Amid threats of certification battles and mass voter challenges, Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign has assembled an expansive senior legal team that will oversee hundreds of lawyers and thousands of volunteers in a sprawling operation designed to be a bulwark against what Democrats expect to be an aggressive Republican effort to challenge voters, rules and, possibly, the results of the 2024 election.
The legal apparatus within the Harris campaign will oversee multiple aspects of the election program, including voter protection, recounts and general election litigation, and it is adding Marc Elias, one of the party’s top election lawyers, to focus on potential recounts.
The legal group is headed by Bob Bauer, who served as personal counsel to President Biden for years, and Dana Remus, the general counsel to the 2020 Biden campaign, and also includes Maury Riggan, the general counsel for the Harris campaign. Josh Hsu, formerly from the vice president’s office, will join the team, and Vanita Gupta, a former director of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and a top Biden Justice Department official, is an informal adviser.
The campaign will also lean on the top lawyers at three prominent law firms — Seth Waxman, Donald Verrilli and John Devaney — to handle litigation, and deploy local counsel to eight
Mr. Elias, who has had tensions with Mr. Bauer and other Democratic lawyers in the past, will also bring lawyers from his growing firm, Elias Law Group. He has also previously worked for Ms. Harris, serving as general counsel for her primary campaign in 2020.
Category Archives: election law biz
ABA Unsung Heroes of Democracy Awards
The ABA’s Task Force for American Democracy has this announcement, on 22 individuals and organizations receiving the award this year. They include Bob Bauer, Ben Ginsburg, and Meaghan Wolf.
In related news, the ABA Task Force is hosting this event on Wisconsin’s election system today at 12:30-5:00 CT, with in-person and virtual options. I’ll be participating along with my University of Wisconsin Law School colleague Rob Yablon.
AEI “Ballot Battles” Book Event with Ned Foley
This Monday, July 15 at 10 ET, on the revised and expanded version of Ned’s book, with live and virtual options.
Congratulations to Election Law Profs Justin Levitt, Carolyn Shapiro, and Kate Shaw, Elected to the American Law Institute
They are among the great choices announced today who write (at least partially) in the area of election law.
“Government reform expert Robert Stern joins LA Ethics Commission”
LADN:
The Los Angeles City Council has confirmed reform expert Robert Stern as the newest member of the Ethics Commission, and Wednesday marks the first time in several months that the five-member body has had all its seats filled.
The council voted 14-0, with Councilman Marqueece Harris-Dawson absent during the vote. Stern was nominated by Council President Paul Krekorian last week.
A nationally recognized expert in the fields of campaign finance and government reform, Stern was the first general counsel of the California Fair Political Practices Commission — the agency in charge of administering California’s campaign disclosure, ethics and lobbying laws. He previously served as a president of the Council on Governmental Ethics Laws, an organization of local, state and federal agencies in the U.S. and Canada that regulate campaign finance, ethics, lobbying and election laws.
Congrats Bob!
“Democratic lawyers get ready: ‘If Trump wins, there will be chaos’”
When Donald Trump issued a ban on travelers from some Muslim-majority countries just a week into his presidency, Democratic attorneys general were caught off guard. They hadn’t expected the policy, long promised by Trump on the campaign trail, to materialize so quickly.
Over the course of a few days, they scrambled to sue to stop the executive order, setting off four years of intense hostility between top Democratic lawyers and a Republican White House.
Now, Democratic attorneys around the country are already gearing up for the possibility of a second Trump administration by beginning to map out an aggressive legal strategy to fight him again in court — this time with a fresh sense of urgency.
Democratic attorneys general are exploring hiring outside experts and dispatching staff to study areas of the law anticipated to come under attack, like reproductive health, immigration and the environment.
They are identifying staff members best equipped to fight assertions of executive privilege — which Trump invoked in his most high-profile controversies — and states best positioned to lead bigger cases.
And they are scrutinizing Project 2025, the 900-page blueprint from The Heritage Foundation that lays out a conservative agenda for the next Republican presidency.
The early but serious preparations are an acknowledgment that a second Trump presidency would entail these lawyers filing lawsuit after lawsuit against the federal government, to mitigate what they view as a significant threat to democracy and individual rights.
Election Law Academics Update
Here’s my yearly roundup of election law academic hires, promotions moves, visits, accolades:
Ellen Aprill is Senior Scholar in Residence at the Lowell Milken Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofits at UCLA (and continues as the John E Anderson Professor in Tax Law Emerita at Loyola LA)/
Wilfred Codrington III will be joining the faculty of Cardozo School of Law as the Walter Floersheimer Professor of Constitutional Law and will serve as co-director of the Floersheimer Center on Constitutional Democracy.
David Froomkin will be starting as an assistant professor of law at the University of Houston Law Center.
Ned Foley will be a Fellow at Princeton’s Program in Law and Public Policy.
Anthony Gaughan will be a visiting professor at the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law.
Ruth Greenwood was appointed as an Assistant Clinical Professor at Harvard Law School as of January 1 2024, and is still the Founding Director of the Election Law Clinic.
Rick Hasen was named the Gary T. Schwartz Endowed Chair in Law at UCLA and continues as the Director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project.
Manoj Mate joined the University at Buffalo School of Law, State University of New York as a Professor of Law.
Lia Merivaki will be Associate Teaching Professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy, and an Associate Research Professor at the Massive Data Institute, Georgetown University (beginning August 1).
Michael Morse won a teaching award for Election Law at Penn.
Spencer Overton returned to GW Law as the Patricia Roberts Harris Research Professor of Law and the Faculty Director of the Multiracial Democracy Project.
Doug Spencer has been named the Ira C. Rothgerber Chair in Constitutional Law at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Franita Tolson is now Dean and Carl Mason Franklin Chair in Law at USC.
Congratulations all!
Assuming the Gary T. Schwartz Endowed Chair in Law on July 1
On July 1, I will officially be the Gary T. Schwarz Endowed Chair in Law at UCLA (along with a Professor of Political Science (by courtesy) and the Director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project).
Alhthough it is of course an honor to be awarded any academic chair, this chair is really special to me. Gary was a professor of mine and on my doctoral dissertation committee when I was at UCLA. He was brilliant and quirky, a voracious reader and a keen legal mind. He was intellectually curious and prolific. He profoundly shaped tort doctrine through his scholarship and through his work as a Reporter on the first part of the mammoth Restatement (Third) of Torts for the American Law Institute. He could translate complex doctrine into understandable prose and test the latest academic theory against real evidence.
Most importantly for me as a student, Gary was an relentless cheerleader when I sought work as an academic, getting on the phone to his many contacts across the country, and an unremitting coach to push me to do better on my scholarship. You couldn’t slip any sloppy reasoning or half-formed thought by Gary. When he offered praise, it really meant that I had accomplished something.
It’s not lost on me as I approach 60 that Gary died early and surprisingly of a malignant brain tumor when he was 61. It was a loss for all of us. I want to think that some of my work (with Doug Laycock) on one of the last parts of the Third Restatement of Torts will be a fitting tribute to his legacy.
I take over the chair from Eugene Volokh, who takes emeritus status and moves onto Stanford’s Hoover Institution July 1. Eugene was a year behind me at UCLA Law School, and we began our spirited but always cordial debates over the nature of law in Dan Lowenstein’s 1990 Election Law course. Dan, another of my exemplary mentors, wrote to me: “I cannot imagine a better chair to hold than one named after Gary Schwartz.” Indeed.
“How a ‘Committed Partisan Warrior’ Came to Rethink the Political Wars” (New Bob Bauer Book!)
Peter Baker on Bob Bauer and his new book, in the NYT:
Once, after he executed a particularly tough-minded legal attack on Republicans, Bob Bauer remembers, a conservative magazine called him an “evil genius.” He took it as a compliment. “I was very proud of that,” he said. “I thought, That’s cool.”
For decades, Democrats have turned to him as their lawyer to wage battles against the opposition. Reverse a House race they seemingly lost? Accuse the other side of criminal activity? Go to court to cut off Republican money flows? Find a legal justification for an ethically iffy strategy? Mr. Bauer was their man.
But now Mr. Bauer, the personal attorney for President Biden and previously the White House counsel for President Barack Obama, is looking back and rethinking all that. Maybe, he says, that win-at-all-costs approach to politics is not really conducive to a healthy, functioning democracy. Maybe, in taking the “genius” part to heart, he should have been more concerned about the “evil” part.
In a new book, “The Unraveling: Reflections on Politics Without Ethics and Democracy in Crisis,” to be published on Tuesday, Mr. Bauer takes stock of what he sees as the coarsening of American politics and examines the tension between ethical decisions and the “warrior mentality” that dominates the worlds of government and campaigns today. And in the process of thinking about what went wrong, Mr. Bauer, who calls himself a “committed partisan warrior,” has stopped to wrestle with his own role in the wars…..
r. Bauer has had a role in most of the significant political-legal wars of the last few decades, representing Democratic Party organizations and candidates, advising House and Senate Democratic leaders during President Bill Clinton’s impeachment battle and serving as Mr. Obama’s campaign lawyer and later White House counsel.
In the last few years, though, Mr. Bauer retired from his law firm, Perkins Coie, and increasingly turned his energies to finding ways to fix the system, working with Republicans like Benjamin Ginsberg and Jack L. Goldsmith. Among other projects, he advised lawmakers who revised the Electoral Count Act in 2022 to make clear that no vice president can single-handedly overturn an election, and he guided a bipartisan group that in April recommended changes to the Insurrection Act to limit presidents’ power to deploy troops to American streets.
Mr. Ginsberg, a longtime election lawyer who represented George W. Bush and Mitt Romney, among others, before breaking with the Republican Party over its support for Mr. Trump, said that Mr. Bauer was always “an ethical, principled guy” who managed to zealously represent his clients without crossing lines that should not be crossed.
“We’ve been battling each other for 40 years on stuff, and it’s always important, he knew, to fight fiercely for your candidate,” Mr. Ginsberg said. “But his concept of the rule of law is that the process works best if you have fierce partisans on each side but with an appreciation for the democratic process, institutions and norms.”
Bob’s new book is fabulous, and here is my blurb of it:
With wit, insight, self-awareness, and humility, Bob Bauer reflects on his life as a leading political lawyer, making an urgent plea for a renewed commitment to political ethics. A must-read warning about how our existential politics has led to norm collapse, and how to bring us back from the brink.
— Richard L. Hasen, Author of A Real Right to Vote and Election Meltdown
“After 2022 errors, primary election will be Pinal County’s big test”
Jen Fifield with a great ground-level view on the logistics of an office under intense scrutiny.
“Elections Brain Drain”
The [North] Carolina Public Press has a really important three-part series on funding for election official positions. (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)
And there’s a timely related story from [South] Carolina as well.
Turns out that low pay makes it harder to retain talent, which is a lesson that stretches well beyond the Carolinas.
If we treated election infrastructure like infrastructure, that’d include human resources too.
Instead, we’re heading the other direction. The President’s FY 2025 budget includes $ 5 billion in election security grants, $ 96 million in election innovation grants, and $ 38 million to keep the lights on at the EAC. The markup from the relevant House subcommittee ignores the first two categories entirely and cuts the EAC appropriation in half.
The full House Appropriations committee markup is Thursday. The chairman has requested that “Members be prompt,” and I’m also hoping that Members be mindful that the system that put them in their chairs needs basic maintenance to keep working.
Someone Needs to Take Away Steven Calabresi’s Keys to the Volokh Conspiracy Blog
Something like this in coming out as an election denier is just embarrassing. And it is part of a recent pattern of poorly reasoned and odd postings that make me worried for his mental acuity. And it’s relatively new and contrary to how he had approached these issues in the past.
Unfortunately, he’s not the only emeritus law professor who could use some advice about no longer posting to social media and blogs.
UPDATE: It appears that Calabresi is not emeritus. I regret the error.
“Neal Katyal Was Their Resistance Hero. Until They Found Out About New Jersey.”
In 49 of the 50 states, Neal Katyal is known as a stalwart defender of democracy. And then there’s New Jersey.
In the Garden State, Katyal — the Beltway-famous legal combatant against Trump-era assaults on democratic norms — has thrown himself into a very different legal battle: He’s working to restore a voting rule that enables machine-politics bosses to stack the ballot against anyone they don’t favor. A federal judge last month declared the system unconstitutional for the upcoming primary. Now Katyal’s admirers say they’re enraged by their erstwhile ally’s efforts to snatch away their victory.
“We are all amazed and disappointed and all the related words,” said Yael Niv of the Good Government Coalition of New Jersey. “He’s on the wrong side of history.”…
Democracy advocates have long derided the rule as something out of a banana republic, “an unconstitutional governmental thumb on the scale,” in the words of New Jersey Rep. Andy Kim, the Democratic Senate candidate who filed suit against the “fundamentally unjust and undemocratic” system in February.
When Kim’s lawsuit prevailed on March 29, it represented a political earthquake in the state — and set off impromptu celebrations among activists who’d fought the system for years and couldn’t quite believe they’d won.
But instead of joining the celebrations, Katyal joined the other side, filing an amicus brief last Saturday on behalf of the Middlesex County Democratic Organization, one of the state’s venerable local machines.
Katyal declined comment, saying he was busy preparing for arguments in a gun-control case in San Francisco this week. But his filing does not strike the high notes that might be familiar to those who read his anti-Trump book or watched his successful Supreme Court evisceration of the “independent state legislature” doctrine that could have allowed state legislatures to overturn election results.
Nonetheless, the brief makes a coherent argument for the old status quo: The line system, Katyal writes, “makes voting more efficient by allowing primary voters to easily identify and quickly vote for all candidates belonging to a single political organization or affiliating with a single slogan.” According to the brief, it’s about protecting “low-information” voters: “Only political junkies learn enough about each primary candidate to make an informed choice about who should be their party’s nominee for Surrogate, township council, or County Clerk.”
It’s an argument that draws scoffs from attorneys who fought to kill off the system….
“North Carolina election law attorney, nominated 4 times to US District Court judgeship, dies at 69”
Thomas Farr, a longtime North Carolina redistricting and election law attorney who regularly defended Republican interests but whose 2018 federal judgeship nomination was scuttled by two GOP senators, has died, a legal colleague said Tuesday. He was 69.
Farr died on Monday following a series of heart problems, according to Phil Strach, a fellow election law attorney who said he had spoken to Farr’s family about his death. Strach declined to say where Farr died.
“He should be remembered as what I would describe as a legal titan, certainly in North Carolina and, in many respects, nationwide,” Strach said. “You don’t get nominated a federal judge without … a record of legal accomplishments.”
Condolences to his family and friends.