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| Affiliation | Democratic |
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| Name | John Bonifaz |
| Address |
Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts , United States |
| Email | None |
| Website | [Link] |
| Born |
June 22, 1966
(57 years)
|
| Contributor | RP |
| Last Modifed | RBH
Sep 12, 2020 01:19pm |
| Tags |
Caucasian - Married - Straight -
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| Info | John Bonifaz is a dedicated leader who has spent years working with citizens across the country to protect the right to vote and to broaden citizen participation in the democratic process.
In 1994, John founded the National Voting Rights Institute, based in Boston, and, after directing the organization for a decade, he now serves as its general counsel. NVRI today is a prominent legal and public education center committed to preserving the right of all citizens to vote and to participate in the electoral process on an equal and meaningful basis. Since founding NVRI, John has been at the forefront of many of the key voting rights struggles facing the nation today. Some highlights of his work at NVRI include:
- Leading the fight in the courts for presidential candidates Michael Badnarik and David Cobb in their demand for a full recount in Ohio of all of the votes cast for President in the 2004 general election.
- Defending the Massachusetts Clean Elections Law, which was passed overwhelmingly by the voters of the Commonwealth in 1998. John led the effort to challenge the Massachusetts legislature's refusal to fund the law and NVRI won a landmark ruling from the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, forcing the state to provide the necessary funds to all qualified candidates running in the 2002 state elections.
- Working to overhaul the nation's campaign finance system by defending mandatory campaign spending limits, public financing of elections, and other important campaign reforms. John and NVRI are pressing for a US Supreme Court review of a 1976 ruling which equated money with speech and sanctioned today's system of unlimited campaign spending, and John has led a challenge to today's exclusionary system on voting rights grounds, linking the movement for change in the way we finance our elections to earlier civil rights struggles.
In 1999, in recognition of his pathbreaking work with the National Voting Rights Institute, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation awarded John with a prestigious MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, otherwise known as the "genius" award.
In addition to his leadership of NVRI, John has also been at the forefront of opposing the Bush administration's war in Iraq. In February and March 2003, John served as the plaintiffs' lead counsel in John Doe I v. President Bush, a constitutional challenge to President George W. Bush's authority to wage war against Iraq absent a congressional declaration of war or equivalent action. John represented a coalition of US soldiers, parents of US soldiers, and Members of Congress (led by Representatives John Conyers, Jr. and Dennis Kucinich) arguing that the president's planned first-strike invasion of Iraq violated the War Powers Clause of the US Constitution.
John is the author of: Warrior-King: The Case for Impeaching George W. Bush (NationBooks-NY, foreword by Rep. John Conyers, Jr., January 2004), on the illegality of the Iraq war. The book presents an accounting of the John Doe I v. President Bush case and its meaning for the United States Constitution. He has also written numerous articles on the war and on the fight for democracy here at home which have appeared in publications such as The Boston Globe, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, TomPaine.com, The Columbia Law Review, and The Yale Law & Policy Review.
John is also a co-founder of AfterDowningStreet.org, a national coalition of veterans' groups, peace groups, and public interest organizations seeking a formal congressional investigation into whether President Bush has committed impeachable offenses in connection with the Iraq war. The coalition, launched in May 2005, focuses on the new and compelling evidence revealed by the release of the Downing Street Minutes, showing that the President may have engaged in a conspiracy to deceive and mislead the United States Congress and the American people about the basis for sending the nation to war.
John continues to maintain a private practice with his father, Cristóbal Bonifaz, which specializes in international human rights and environmental law cases. John and his father serve as co-counsel for thousands of indigenous people living in the Ecuadorian and Peruvian Amazon in an ongoing case against the Texaco oil company for the company's environmental destruction of their homeland. John was instrumental in launching a landmark case against the Unocal oil and gas company on behalf of Burmese villagers for human rights abuses connected with the company's construction of a major gas pipeline in Burma.
John has been active in social movements for change from a very young age. As a college student at Brown University, John worked to register thousands of voters, participated in the nuclear disarmament movement, and fought for the university's divestment from companies doing business in then-apartheid South Africa. After graduating from Brown, John served as the scheduler for United States Senator Edward M. Kennedy in his 1988 re-election campaign. While attending Harvard Law School, John served as a leader of La Alianza, the Latino law students association, and helped to lead the fight for faculty diversity at the school. In 1990, John was one of 11 Harvard Law students who, along with a coalition of student groups, sued the school for discrimination in the hiring of its faculty. Following his graduation from Harvard Law School in 1992, John moved to Washington, D.C., to serve as the staff attorney for the Center for Responsive Politics. He moved back to Massachusetts in 1994 to start the National Voting Rights Institute and to join his father's law practice.
John and his wife, Lissa Pierce Bonifaz, live in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. Lissa holds a doctorate in bilingual education and works as a professor at Lesley University in Cambridge, where she teaches in the Language and Literacy Division of Lesley's School of Education.
John's parents, Deirdre and Cristóbal, live in Conway, Massachusetts, and his sister Margarita lives in Northampton. Deirdre grew up in nearby Whately, Massachusetts, and, during John's childhood, she founded and directed a national non-profit cooperative supporting low-income artisans across the country. Cristóbal emigrated to this country from Ecuador when he was sixteen and became a chemical engineer. He later became a lawyer while John was in high school. Margarita has worked tirelessly for the past fifteen years as a teacher in the Amherst public school system.
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