Who Does Sarah Isgur Work For?
It's definitely not America.
The question has a literal answer and a structural answer, and the literal answer does not satisfy the question.
The literal answer is The Dispatch. Sarah Isgur is a senior editor of the conservative-leaning digital media company founded in 2019 by Steve Hayes and Jonah Goldberg and Toby Stock, where she hosts the legal podcast Advisory Opinions with David French and edits SCOTUSblog since The Dispatch acquired it in late 2024. French formally works for The Dispatch as well, and additionally for The New York Times, where he has been an opinion columnist since January 2023. The two of them produce, twice a week, a podcast of considerable professional polish, in which they discuss the federal courts and the cases before them with appropriate respect for the institutions, careful attention to doctrinal complexity, and the kind of measured tone the audience associates with seriousness.
This answer is true and it does not satisfy the question. It does not satisfy because the question, as it is being asked here, is not asking who signs the checks. The question is asking what the pattern of the work is for, what intellectual and political ecosystem the work is embedded inside, what the work is doing in the world even when the work appears to be merely the careful explication of legal doctrine.
The pattern, when you look at it carefully, is unmistakable. And the pattern’s name is the answer to the question.
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Begin with the resumes, because the resumes are the documentary record of the institutional ecosystem these two professionals have spent their entire careers inside.
Isgur went to Harvard Law School. While there, she was president of the Harvard Federalist Society chapter, which is among the most consequential things a law student can be inside the conservative legal movement, because the Federalist Society chapter presidency is one of the standard credentials for the network’s identification of its rising professionals. After law school, she clerked for Judge Edith Jones of the Fifth Circuit, who is one of the most conservative federal appellate judges of the past forty years and a key node in the Federalist Society judicial-selection network. She then worked at Cooper & Kirk, the firm of Charles Cooper, who is a major Federalist Society figure and one of the principal litigators of the conservative legal movement. She also worked at Wiley Rein, another elite conservative-movement litigation shop. From there she moved to the National Republican Senatorial Committee as legal counsel. Then to Ted Cruz’s 2010 Texas attorney-general campaign as political director. Then to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. Then to the Republican National Committee as deputy communications director from 2013 to 2015. Then to Carly Fiorina’s super PAC and then her presidential campaign, where she was deputy campaign manager. Then, in December 2016, to the Trump transition, where she joined Jeff Sessions’s confirmation team and ran his mock confirmation hearings. Then to the Department of Justice as spokesperson for the Office of Public Affairs and senior counsel to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein during the Mueller Investigation. Then, after Sessions was fired and Isgur with him, briefly to CNN (a hire that produced internal revolt and was rescinded), then to ABC News as a contributor, then to The Dispatch in November 2019.
This is not the resume of a neutral legal analyst. This is the resume of a Republican political operative with deep credentials inside the conservative legal movement who pivoted to media after the political infrastructure she was working inside became uncongenial to her with the Trumpist takeover of the Republican party.
French’s path runs through a different but adjacent corner of the same ecosystem. Harvard Law. Senior counsel at the American Center for Law and Justice, which is Jay Sekulow’s organization, one of the principal Christian-right litigation shops of the past forty years. Senior counsel at the Alliance Defending Freedom, one of the most active conservative-Christian litigation organizations in the country, which has argued and won numerous Supreme Court cases narrowing the application of antidiscrimination law and expanding religious-liberty doctrine. President of FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, now Expression. JAG officer in the Iraq War, Bronze Star. National Review senior writer, 2015 to 2019. Co-founder and senior editor of The Dispatch, 2019. New York Times opinion columnist, January 2023 to present.
These are not neutral career paths. These are the career paths of two professionals who have spent their entire working lives inside one specific institutional ecosystem — the Federalist Society and the conservative-Christian legal movement and the Republican political infrastructure and the conservative-media apparatus that the Powell Memo project began funding in 1971 and that has now been operating for fifty-five years.
What distinguishes Isgur and French from most of their peers in this ecosystem is that they broke with the Trumpist insurgency in 2016 and have remained, sincerely and at some professional cost, Never Trump conservatives. This is real. This is worth giving them credit for. They have written and said things, repeatedly and on the record, that have made them unwelcome in significant portions of the institutional space they used to inhabit. French in particular has paid real costs — sustained personal attacks, threats to his family, the loss of friends and professional relationships — for his refusal to align with the populist-Trumpist takeover of the conservative movement.
But the Never Trump conservative position has a structural feature that is the subject of this piece. The position requires its practitioners to maintain a particular distinction. The distinction is between the good parts of the conservative legal movement and the bad parts of the contemporary right. The good parts are the Federalist Society judicial pipeline, the originalist jurisprudence, the careful doctrinal work of the conservative legal academy, the institutional rigor of the conservative think tanks, the constitutional seriousness of figures like the late Antonin Scalia and the late William Rehnquist and the still-living Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito and John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett. The bad parts are the populist-Trumpist insurgency, the Christian-nationalist movement, the conspiratorial right of the Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon and Curtis Yarvin variety, the petro-AI rentier coalition that has captured the executive branch.
The position requires that these two clusters be treated as separable. The position falls apart if they are understood as products of the same forty-year project.
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This is where the obscurantism enters, and it enters through a specific legal doctrine.
On June 2, 2026, the Advisory Opinions episode that gave occasion to this piece was published under the title President Trump’s Losing Streak. The episode discusses the Kennedy Center ruling, the Trump v. IRS motion, and the injunction on the weaponization fund. The framing — implicit but consistent — is that the legal system is functioning. Trump is acting unlawfully. The courts are constraining him. The constitutional order is holding. The professionals discussing the cases are reassuring their audience, in the register of doctrinal sobriety, that the institutions are doing their work.
This framing is true at the level of the cases discussed. The framing is false at the level of the cases not discussed. And the cases not discussed are precisely the ones where the structural question becomes inescapable.
Trump fires inspectors general en masse, in evident violation of statutes governing their removal, gutting the oversight architecture that Congress built into the executive branch precisely to prevent the kind of self-dealing the current administration is now engaged in. No federal court has constrained these firings, and the reason is that under current standing doctrine, no plaintiff has been able to establish the concrete particularized injury the doctrine requires.
Trump installs DOGE personnel inside the Treasury payment system, the IRS database, the Social Security records, the security clearances database, in violation of the Privacy Act and a stack of other statutes. Some plaintiffs have managed to establish standing in some of these cases, after extended litigation. In many of the cases, plaintiffs have been dismissed on standing grounds. Where plaintiffs have survived, the merits proceed slowly while the data continues to be accessed.
Trump bombed Iran in February of this year without congressional authorization, killing four hundred American service members and dragging the country into a Middle Eastern war that Congress had not voted on. Members of Congress have repeatedly attempted to assert standing in war-powers cases for fifty years and have repeatedly been rejected. Citizens whose tax dollars fund the bombing and whose sons and daughters were placed at risk have, under current doctrine, no concrete particularized injury. No federal court has reached the merits.
Trump appointed, on the morning of June 2, by a Truth Social post, the Director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency to be Acting Director of National Intelligence, in evident violation of the Federal Vacancies Reform Act and possibly the Appointments Clause itself. Standing? The intelligence community has been injured but cannot sue itself. Members of the Senate Intelligence Committee have institutional interests but the Roberts Court has narrowed congressional standing nearly to nullity in Raines v. Byrd and its successors. Citizens whose security depends on a functioning intelligence community have no concrete particularized injury under the doctrine. The action stands.
What standing doctrine does, in its current form, is to insulate the largest and most consequential executive actions — the ones that affect everyone in general but no one specifically enough to satisfy the doctrine’s criteria — from judicial review. The smaller, more specific actions can be challenged. The structural, system-altering actions cannot. This is precisely the inversion of what a constitutional check would, by design, want to do.
And this doctrine — this is the part that the Never Trump conservative position cannot say plainly without dismantling itself — was constructed by the conservative legal movement, deliberately, over the past five decades, for exactly this purpose.
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The historical doctrine, the one that prevailed from the founding through roughly the mid-twentieth century, was significantly more permissive. Citizen suits, taxpayer suits, qui tam actions, generalized grievance suits, suits by state attorneys general on behalf of their populations, suits by members of Congress to enforce constitutional limits on the executive — all of these were routinely entertained by federal courts. The system worked because the courts could reach structural constitutional violations even when no single plaintiff had been distinctively harmed. Marbury v. Madison itself would not survive the standing analysis the Roberts Court now applies; William Marbury’s injury was the denial of a commission for an office that paid no salary and conferred no power he did not already have, and the modern doctrine would dismiss the case for failure to establish redressable concrete harm.
The narrowing began with Frothingham v. Mellon in 1923 and proceeded slowly through the mid-twentieth century. The decisive construction of the modern restrictive doctrine happened under Justices Powell, Rehnquist, and Scalia from the 1970s through the 1990s. Scalia’s 1983 article The Doctrine of Standing as an Essential Element of the Separation of Powers, in the Suffolk University Law Review, is the foundational text. Scalia argued, with characteristic clarity about the project, that standing doctrine should function as a constitutional firewall protecting executive-branch action from judicial review by anyone other than directly injured private parties. The article was not written as constitutional analysis. It was written as a brief for a particular doctrinal outcome the conservative legal movement wanted, and the article became the doctrine because Scalia ascended to the Supreme Court three years later and spent the next thirty years making it so. Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife in 1992 was Scalia’s own opinion implementing the framework he had argued for. Allen v. Wright, Schlesinger v. Reservists Committee, Valley Forge Christian College v. Americans United, Spokeo v. Robins, Clapper v. Amnesty International, TransUnion v. Ramirez — the line of cases is continuous, the direction of doctrinal motion is one-way, and the political effect is to insulate executive action from judicial review when the action benefits the people the conservative legal movement was built to serve and harms the people the movement was less interested in.
This is the part that the Advisory Opinions register cannot reach. The doctrine is presented in their discussions as a feature of the legal landscape — the law is what it is, the courts cannot act, no one has standing. The political genealogy of the doctrine is left undiscussed. The fact that the doctrine was constructed by a specific movement for a specific purpose is left undiscussed. The asymmetric application of the doctrine is left undiscussed. Citizens United found standing for a corporation to challenge campaign finance law on First Amendment grounds. Bruen found standing to challenge gun regulations. Dobbs found standing to challenge state abortion regulations. Kennedy v. Bremerton found standing for a coach who had been put on paid administrative leave to challenge his school district. AFP v. Bonta found standing for donor-disclosure challenges. The doctrine’s restrictiveness is asymmetric. The asymmetry is the project. And the asymmetry cannot be named without naming the project, and the project cannot be named without confronting the structural fact that the project produced both the captured judiciary and, through related but distinguishable mechanisms, the political conditions under which Trump now operates.
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There is a name for the move Isgur and French are making, and the name comes from a piece of mid-twentieth-century legal-realist scholarship that the conservative legal movement has done its best to bury.
The name is legal formalism as political ideology. The legal realists — Karl Llewellyn, Jerome Frank, Felix Cohen, the early Holmes — pointed out a hundred years ago that any time a contestable legal doctrine is presented as if it were a fixed feature of the legal terrain rather than a constructed artifact reflecting specific political choices, the presentation itself is doing political work. The work is to take a contestable choice and dress it as a non-negotiable necessity. The work is to convert we have decided this into this has been decided.
Standing doctrine in its current form is paradigmatic. Its present shape is a choice. The choice was made, deliberately, by a specific political-legal movement, for specific political purposes. The choice can be unmade, by political-legal action of the same kind that made it. To present the current doctrine as the inevitable shape of Article III is to misrepresent the doctrine’s history, its construction, and its alternatives. The misrepresentation serves the movement that made the choice. The misrepresentation, when it is performed by figures who are themselves products of the movement that made the choice, is the ideology operating as if it were the law.
When Isgur and French perform standing doctrine in the register of the law just is what it is and the courts cannot act, they are performing legal formalism as political ideology in the textbook sense. The performance is conducted with high professional polish. The performance is sincere. They are not, I believe, knowingly deceiving anyone. They have internalized the doctrine to the point where they no longer experience it as a contestable construction. They experience it as the air they breathe. This is what successful ideological work produces — a generation of practitioners who can no longer perceive the contingent constructions they are operating inside, and who present those constructions to their audiences as the unavoidable shape of reality.
The audience for this performance is the Never Trump conservative who needs to believe that the legal system is functioning within its appropriate constraints, that the constraints are necessary and proper, that the system is doing what can reasonably be expected of it, and that the failure of the system to constrain Trump in the structural cases is regrettable but inevitable rather than the consequence of a forty-year political project the audience and the hosts are both participants in. This audience is paying The Dispatch’s subscription fees in part precisely to be told this. The product is the reassurance that the system is working. The reassurance requires the obscurantism. The obscurantism is what produces the Advisory Opinions register, in episode after episode, year after year.
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So return to the question.
Who does Sarah Isgur work for?
The literal answer is The Dispatch. The structural answer is the conservative legal movement that produced her career, that built the doctrine she now uses to explain why the courts cannot act, and that is, through related but distinguishable channels, also responsible for the political conditions her podcast describes Trump as losing court cases against. The deeper answer is the audience that pays the subscriptions to be told that the system is working.
None of these answers describe corruption in any vulgar sense. Isgur is not, to anyone’s public knowledge, taking money from Federalist Society donors directly. She is conducting herself with what she would call professional integrity inside the institutional space she has spent her career inside. The obscurantism is structural, not corrupt. It is what her professional position requires her to perform if she wants to keep doing what she is doing in the venues she is doing it in.
But the structural is not less consequential than the corrupt. The structural is, in some respects, more consequential, because the structural produces consistent ideological work without anyone having to be bribed to do it. The conservative legal movement has, in Isgur and French, two of its most articulate and most sincere practitioners — professionals who have internalized the movement’s commitments so thoroughly that they can perform the movement’s ideological work in the register of doctrinal neutrality, persuading their audience that the doctrine is the doctrine and the law is the law and there is nothing more to be said. The audience is reassured. The structural question goes unasked. The forty-year project continues.
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This is, as I have written elsewhere this week, the operational pattern that runs across the captured institutions. It is the same pattern I named in Business Ought Never Be Politics when I described the captured regulatory agencies and the captured legal academy and the captured judicial pipeline. It is the same pattern I named in Economic Royalists when I described the apparatus that built the wall around the corporate-personhood doctrine and the standing doctrine and the Citizens United doctrine and the Lochner doctrine and the entire architecture of legal sanction within which the current oligarchy operates. The legal-doctrinal apparatus and the political-economic apparatus are two faces of the same project. The project required the legal apparatus to construct the doctrines that would prevent the political apparatus from being constrained, and the legal apparatus did so, methodically, over forty years, by exactly the kind of professional work Sarah Isgur and David French were trained to do and have spent their careers doing.
That this is also the apparatus that has now produced political conditions Isgur and French personally find appalling is a real complication for them. They are honest enough to say so, repeatedly and in public. But the complication does not, by their own choice, reach the structural question. The structural question would require them to recognize that the apparatus that produced Trump is the same apparatus that produced the Federalist Society judicial pipeline, the standing doctrine, the corporate-personhood doctrine, the campaign-finance jurisprudence, the regulatory-capture pattern, and the broader collapse of the wall that distinguished political authority from concentrated capital. They cannot name this without dismantling the position they have built their careers inside. They have chosen, instead, to maintain the position and bracket the question.
This is not a moral failure in any individual sense. It is a structural failure of a position. The position, as it currently exists, is incapable of doing the analysis the moment requires. The Sarah Isgurs and David Frenches of the world are the most articulate practitioners of the position. They are also, by virtue of the position’s structural limits, the people who cannot do the work that needs doing.
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The cleanest way to put what this piece is for is that the question who do you work for is a question that almost everyone in the credentialed knowledge class, in the captured institutions, in the legal academy, in the major-paper opinion sections, in the cable-news bench, in the think-tank network, in the foundation-funded NGO sector, has not been asked recently and probably should be. The literal answer almost never satisfies the question. The structural answer is almost always the apparatus that produced the position the person is now occupying. And the apparatus, in most cases, has structural commitments that prevent the position from confronting the actual structural conditions of the moment.
The work of the moment is to do the analysis the structural question requires, in venues that have not yet been captured by the requirement to bracket it. This is part of what these pages have been for. This is part of what the middle road I have been describing is, in its credentialed-knowledge-class application. The middle road for journalists and lawyers and scholars and analysts is the road that asks the question their institutional positions are constructed to prevent them from asking, and asks it out loud, and follows where the answer leads.
Sarah Isgur is not the villain of this piece. Sarah Isgur is the diagnostic case. The diagnostic case is what the position requires of its most articulate practitioners. The diagnostic case is, with appropriate substitution of names and credentials, also the case for most of the rest of us who occupy positions inside captured institutions and have not yet asked the question.
The question is the question. Who do you work for? The answer, when it is honest, is rarely the institution that signs the check. The answer is the apparatus the institution is embedded inside, the doctrines the apparatus has built, the audiences the apparatus has cultivated, and the structural commitments the position requires its occupants to maintain in order to remain in the position.
Asking the question of yourself is the first move. Asking it out loud, in public, in the venues you are paid to inhabit, is the second. Acting on the answer, when the answer is uncomfortable, is the third. The third is where the work begins.
I think that what you're saying is that Never Trumpers are still on a mission of bad faith when it comes to monarchism vs. democracy -- playing at being serious democrats who don't mind taking your money but won't give you what we're all desperately striving for -- to complete the American revolution by democratizing the economy. Am I warm?
If I understand the post (and I’m not sure that I do), it seems that conservative pundits like Isgur and French are analyzing and arguing within the confines of a box, where the box is the Federalist Society ecosystem and, e.g., the particularized injury doctrine it concocted. They can only use the facts and logic that are available in the box. This is what I’m afraid of when I think of how Never Trumper conservatism will try to justify itself: thinking that expunging the “bad” - Trump-y - stuff will suffice, without acknowledging the conservative political continuum that led to it. So “who do you work for” is also “what box are you in”?
Anyway, it’s a terrific post, and had me thinking there for at least an hour and a half after reading it when I should have been mowing the grass/weeds.