Arguing against Trump will be Jason Murray, a Denver lawyer whose firm describes its mission as holding powerful people accountable. Late last year, Murray successfully persuaded Colorado’s top court to
declare Trump ineligible to run in that state due to the Constitution’s
insurrection clause — a bombshell decision that paved the way for the Supreme Court to take up the question.
There also will be a third lawyer taking a brief turn at the lectern on Thursday: Shannon Stevenson, the solicitor general of Colorado. Stevenson will speak on behalf of the Colorado secretary of state, who is responsible for enforcing the state’s election laws.
Here’s what to know about the three advocates who will present what may be the most important election case since Bush v. Gore.
Jonathan Mitchell
A ‘very aggressive litigator’
Mitchell, 47, is a prominent conservative lawyer and legal theorist who has worked as the Texas solicitor general, as a law professor and as a private litigator running his own law firm.
Before the Trump case, Mitchell was best known — particularly to the justices — as the architect of a restrictive Texas abortion law that preceded the court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade.
The ingenuity of the law, which bans abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy, allows private citizens to enforce the ban by suing abortion providers or anyone else who facilitates an abortion. This novel enforcement mechanism doesn’t require state officials to enforce it, allowing Texas to implement an abortion ban even before the Supreme Court overturned Roe.
The private-enforcement mechanism displeased some of the justices. During oral argument in a challenge to the Texas case, Kagan skewered Mitchell, though not by name, remarking that, “after, oh, these many years, some geniuses came up with a way to evade” the court’s authority.
Mitchell has repeatedly described the goal of his legal practice as undercutting the notion that the Supreme Court is the ultimate interpreter of the Constitution, a belief known as “judicial supremacy.”
In a written dissent in the Texas case, Justice Sonia Sotomayor called the Texas law “
a breathtaking act of defiance — of the Constitution, of this Court’s precedents, and of the rights of women seeking abortions throughout Texas.”
Mitchell’s affront to Supreme Court authority may play a role in the Trump ballot case: One of the arguments that Mitchell
has advanced in his briefs is that only Congress, not courts, can kick a candidate off the ballot under the insurrection clause.
Mitchell declined to comment for this story. Chris Hilton, who worked alongside Mitchell when they represented co-defendants in several cases while Hilton was at the Texas attorney general’s office and Mitchell was in private practice, described Mitchell as a “very aggressive litigator.”
“He has a strong conviction for what he thinks the law is, for what he thinks the right thing to do in a case is, and he is unafraid to go down that road,” Hilton said.
Hilton, now a partner at Stone Hilton, added: “You almost can’t talk fast enough to keep up with how fast his brain is going at times.”
Mitchell attended the University of Chicago Law School, then worked as a law clerk for Judge J. Michael Luttig of the 4th Circuit U.S. Court Appeals and for the late Justice Antonin Scalia, Mitchell’s legal role model. During law school, Mitchell maintained a website called “Scalia Shrine,”
according to the New Yorker, in which he posted opinions and quotes from his favorite justice.
Mitchell has said his experience working for Scalia made him more disillusioned about the institution of the court. “I didn’t have as much faith in the Supreme Court after the clerkship as I did before the clerkship,”
he told NPR. “The decision-making was more politicized and more results-oriented than I would have expected.”
As for Luttig, now a prominent conservative…
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