Author of an Article called, “Make Death Penalty for Youth Available Widely”
The Resume
Compared to some other federal judges, Chad Readler is a man of the people. Chad didn’t go to an elite, Ivy League law school, and he didn’t get clerk for some high-falutin Supreme Court Justice. He made his own way in the world after graduating from Michigan, one of the nation’s elite law schools outside of the Ivies, and clerking for Reagan appointee Alan Norris on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, one step below the Supreme Court.
After his clerkship, he worked at Biglaw firm Jones Day for 20 years. Jones Day’s lawyers are some of the most conservative of all large law firms. It’s long been a corporate litigation powerhouse, regularly representing corporate employers in disputes with their employees and fighting countless federal rules that could hurt corporate profits. And it’s quietly resolved claims that it fostered a frat party atmosphere and underpaid women who worked there. Small wonder that its lawyers filled the ranks of the Trump Administration.
Chad fit right in at Jones Day, representing clients like R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company when it challenged bans on cigarette advertisements near schools and Wells Fargo when it foreclosed on people’s homes. He also represented Donald Trump’s campaign in Ohio and Pennsylvania in 2016, back when Trump’s electoral strategy involved fewer coup attempts. In one case, after Trump suggested at an Ohio rally that his voters should monitor “certain areas” and patrol polling places to intimidate minority voters, the Ohio Democratic Party sued the Trump campaign seeking an injunction to stop the Trump campaign from doing so. And they won – until Chad helped Trump skate by on appeal. All his hard work must have made an impression on Trump, because he was in the first wave of Jones Day lawyers that swept into the Justice Department in January 2017.
At the Justice Department, Chad was the Assistant Attorney General appointed to run the Civil Division, which is supposed to defend against challenges to federal agency policies. While there, he signed onto a brief arguing that the Census Bureau had completely legitimate reasons for asking everyone in America if they were a citizen. That case went to the Supreme Court, which narrowly held that the Census didn’t adequately explain its reasons for asking a citizenship question. In a completely unpredictable twist, Trump’s Commerce Secretary later admitted that he had added the question after virulent racists Steve Bannon and Kris Kobach asked him to. Bannon and Kobach hoped that the question would scare noncitizens and undocumented people from answering the Census. So all of Chad’s briefing had been a legal fig leaf for a failed xenophobic pressure campaign. A normal person might feel guilty after participating in a racist coverup like that. Chad got nominated to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals.
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