On April 1, 2022, RNLA hosted its annual National Policy Conference in Arlington, Virginia to hear from several speakers on issues pertinent to Republican lawyers.  A crowd favorite was Ilya Shapiro, author of “Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations & the Politics of America’s Highest Court,” who discussed the Supreme Court nomination process and public discourse on the role of the courts.

Just days after Georgetown University Law Center reinstated Ilya Shapiro after a four-month-long investigation for an ill-worded tweet, Shapiro proudly resigned.  Georgetown reinstated Shapiro based on the technicality that he was not yet an employee when he tweeted negatively about Biden's narrow-minded pool of potential SCOTUS nominees, a move that led students and faculty at the law school to protest him being hired.  But in resigning, Shapiro is standing up for free speech, contrary to Georgetown Law Center’s spineless actions, which were not based on law school policy but rather based in part on an effort to avoid "woke" student backlash.  As FIRE points out:

When Georgetown reinstated Shapiro, it said that university policies did not apply to him when he tweeted on Jan. 26, as his employment was to begin Feb. 1. The university reasoned it could not punish him for tweets made when he was not a university employee. As Shapiro said in his resignation letter, Georgetown investigated him for four months when the situation “apparently could’ve been resolved by looking at a calendar.” Georgetown’s investigation was primarily calendar based, concluding just days after its academic calendar ended — and just days after commencement, when the majority of students left campus for the summer. (emphasis added).

RNLA’s National Policy Conference is in one week and we thought we would highlight four of the speakers' views on the just-completed Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson.  But as Senator Tom Cotton, who will be awarded the Ed Meese Award at the conference, points out:

The media's cheerleading for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson's confirmation, despite her soft-on-crime record, goes beyond bias—it's propaganda.

— Tom Cotton (@TomCottonAR) March 24, 2022

Another poll has shown that Americans would prefer President Joe Biden pick the "most qualified" person to replace Justice Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court as opposed to strictly sticking with his pledge to nominate a Black woman to the Court:

[J]ust 36 percent of Americans say Biden’s pledge was a "good idea," while the rest say it was either “a bad idea” (32 percent) or “neither good nor bad” (32 percent). And just a third of Americans say they have “a great deal” or “quite a bit” of confidence that Biden will select "the right kind of person" to replace Breyer on the court (33 percent), or that they themselves expect to support the nominee Biden puts forward (34 percent) — noticeably lower than the 39 percent who said they expected to support "President Trump's Supreme Court nominee" in September 2020, just before he nominated Amy Coney Barrett.

The Republican National Lawyers Association supports Ilya Shapiro, a respected colleague who has become the latest target of a smear campaign from the left.

On Tuesday, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Federal Courts, Oversight, Agency Action and Federal Rights held a hearing entitled, "Supreme Court Fact-Finding and the Distortion of American Democracy." The two witnesses called by the Republican members of the Committee were Indiana Solicitor General Thomas Fisher and the Cato Institute's Ilya Shapiro. As Shapiro pointed out during the hearing and in his prepared remarks, the title of the hearing itself is overblown:

I actually think that the hearing title is a bit loaded: first, because the Supreme Court doesn’t generally engage in fact-finding in the way trial courts do, but rather applies the law to novel facts, as any appellate court is supposed to; and second, because however much one thinks American democracy is “distorted,” the Supreme Court, a reactive institution, is hardly at fault. Indeed, the court is the most respected government institution other than police and the military, so hand-wringing over its role in governance—or broader questioning of its legitimacy—principally arises when the justices rule in ways that disagree with progressive orthodoxy or, more broadly, when progressives are frustrated that there’s a major institution they don’t control. The chairman himself filed a brief in last year’s Second Amendment case admonishing the Court to “heal itself before the public demands it be restructured in order to reduce the influence of politics.”

Today, RNLA hosted a powerful webinar on Judge Amy Coney Barrett featuring the Network of enlightened Women's Karin Lips and The Cato Institute's Ilya Shapiro. The event came as Democrats are even using the President’s COVID-19 diagnosis as a reason to delay hearings on Judge Barrett’s confirmation. The reality is that the Democrats and their liberal allies will go to extreme lengths of any means to defeat or delay Judge Barrett’s nomination. 

One of the worst tactics utilized by liberals is attacking Judge Barrett based on her gender. As Karin Lips explains: "Popular feminists today are quick to mock, delegitimize, and pressure conservative women into silence. To many, we are 'gender traitors' once we speak out or support conservatives in public life."

RNLA Co-Chair Harmeet Dhillon wrote today in The Daily Caller about how the response to the coronavirus, especially in states like California in full lockdown, threatens civil liberties:

Democrats often seem to cite certain events as the world is going to end if, or when, they happen -- whether it was Al Gore’s climate disaster by 2016 or the end of the internet when FEC Chair Ajit Pai ended net neutrality.  This week another anniversary of one of those doomsday events occurred, the tenth anniversary of Citizens United v. FEC which was decided on January 21, 2010.  As Cato scholar Ilya Shapiro wrote on the fifth anniversary:

President Obama’s famous statement during his 2010 State of the Union Address: “The Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates of special interests — including foreign corporations — to spend without limit in our elections.”

In that one sentence, the former law professor made four errors that are all too common.