When the Supreme Court this week considers Donald Trump‘s case about being on — or off — the Colorado primary ballot, two members of the close-knit world of legal elite will present the opposing arguments to the nation’s highest court.
Representing the Colorado group that sued to get Trump removed from the ballot for his participation in an insurrection is SCOTUS rookie Jason Murray, trained in law at Harvard and a former clerk for SCOTUS Justice Elena Kagan. (Murray, not to be pigeon-holed, also clerked for Justice Neil Gorsuch at the US Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.)
On the other side, representing Trump, will stand Jonathan Mitchell, the University of Chicago-trained former clerk for SCOTUS Justice Antonin Scalia who will be very busy in Washington this month.
Donald Trump has filed a Supreme Court reply brief in the case over whether Colorado can bar him from the ballot, making some of his final arguments before a high-stakes hearing on Thursday. His lawyer Jonathan Mitchell cited Trump's NH victory & made comparisons to Venezuela pic.twitter.com/8gMN173UlC
— Erik Larson (@eelarson) February 5, 2024
After Mitchell represents Trump’s position, he’ll be returning to argue another case before the Supreme Court on February 28, when he will question the constitutionality of a federal ban on so-called bump stocks, a firearms modification that transforms semi-automatic rifles like the AR-15 into virtual machine guns by increasing the rate of fire.
The 2018 federal ban re-classified a legal semi-automatic rifle equipped with a bump stock as an illegal “machine gun” — making its possession a felony.
Interestingly, the ban was put in place during the Trump administration, largely in reaction to the mass shooting in Las Vegas where a gunman used the rifle-enhancing technology to kill 58 people while firing from a hotel balcony, injuring hundreds more.
“Americans bought 520,000 bump stocks during a nine-year span when they were legal,” AP reported at the time, “and the new prohibition requires them to be surrendered or destroyed.” The ban, signed by Trump’s Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, went into effect in 2019.
The ATF describes bump stocks as “devices that allow a semiautomatic firearm to shoot more than one shot with a single pull of the trigger by harnessing the recoil energy of the semiautomatic firearm to which it is affixed so that the trigger resets and continues firing without additional physical manipulation of the trigger by the shooter.”
Mitchell’s firearms client is less well-known than his Colorado ballot client — the plaintiff in the bump stock case is Army veteran Michael Cargill who, CBS reports, “bought two bump stocks in April 2018, before the ATF issued its final rule outlawing them, but turned in the devices in March 2019 after the ban went into effect.”
Attorney Mitchell is also widely credited as the architect of a Texas abortion prohibition known as S.B.8 — AKA the “Texas Heartbeat Act” — which controversially deputized citizens to report incidents in exchange for a cash reward.
I joined 85 @UChicago @UChicagoLaw classmates to call out our fellow classmate — Jonathan Mitchell — for appalling lawyer gaming.
— Leslie Danks Burke (@LDanksBurke) October 3, 2021
No matter what you believe about Roe v. Wade, deliberately creating a state law to dodge current Supreme Court precedent erodes the rule of law. pic.twitter.com/W9G0NVKS0j
