organization founded in 1982 by three young Yale conservatives, Steve Calabresi, Lee Liberman, and David McIntosh, with Bork and future Justice Antonin Scalia as faculty advisors. At the society's inaugural conference, Bork outlined originalism, the theory that constitutional rights exist only as the Founders originally understood them. Wagner argues this framework was strategically designed to provide an apolitical veneer for a conservative agenda. The Federalist Society quickly became the primary pipeline for placing young conservative lawyers into the Justice Department and onto federal benches. By the Trump presidency, every Republican-appointed Supreme Court justice was a member.

Wagner details how the administration weaponized other controversies to galvanize the conservative base. The case of Bob Jones University, a fundamentalist Christian school that practiced racial segregation and claimed it was divinely ordained, became a flashpoint. Weyrich recognized the political potential of framing the school's fight against IRS tax-exemption rules as a matter of religious liberty rather than racism, and this issue, not abortion, first drew evangelicals into organized political activism. The Reagan administration restored tax-exempt status to segregationist schools, but the backlash was so severe that Reagan reversed course. The Supreme Court ultimately ruled 8-1 against the schools.

Meese's own path to becoming attorney general was grueling. His 1984 nomination triggered a 13-month Senate battle over questionable financial entanglements, but he was confirmed in February 1985 and immediately set about reshaping the department with Federalist Society recruits. In a landmark 1985 speech to the American Bar Association, Meese declared originalism the administration's official judicial philosophy, insisting that judges interpret the Constitution according to its "original intention" (154) and that anything else constituted illegitimate activism.

The book's central dramatic arc concerns Reagan's attempts to fill Supreme Court vacancies. When Chief Justice Warren Burger retired in 1986, the administration chose Scalia over Bork, favoring Scalia's youth and the political advantage of nominating the first Italian American to the Court. Scalia was confirmed 98-0. Bork's moment came a year later when Justice Lewis Powell, the Court's swing vote, retired. Reagan nominated Bork, but Democrats mounted an unprecedented public campaign against him. Senator Ted Kennedy delivered a blistering speech describing a dystopian "Robert Bork's America," and Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Joe Biden delayed hearings for a then-record 77 days. During the hearings, Bork's candid answers proved devastating: He questioned the constitutional basis for desegregation, dismissed privacy rights, and appeared indifferent to women workers pressured into sterilization by their employer. His nomination failed 58-42, the most resounding rejection of a high court nominee in American history. Reagan's second choice, Douglas Ginsburg, withdrew after admitting to marijuana use. The seat went to Anthony Kennedy, a moderate who would later uphold abortion rights and author the majority opinion guaranteeing same-sex marriage.

Wagner argues that the Bork defeat, far from weakening the movement, became a recruitment bonanza that turned Bork into a conservative martyr and caused Federalist Society enrollment to surge. In the book's final chapters, Wagner traces how Clarence Thomas, a young Black conservative who led the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) under Reagan, navigated the conservative network by attending Federalist Society events and building relationships with key figures including Bush White House Counsel C. Boyden Gray. When Bork resigned from the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, the influential federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., Thomas strategized with operatives from Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation, a conservative advocacy organization, about filling the vacancy and eventually reaching the Supreme Court. Bush nominated Thomas to the DC Circuit in 1989, and Senator Biden accepted White House assurances that Thomas was not being groomed for the high court.

Wagner concludes that Democrats fundamentally misunderstood the scope of what conservatives were building. While the left focused on defeating individual nominees, the New Right constructed permanent infrastructure: the Federalist Society pipeline, the Heritage Foundation, ALEC, and a framework of originalist jurisprudence that reframed conservatism as apolitical principle. During his eight years, Reagan appointed nearly half the federal judiciary. Every federal judge appointed by the next two Republican presidents was either a Federalist Society member or approved by one. The work of these four men, Wagner argues, remained largely unnoticed until decades later, when the conservative Supreme Court majority overturned Roe v. Wade, ended affirmative action, and gutted the Voting Rights Act.