Saith Jeffrey Toobin in The New Yorker:

It can take a while even for Republicans to understand the breadth of the Federalist Society’s influence in Washington.  Alberto Gonzales, George W. Bush’s first White House counsel [now Dean of Belmont University College of Law], told me, “When I came to Washington, being an outsider from Texas, I knew that I would have to have some weapons in my arsenal to reassure conservative groups that I wasn’t some crazy guy from Texas.  I was familiar with the Federalist Society, but I’d never been active with it.”  Gonzales’s lack of connection with the group drew suspicion from the conservative legal community in Washington.  “Truth be told, maybe some of the more influential members, I think they were concerned about me going on to the Supreme Court,” Gonzales said.

Tim Flanigan, who was Gonzales’s deputy in the White House, told me, “The talk started to irritate Al, who was very proud of being a conservative.  He comes to Washington, and suddenly he feels like this group that he’s never heard of is attacking him, and he’s told that this group is very important to his judicial nominations.  We used to have a staff meeting of about a dozen lawyers, and at one of the early meetings Al started to vent a little bit about the Federalist Society, saying, ‘Who is this Federalist Society?’  And, finally, he’s getting frustrated, and he says, ‘How many of you here are members of the Federalist Society?’  And every hand in the room went up, except for Al’s and mine.”

The American left ought to recognize that the Federalist Society, at least in some respects, disciplines the excesses of modern conservatism by mainstreaming classical liberal ideas.  But that would leave insufficient opportunities for graft, so I understand the manufactured outrage.