RNLA's Vice Chair Joanne Young was selected by the Board of Governors as the 2020 Republican Lawyer of the Year.  This annual award recognizes a lawyer for his or her outstanding professional accomplishments and years of dedicated service to the Republican Party and its ideals.  Ms. Young is particularly deserving of this award, and a presidential election year is fitting timing for presenting it to her.  She has been unwavering in her efforts to promote election integrity in her home of Washington, DC, and around the country through the RNLA and the Lawyers Democracy Fund.

While only Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, and Utah currently conduct all of their elections by mail, Democrats have ramped up their efforts recently to push for universal vote-by-mail for November’s Presidential Election. However, a nationwide universal vote-by-mail system would be extremely detrimental to the integrity of our elections. The presence of “out-of-date voter rolls, undue influence over voters, foreign interference through counterfeit ballots, [and] ballot harvesting through unscrupulous parties” would weaken an already susceptible form of voting.

Today, the RNLA posthumously presented former RNLA Board of Governors member Anne Ware Lewis of Georgia with the Robert J. Horn's Chairman's Award during the National Election Law Seminar in Charlotte, North Carolina.  

Lawyers Democracy Fund's board member Joanne Young published an op-ed today cataloguing the many problems with California's automatic, or mandatory, voter registration system, which is especially relevant as the House debates and votes on H.R. 1 this week.  H.R. 1 would require all states to adopt automatic voter registration (AVR) according to the bill's requirements, regardless of each state's existing laws.  It would also require a massive data dump from various government databases in the states' voter registration systems, which would introduce errors in the voter registration databases that would only be exacerbated by the new required AVR systems.

President Donald Trump has announced an outstanding choice to be the new Deputy Attorney General in Jeffery Rosen.  Despite more #fakenews about former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein being forced out, Rosenstein has always said he would step down upon the swearing in of a new Attorney General.  Furthermore the Department of Justice has clearly stated the so-called 25^th Amendment talk and Rosenstein was more fake news.  As the Department of Justice points out Rosenstein "was not in a position to consider invoking the 25th Amendment" and denied the allegations.

We bring this up because it will be an effort to detract from the real story.  Rosenstein’s planned departure should in no way detract from the outstanding nomination of Jeffery Rosen.  Rosen has outstanding qualifications:

On Saturday, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed by the Senate 50 to 48 with Vice President Mike Pence presiding.  Justice Kavanaugh was sworn-in Saturday evening.  He carried through on his promise to have an all-women first class of clerks, including one African-American woman.  This the first time in Supreme Court history that a justice has had an all-women class of clerks.

The RNLA congratulated Justice Kavanaugh on Saturday, with statements from a few RNLA leaders:

Today, RNLA Co-Chair Joanne Young and RNLA Vice President for Communications Harmeet Dhillon issued a statement about how Democrats use allegations of mistreatment by women for partisan purposes.