Every president deserves an attorney general as learned, prudent, and loyal as Ed Meese proved to be to Ronald Reagan. As such, I urge Pam Bondi, President-elect Trump’s nominee for AG, Trump’s Deputy Attorney-designate Todd Blanche, and every other new appointee to the Department of Justice to read The Meese Revolution by Professors Steven Gow Calabresi and Gary Lawson. In fact, every political appointee in the new administration across all agencies and departments and the 115,000 career employees who work for DOJ ought to read this stellar intellectual history of the Meese era at Justice. Certainly, every serious member of the Federalist Society will, and every member of every law school faculty ought to do so (but won’t, as the legal academy largely recoils from "originalism" and won’t be much interested in the man primarily responsible for its ascendency and what proponents hope is it’s unfolding triumph).
"Every development over the last four decades that has led to the modern successes of originalism can be traced to Ed Meese," Calabresi and Lawson conclude. Indeed, all of originalism’s many "roads lead to Ed Meese."
That Meese "was the indispensable man in promoting, publicizing, and legitimizing both originalism and the Reagan Revolution" is just one of the many large claims of this book. "[T]hose who do not understand Ed Meese’s role in shaping American law do not understand American law," is another. The third and most far-reaching claim? That Meese is "the most significant Attorney General in U.S. history." A complete argument for any of these propositions is enough to fill a book. Calabresi and Lawson should persuade any reader with an open mind of all of them. The authors have the evidence, the history, and the Supreme Court decisions of the four-plus decades since Reagan swept into the White House to prove their claims.
Calabresi had a unique advantage in coauthoring a combination biography and intellectual history of the "Meese Revolution"—he had a major role in it as a senior aide to Meese at DOJ and then within the White House staff for the last two years of Reagan’s second term. Lawson is, like Calabresi, a large figure among originalists in the legal academy, and both men have records of scholarship and teaching that set standards young academics can only hope to equal. Both are senior figures in the Federalist Society. Their credentials opened the doors to them of every senior player in the Meese DOJ and most of the Reagan-era giants. Their research is complete, their scholarship evident, but it does not weigh down the reader as law professors often do when they take to writing books for the public at large.
Laymen will find The Meese Revolution the primer they may have longed for as the debate about the Supreme Court, and originalism moves into its new phase under the incoming president. Trump and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell combined to save the Meese Revolution—and the Constitution—when the latter declined to hold any hearings or votes on any nominee of then-president Barack Obama for the vacancy created by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia and the former published a list of potential justices from whom he would pick a nominee should he win the 2016 election. Trump’s promise to nominate a justice from a list of 22 originalists, the authors correctly note, was decisive in Trump’s win in 2016. "A poll done after Trump won … showed that among voters for whom Supreme Court and other federal judicial appointments was the number-one voting issue, Donald Trump led Hillary Clinton by a 57 percent to 43 percent margin."
Even many of those who have followed the confirmation wars of the past 40 years will be surprised to learn of the Meese connection to Trump’s first White House counsel Don McGahn, but it is long-standing. In fact, there are very few senior lawyers inside the Beltway who are originalists who don’t have a Meese connection.
Full disclosure: I was a special assistant to Attorney General William French Smith when he retired, and Meese arrived on the fifth floor of Justice. AG Meese graciously retained all of Smith’s aides until we moved on—in my case to the White House Counsel’s office. I first clerked, however, for Judge Roger Robb of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Robb chaired the special panel of judges who appointed independent counsels under the now-expired law that provided for them.
Meese was accused of wrongdoing by D.C. Democrats in an attempt to stop his arrival at DOJ and triggered the provisions of that misbegotten statute that has long since sun-setted, despised by both parties. But it was in force at the time of Meese’s nomination to become AG, and I watched in the room as Robb imposed Jacob Stein on his two colleagues on the panel as a serious man who would not prolong his appointment or unnecessarily delay the investigation of Meese and who would speak clearly and decisively on whether charges should be brought or a conclusion of exoneration rendered.
Calabresi and Lawson recount the Stein appointment and subsequent five-month investigation that completely acquitted Meese of the partisan attacks on him and which then led to his confirmation. Would that Robert Mueller or Jack Smith had the learning and the decisiveness of Stein. The country would have been spared the last eight years of lawfare and the crumbling of the reputation of the leadership at the FBI and DOJ that followed the choice of these two "Special Prosecutors" who emulated the disreputable Lawrence Walsh of Iran-Contra infamy as opposed to Stein.
The chapter in The Meese Revolution on the use and abuse of independent counsels under the expired law, as well as of "special counsels" under DOJ regulations, is comprehensive and should be assigned to every constitutional law class in the land. General Meese has always been a friend to every young lawyer whose career he touched, and my experience was no different. In the decades since, when I have broadcast from the studios in the Heritage Foundation, Meese would often come through and catch up briefly. Calabresi and Lawson make clear how dedicated he was to the careers of the young lawyers he mentored for long or short periods.
Meese’s "coaching tree" of judicial appointments is fully covered by the professors, but a reader should pay close attention to all the names of lawyers whose careers Meese either launched or nourished along the way. It is astonishing. To my knowledge, none of them has ever said a bad word in public or private about Meese, and not because of his mentoring and support, but because he and his wife Ursula are simply the equal of anyone in the virtues one hopes every public servant brings with them to office: honesty, fairness, good humor, and great knowledge of the law generally and especially the Constitution.
Calabresi and Lawson carefully chronicle Meese’s entire career and his time in Reagan’s White House in the first term. (I had forgotten that Meese served eight years as a member of the National Security Council.) Meese’s early introduction to Governor Reagan was almost accidental, and serendipity or Providence provided the most consequential president since FDR with a right-hand man who had no concept of self-interest, only service.
Meese had an ambitious agenda for DOJ that he laid out in dozens of speeches, the most significant of which are in the book. Meese also empowered his closest aide, Ken Cribb, to build the "DOJ University School of Law," and to turn that school into an engine for driving the restoration of the actual Constitution to a place of primacy in the work of the Supreme Court.
That may sound odd to anyone new to the debates of originalists vs. "living Constitution" enthusiasts, and Calabresi and Lawson do a great service by explaining the evolution of the various "schools" of interpretive approach to the Constitution and, at least for now, the triumph of originalism with the nomination by Trump and confirmation by the McConnell-led Senate of Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. Those three join Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito as part of the six justice originalist majority on the Court. Readers can disagree with some of the judgments of the justices rendered by the authors but not with their succinct summaries of the crucial issues that have made headlines over the 40 years since Meese set to resurrecting the boundaries laid out in the Constitution and its amendments. Constitutional law has rarely been served up for laymen in such an easy-to-absorb fashion.
Readers should especially appreciate the authors’ review of the First Amendment’s religion clauses and their provocative assessment of property rights jurisprudence as well as many other niches of the field of constitutional law. But this isn’t a casebook or a law review note. It’s an intellectual history of what Meese wrought, and it’s riveting.
If you pass this book by, you will be missing out on the easiest hack to so many legal controversies that have broken into the headlines since Ronald Reagan took the White House from Jimmy Carter. And you will be missing a wonderfully complete portrait of an indispensable public servant and aide to Reagan. Meese is the equal of anyone in any administration in modern times when it comes to character and modesty, generosity of spirit, and resolve to keep the Constitution at the center of our Republic’s functioning. Do read it. Especially if you work for or aspire to work for the DOJ.
The Meese Revolution: The Making of a Constitutional Moment
by Steven Gow Calabresi and Gary Lawson
Encounter Books, 480 pp., $39.99
Hugh Hewitt is a professor of law at Chapman University Fowler School of Law, where he has taught constitutional law since 1996, and host of The Hugh Hewitt Show, M-F 6-9 a.m. Eastern.