EVENTS

Date:	Thursday, July 2, 2009
Time:	9:00 AM -- 12:00 PM
Location:	Wohlstetter Conference Center, Twelfth Floor, AEI 1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036

Akhil Amar is the Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University, where he teaches constitutional law at both Yale College and Yale Law School. Mr. Amar clerked for Judge Stephen Breyer on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit prior to joining the Yale faculty in 1985. He is the coeditor of Processes of Constitutional Decisionmaking (Aspen Publishers, 2006), a leading constitutional law casebook. He has authored several books, including The Constitution and Criminal Procedure: First Principles (Yale University Press, 1997); The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction (Yale University Press, 1998); and, most recently, America’s Constitution: A Biography (Random House, 2005).

John D. Feerick is the Norris Professor of Law at the Fordham University School of Law, where he teaches courses on the Constitution, conflict resolution, and ethics. Prior to entering academia, he worked as a practicing attorney at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom; during this period, he wrote From Failing Hands: The Story of Presidential Succession (Fordham University Press, 1965). Mr. Feerick has received numerous awards for his work, including a special award from the American Bar Association for his efforts in developing the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Mr. Feerick served as the dean of Fordham Law from 1982 to 2002.

John C. Fortier is a research fellow at AEI. He studies American politics, the presidency, continuity of government, elections, the Electoral College, election reform, and presidential succession and disability. He is the senior counselor to the AEI-Brookings Election Reform Project, executive director of the Continuity of Government Commission, and a fortnightly columnist for Politico. Mr. Fortier’s books include Absentee and Early Voting: Trends, Promises, and Perils (AEI Press, 2006); After the People Vote: A Guide to the Electoral College (third edition, AEI Press, 2004); and Second-Term Blues: How George W. Bush Has Governed (Brookings Institution Press, 2007). He is also a frequent radio and television commentator on the presidency, Congress, and elections.

Martin Frost is an attorney with Polsinelli Shughart in Washington, D.C., and a commissioner for the AEI-Brookings Continuity of Government Commission. From 1979 to 2005, Mr. Frost was a member of the House of Representatives for Texas’s Twenty-fourth Congressional District. He served as the chair of the Caucus, the third-highest elected leadership position for Democrats, between 1999 and 2003, and he was the senior Democrat on the Rules Committee. At the time of his departure from Congress, he was the senior southern Democrat in the House and the dean of the Texas congressional delegation. During the 2008 election cycle, Mr. Frost served as president of America Votes, a national voter turnout organization.

Jamie Gorelick is a partner at WilmerHale, where she chairs both the National Security Practice and the Public Policy and Strategy Practice, and a commissioner for the AEI-Brookings Continuity of Government Commission. Ms. Gorelick was a member of the 9/11 Commission and has served on numerous boards and commissions involving the national security of the country, including the CIA’s National Security Advisory Panel. From 1994 to 1997, she was deputy attorney general of the United States, the second most senior position in the department, and before that, she was general counsel of the Department of Defense. From 1979 to 1980, Ms. Gorelick was assistant to the secretary and counselor to the deputy secretary of energy, and she was vice chair of Fannie Mae from 1997 to 2003.

James C. Ho is the solicitor general of the state of Texas and a commissioner for the AEI-Brookings Continuity of Government Commission. He previously served in all three branches of the federal government as well as in private practice. He was chief counsel to Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas), who appointed him chief counsel of the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Property Rights for the 108th Congress, and chief counsel of the Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security and Citizenship for the 109th Congress. He served as special assistant to the assistant attorney general for civil rights and then as an attorney adviser in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department from 2001 to 2003. He has clerked for Judge Jerry E. Smith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and Justice Clarence Thomas of the U.S. Supreme Court.

James Mann is the Foreign Policy Institute author-in-residence at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of the Johns Hopkins University. He has worked as a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times, serving as Beijing bureau chief, national security correspondent, and foreign affairs columnist. Mr. Mann was a guest scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. He has written numerous books, including Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (Viking, 2004) and, most recently, The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the End of the Cold War (Viking, 2009).

Thomas E. Mann is the W. Averell Harriman Chair and a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution. He serves as a senior counselor to the Continuity of Government Commission and is codirector of the AEI-Brookings Election Reform Project. Between 1987 and 1999, Mr. Mann was the director of governmental studies at Brookings and before that was executive director of the American Political Science Association. He is a recipient of the association’s Frank J. Goodnow and Charles E. Merriam Awards. His books include Vital Statistics on Congress 2008, with Norman J. Ornstein and Michael Malbin (Brookings Institution Press, 2008); The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track, with Norman J. Ornstein (second edition, Oxford University Press, 2008); and Party Lines: Competition, Partisanship, and Congressional Redistricting, edited with Bruce Cain (Brookings Institution Press, 2005).

Norman J. Ornstein is a resident scholar at AEI. He also serves as an election analyst for CBS News and writes a weekly column called “Congress Inside Out” for Roll Call. He has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, and other major publications, and he regularly appears on television programs such as Nightline, Charlie Rose, and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, where he was recently recognized as the most frequent guest over the program’s thirty years. Mr. Ornstein’s campaign finance working group of scholars and practitioners helped shape the major law, known as McCain-Feingold, that reformed the campaign financing system. He serves as senior counselor to the Continuity of Government Commission and as codirector of the AEI-Brookings Election Reform Project. Mr. Ornstein is a member of the boards of the Public Broadcasting Service, the Campaign Legal Center, and the U.S. Capitol Historical Society. He was elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004. His many books include The Permanent Campaign and Its Future (AEI Press, 2000) and The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track (Oxford University Press, 2006), both with Thomas E. Mann; Debt and Taxes: How America Got into Its Budget Mess and What to Do About It (AEI Press, 1994), with John H. Makin; and, most recently, Vital Statistics on Congress 2008 (Brookings Institution Press, 2008), with Michael Malbin and Thomas E. Mann.

Frances Townsend is a partner with Baker Botts in Washington, D.C. She served as assistant to President George W. Bush for homeland security and counterterrorism and chaired the Homeland Security Council from May 2004 until January 2008. She previously served as deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser for combating terrorism from May 2003 to May 2004. Most recently, Ms. Townsend provided consulting services and advice to corporate entities on global strategic engagement and risk as well as crisis and contingency planning. She is a contributor for CNN and has regularly appeared on network and cable television as a counterterrorism and national and homeland security expert.