Eschaton

Them Federalist Society lawyers sure do know how to party...

Before one event, a graybeard in the audience tutored a wet-behind-the-ears Federalist on the horrors of Travelgate, in which the Clinton White House did — well, nothing much, really. At the black-tie banquet, a satirical song took aim at "Brennan, Marx and Lenin." William Brennan, the Supreme Court justice who was being gleefully branded a communist, died in 1997.

The search for fictive liberal enemies reached a loopy low on the convention's last day, when an archconservative federal appeals court judge, Laurence Silberman, accused William Rehnquist's archconservative Supreme Court of having a secret plan to declare the death penalty unconstitutional. In an opinion just last month, the court reiterated its view that capital punishment is constitutional even for 16-year-olds.

But the event that most captured the spirit of the week was Kenneth Starr's speech and his introduction by Barbara Comstock, the head of the Justice Department's Office of Public Affairs. Between them, Ms. Comstock and Mr. Starr managed to rail against Bill Clinton, James Carville, Lanny Davis, James Jeffords, Alan Dershowitz, the Warren court, trial lawyers and Barbra Streisand.

Mr. Starr was particularly exercised about liberals' being result-oriented, abandoning their principles to reach the outcomes they favor. But he would have made a more compelling case if he had not proceeded to abandon his — and the Federalist Society's — own oft-repeated commitment to judicial restraint to praise the Supreme Court for striking down the Gun-Free School Zones Act and the Violence Against Women Act in a burst of conservative activism.