John Bonifaz

John Bonifaz is a constitutional attorney and the Co-Founder and President of Free Speech For People. Mr. Bonifaz previously served as the executive director and general counsel of the National Voting Rights Institute, an organization he founded in 1994, and as the legal director of Voter Action, a national election integrity organization. He has been at the forefront of key voting rights and democracy campaigns in the United States for more than three decades. Mr. Bonifaz’s work has included: pioneering a series of court challenges, applying political equality principles, that have helped to redefine the campaign finance question as a basic voting rights issue of our time; helping to lead key election protection cases across the country; and helping to lead historic legal challenges, under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, to insurrectionists seeking to run for re-election. He is the co-author with former American University Law Professor and now-Congressman Jamie Raskin of two seminal law review articles (Yale Law & Policy Review-1993 and Columbia Law Review-1994) and of The Wealth Primary: Campaign Fundraising and the Constitution (1994), which all argue that the current campaign finance system violates the Equal Protection rights of non-wealthy candidates and voters. Mr. Bonifaz is the co-author with Ron Fein and Ben Clements of The Constitution Demands It: The Case For The Impeachment of Donald Trump, published by Melville House in 2018, with a foreword by John Nichols. Mr. Bonifaz is also the author of Warrior-King, published by Nation Books in 2004, with a foreword by the late Congressman John Conyers, Jr., which chronicles the 2003 case, in which he served as lead counsel, challenging the US military invasion of Iraq as illegal under the War Powers Clause of the US Constitution. Mr. Bonifaz has also served as co-counsel in international human rights and environmental litigation, including litigation to hold the Chevron-Texaco oil company accountable for its widespread destruction of the Ecuadorian Amazon. Mr. Bonifaz is a 1992 cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School and a 1999 recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.