A New American Political System?

With immeasurable knowledge of the executive branch and the regulatory process, Podesta Group clients are fortunate to have Sally Katzen on their side. Easily guiding organizations through the complexities of the administration and the Office of Management and Budget, Sally offers sound strategic advice informed by decades of service. During the Obama-Biden transition, Sally served on the Agency Review Working Group, responsible for the Executive Office of the President and the operations of government agencies.
 

As a leading policy expert on budgetary issues, among others, Sally has testified before Congress more than 70 times and has participated on panels for the National Academy of Science. Serving for eight years in the Clinton administration, she was Deputy Director for Management at the Office of Management and Budget (1999-2001), Deputy Assistant to the President for economic policy, Deputy Director for the National Economic Council (1998-1999) and Administrator for the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in OMB (1993-1998), where she was the senior adviser to the president on regulatory policy and process.

Sally was the first female partner at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering, where she specialized in administrative and legislative practice for more than 25 years. A well-respected professor, she has taught at the George Washington University, University of Michigan, New York University, George Mason University, University of Pennsylvania and Georgetown University law schools, as well as at Smith College, Johns Hopkins University and the Michigan in Washington Program.

A native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, she has a bachelor's from Smith College and a Juris Doctor from the University of Michigan Law School. She has served as chair of the section on administrative law and regulatory practice of the American Bar Association, president of the Federal Communications Bar Association and president of the Women’s Legal Defense Fund. She is also a fellow in the National Academy of Public Administration.

JOHN KUSTER has more than 20 years of experience litigating complex commercial litigation matters in Federal and state courts, as well as arbitrations. He has a diverse complex commercial litigation practice, and serves as one of the global co-leaders of the firm’s Complex Commercial Litigation practice area team.

The scope of John’s experience is reflected in his representative matters, including:

• Representing client, an auto parts manufacturer, in an action brought by owner seeking US$50 million in damages relating to indemnification, environmental claims and alleged breaches of a lease arising out of alleged conditions at a manufacturing facility in Upstate New York which our client left at the end of the lease.
• Representing CONCACAF, a regional soccer confederation for North America, Central America, and the Caribbean in connection with the United States Department of Justice indictment of a number of its former executives and officers who allegedly were engaged in corruption, bribery and kickbacks, among other alleged misconduct, including conducting an internal investigation, renegotiation of major commercial contracts, and prosecuting and defending numerous claims arising out of the consequences of the alleged misconduct. Represented CONCACAF before the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in appeal by former official to ban imposed on his participation in any football related activity within the CONCACAF region.
• Lead trial counsel in a bench trial where the firm’s client successfully enforced the provisions of a complex purchase price agreement concerning responsibility for significant environmental liabilities relating to a gas pipeline system.
• Serving as co-lead counsel in a three-week federal jury trial, which resulted in a US$125 million verdict in favor of the firm’s client finding that the defendant was liable for breach of fiduciary duty and fraud.
• Obtained a highly favorable settlement in April 2015 for a global investment management firm following a secured receivables-based loan to a special-purpose entity that was wholly owned by the Debtor.

Strong leadership has earned John recognition in The Legal 500 within Litigation: White-Collar Criminal Defense. John serves as a national co-chair of Sidley’s Recruiting of Associates Committee.

RICK BOUCHER, former U.S. Congressman and practice area team leader of Sidley’s Government Strategies group, focuses his practice on counseling clients whose business needs require the development of public policy strategies. 

Rick has extensive experience representing clients in Congressional investigations, counseling them on the expectations of the investigating committee, preparing written materials responsive to investigative requests, preparing witnesses for investigative hearings and interacting with the committee on the client’s behalf throughout the investigative process. During his 28 years of service as a member of Congress he participated in dozens of congressional investigations and gained valuable perspective and experience.

Rick served in the Virginia Senate for seven years and before entering public service was in the private practice of law for 12 years in New York and Virginia.

Ben Ginsberg represents numerous political parties, political campaigns, candidates, members of Congress and state legislatures, governors, corporations, trade associations, vendors, donors, and individuals participating in the political process. He represents a variety of clients on election law issues, particularly those involving federal and state campaign finance laws, ethics and gifts rules, pay-to-play laws, election administration, government investigations, redistricting, communications law, and election recounts and contests.

Prior to joining Jones Day in 2014, Ben served as national counsel to the Bush-Cheney presidential campaigns in the 2004 and 2000 election cycles and played a central role in the 2000 Florida recount. In 2012 and 2008, he served as national counsel to the Romney for President campaign. He also has represented the campaigns and leadership PACs of numerous members of the Senate and House as well as the national party committees. He serves as counsel to the Republican Governors Association and has extensive experience on the state legislative level through Republican redistricting efforts.

Before entering law school, Ben spent five years as a newspaper reporter at The Boston Globe, Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, The Berkshire Eagle (Massachusetts), and The Riverside Press-Enterprise(California). He has been a guest lecturer at the Stanford University Law School, a Fellow at Harvard University's Institute of Politics, and an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center. Ben recently served as co-chair of the Presidential Commission on Election Administration.

David Keating has a long and distinguished career in nonprofit advocacy.  In addition to his role as Executive Director of Club for Growth, a group dedicated to the promulgation of economic freedom, he has served as executive vice president of the National Taxpayers Union and executive director of Americans for Fair Taxation, a group that supports the FairTax to replace the income tax.

Richard Pildes is one of the nation’s leading scholars of constitutional law and a specialist in legal issues affecting democracy. A former law clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall, he has been elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Law Institute, and has also received recognition as a Guggenheim Fellow and a Carnegie Scholar. His acclaimed casebook The Law of Democracy: Legal Structure of the Political Process helped create an entirely new field of study in the law schools. The Law of Democracy systematically explores legal and policy issues concerning the structure of democratic elections and institutions, such as the role of money in politics, the design of election districts, the regulation of political parties, the structure of voting systems, the representation of minority interests in democratic institutions, and similar issues. He has written extensively on the rise of political polarization in the United States, the Voting Rights Act, the dysfunction of America’s political processes, the role of the Supreme Court in overseeing American democracy, and the powers of the American President and Congress, and he has criticized excessively “romantic” understandings of democracy. In addition to his scholarship on these issues, he has written on national-security law, the design of the regulatory state, and American constitutional history and theory. A well-known public intellectual, Pildes also has successfully argued before the United States Supreme Court and was nominated for an Emmy as a member of NBC’s breaking-news team for coverage of the 2000 Bush v. Gore contest.

In Bob Bauer’s 40 years of practice, he has provided counseling and representation on matters involving the regulation of political activity before the courts and administrative agencies of national party committees, candidates, political committees, individuals, federal officeholders, corporations and trade associations, and tax-exempt groups. He served as White House Counsel to President Obama and returned to private practice in June 2011, and was general counsel to Obama for America, the president’s campaign organization, in 2008 and 2012. In 2013, President Obama appointed Bauer to the co-chairmanship of the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. He is general counsel to the Democratic National Committee. Bauer is the author of several books and articles, and writes about campaign finance and other topics in political law at MoreSoftMoneyHardLaw.

David, a 20-year veteran of money in politics organizing and advocacy, has managed or consulted on six winning campaigns for state policy, and pioneered electoral and issue accountability campaigns on the issue. He is a regularly sought strategist for organizations, foundations, and elected officials seeking reform.

Professor Richard L. Hasen is Chancellor’s Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. Hasen is a nationally recognized expert in election law and campaign finance regulation, and is co-author of a leading casebook on election law.

From 2001-2010, he served (with Dan Lowenstein) as founding co-editor of the quarterly peer-reviewed publication, Election Law Journal. He is the author of over 100 articles on election law issues, published in numerous journals including the Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review and Supreme Court Review. He was elected to The American Law Institute in 2009 and serves as an Adviser on ALI’s ongoing law reform project, Principles of Election Law: Resolution of Election Disputes.

Professor Hasen was named one of the 100 most influential lawyers in America by The National Law Journal in 2013.

His op-eds and commentaries have appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, and Slate. Hasen also writes the often-quoted  Election Law Blog, which the ABA Journal named to its “Blawg 100 Hall of Fame” in 2015. His newest book, Plutocrats United: Campaign Money, the Supreme Court, and the Distortion of American Elections, was published in 2016 by Yale University Press.

Professor Hasen holds a B.A. degree (with highest honors) from UC Berkeley, and a J.D., M.A., and Ph.D. (Political Science) from UCLA. After law school, Hasen clerked for the Honorable David R. Thompson of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and then worked as a civil appellate lawyer at the Encino firm Horvitz and Levy.

From 1994-1997, Hasen taught at the Chicago-Kent College of Law and from 1998-2011 he taught at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, where he was named the William H. Hannon Distinguished Professor of Law in 2005. He joined the UC Irvine School of Law faculty in July 2011, and is a faculty member of the UC Irvine Center for the Study of Democracy.

Samuel Issacharoff’s wide-ranging research deals with issues in civil procedure (especially complex litigation and class actions), law and economics, American and comparative constitutional law, and employment law. He is one of the pioneers in the law of the political process; his Law of Democracy casebook (co-authored with Stanford Law School’s Pam Karlan and NYU School of Law’s Richard Pildes) and dozens of articles have helped create this vibrant new area of constitutional law. In addition to ongoing involvement in some of the front-burner cases involving mass harms, he served as the reporter for the Principles of the Law of Aggregate Litigation of the American Law Institute. Issacharoff is a 1983 graduate of Yale Law School. He began his teaching career in 1989 at the University of Texas, where he held the Joseph D. Jamail Centennial Chair in Law. In 1999, Issacharoff moved to Columbia Law School, where he was the Harold R. Medina Professor in Procedural Jurisprudence. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

With immeasurable knowledge of the executive branch and the regulatory process, Podesta Group clients are fortunate to have Sally Katzen on their side. Easily guiding organizations through the complexities of the administration and the Office of Management and Budget, Sally offers sound strategic advice informed by decades of service. During the Obama-Biden transition, Sally served on the Agency Review Working Group, responsible for the Executive Office of the President and the operations of government agencies.
 

As a leading policy expert on budgetary issues, among others, Sally has testified before Congress more than 70 times and has participated on panels for the National Academy of Science. Serving for eight years in the Clinton administration, she was Deputy Director for Management at the Office of Management and Budget (1999-2001), Deputy Assistant to the President for economic policy, Deputy Director for the National Economic Council (1998-1999) and Administrator for the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in OMB (1993-1998), where she was the senior adviser to the president on regulatory policy and process.

Sally was the first female partner at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering, where she specialized in administrative and legislative practice for more than 25 years. A well-respected professor, she has taught at the George Washington University, University of Michigan, New York University, George Mason University, University of Pennsylvania and Georgetown University law schools, as well as at Smith College, Johns Hopkins University and the Michigan in Washington Program.

A native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, she has a bachelor's from Smith College and a Juris Doctor from the University of Michigan Law School. She has served as chair of the section on administrative law and regulatory practice of the American Bar Association, president of the Federal Communications Bar Association and president of the Women’s Legal Defense Fund. She is also a fellow in the National Academy of Public Administration.

As a reporter, editor, editorial writer and columnist at The Washington Post, Ruth Marcus has developed a keen understanding of the folklores and byways of the national political scene. Marcus writes with the practiced eye of a veteran reporter, the incisive analysis of a lawyer, and the amused affection of someone who loves the political game even as she perceives—and pierces—its artifice.

Marcus has covered every institution in Washington, from the Supreme Court to the White House to Congress; she has reported on every major Washington story of the last two decades, from contested Supreme Court nominations to contested elections, from hard-fought political campaigns to a hard-fought presidential impeachment. She can dissect a Supreme Court opinion; unearth—and explain—a fundraising scandal; and write, always in a down-to-earth manner, about the details of the federal budget or the intricacies of health care reform.

Jen Psaki is the current White House Communications Director. She previously served as a spokesperson for the United States Department of State, and has served in various press and communications roles in the Obama White House.

Psaki began her career in 2001 with the re-election campaigns of Iowa Democrats Tom Harkin for the U.S. Senate and Tom Vilsack for Governor. Psaki then became deputy press secretary for John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign. From 2005 to 2006, Psaki served as communications director to U.S. Representative Joseph Crowley (D-NY) and regional press secretary for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Throughout the 2008 presidential campaign of U.S. Senator Barack Obama, Psaki served as traveling press secretary.  After Obama won the election, Psaki followed Obama to the White House as Deputy Press Secretary and was promoted to Deputy Communications Director on December 19, 2009. On September 22, 2011, Psaki left this position to become senior vice president and managing director at the Washington, D.C. office of public relations firm Global Strategy Group.

In 2012, Psaki returned to political communications as press secretary for President Obama's 2012 re-election campaign. On February 11, 2013, Psaki became spokesperson for the United States Department of State.

CAM KERRY, former General Counsel and Acting Secretary of the United States Department of Commerce, has been a global leader on many of the biggest challenges facing business today, including privacy, information security, Big Data and the flow of information and technology across international borders. His broad practice operates at the intersection of law, technology and public policy and is informed by his years of government service and over three decades in private practice. Cam joins his wealth of experience in the highest levels of government with the global and inter-disciplinary resources of Sidley’s highly regarded Privacy, Data Security and Information Law team. He is a thought leader whose writing has appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle, The Boston Globe, TechCrunch and Forbes.com and is quoted by The Financial Timesand The Wall Street Journal among other publications.

In addition, Cam works on complex matters involving international trade relations, intellectual property policy, litigation, government affairs and communications. Cam is recognized by The Legal 500 in Technology: Data Protection and Privacy and in International Trade: Litigation, and by the Burton Awards, a nonprofit program in association with the Library of Congress and co-sponsored by the American Bar Association, as one of the “finest law firm writers of 2016.”

Cam’s practice involves strategic counseling, regulatory guidance and litigation, and includes:

• Providing strategic advice for general counsels, boards of directors, chief privacy officers and compliance officers on emerging issues in global privacy and data protection and information governance 
• Advising on corporate cybersecurity preparedness, including deployment of the NIST Framework, an outgrowth of Cam’s leadership, at the Department of Commerce 
• Assisting clients to advance their objectives to promote international digital trade, cross-border data transfers, cloud services and innovative Big Data and new technology applications in the face of new and emerging challenges from governments and changing markets
• Representing companies in litigation and government investigations concerning alleged unfair or deceptive business practices regarding privacy and other consumer protection issues 
• Advising and representing U.S. and multinational companies regarding cross-border information flows, including most prominently the new EU Data Protection Regulation, and the challenges to Safe Harbor and the proposed Privacy Shield, as well as the APEC Cross-Border Privacy Rules and other data transfer mechanisms 

Throughout his life, Cam has been deeply involved in politics. During the 2004 presidential campaign, he was a close advisor and national surrogate for his brother, Democratic nominee John Kerry. The period when Cam served as Acting Commerce Secretary, while his brother served as Secretary of State, marked the first time in U.S. history that two brothers served in the Cabinet at the same time.

Scott Goodstein, the founder and CEO of Revolution Messaging, has spent the past decade pioneering digital strategy and technology for political campaigns and progressive causes across the country. He was the External Online Director for Obama for America during the 2008 presidential race, developing social networking and mobile platforms for what was arguably the biggest, most effective grassroots organizing campaign of modern times and a watershed moment for the use of digital technology in politics. Notably, he created and implemented Obama Mobile, an advanced communication tool featuring text messaging, downloads, interactive voice response communication, a mobile web site (WAP) and an iPhone App. He also developed the campaign’s lifestyle marketing strategy, including the “street team” materials used in battleground states.

Goodstein has worked with the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, SEIU, and the NAACP, among other organizations. He has been involved in more than two dozen progressive political initiatives. In 2004, Goodstein co-founded Punkvoter and Rock Against Bush, which became a $4 million young voter mobilization effort. He has conducted political trainings for the National Democratic Institute, UNICEF, Democracy for America, the Campaign Management Institute and the New Organizing Institute. He has given presentations at Columbia, American University, George Washington University and Georgetown. He has been a featured panelist at the Brookings Institute, the Milken Institute and Personal Democracy Forum.

An award-winning teacher and nationally recognized constitutional law expert, Professor Persily, JD ’98, focuses on the law of democracy, addressing issues such as voting rights, political parties, campaign finance and redistricting. A sought-after nonpartisan voice in voting rights, he has served as a court-appointed expert to draw legislative districting plans for Georgia, Maryland and New York and as special master for the redistricting of Connecticut’s congressional districts. Most recently, he also served as the Senior Research Director for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration, a bipartisan commission created by the President to deal with the long lines at the polling place and other administrative problems witnessed in the 2012 election.   

His other principal area of scholarly interest concerns American public opinion toward various constitutional controversies. He designed the Constitutional Attitudes Survey, a national public opinion poll executed in both 2009 and 2010. The survey includes an array of questions concerning attitudes toward the Supreme Court, constitutional interpretation and specific constitutional controversies. Professor Persily has edited three books. The first, Public Opinion and Constitutional Controversy (Oxford, 2008), examines the effects of Supreme Court decisions on American public opinion and in areas such as desegregation, criminal rights, abortion, gay rights, federalism, school prayer and the death penalty. The second, The Health Care Case: The Supreme Court’s Decision and Its Implications (Oxford Press, 2013), presents expert analysis of NFIB v. Sebelius from the nation’s leading professors of constitutional and health law. And the third, Solutions to Polarization(Cambridge Press, 2015) sets forth an array of proposals to deal with the hyper-partisanship and gridlock that plague the current American political system.

Joe Rospars is Founder & CEO of Blue State Digital, the creative and tech agency for causes and brands looking to transform how they engage people. From Google to UNICEF, Obama to MIT, Tate Modern to Ford Motor Company, Blue State Digital helps grow communities, build platforms, and transform organizations for the digital age.

Joe was President Barack Obama’s chief digital strategist for both the 2008 and 2012 campaigns, overseeing the digital integration of the unprecedented fundraising, communications and grassroots mobilization effort. The digital arm of the campaign engaged a record-breaking number of Americans through mobile, social, video and the web, and raised more than a billion dollars in mostly small donations from ordinary Americans.

Prior to the Obama campaign, Joe led BSD’s work with Governor Howard Dean, from the founding of Democracy for America through Dean’s historic “50 State Strategy” at the DNC and the 2006 election victories. He is a frequent commentator on CNN, MSNBC and Bloomberg TV and has appeared in The Washington Post, TIME, Fast Company, WIRED, Adweek and POLITICO, among other outlets. Joe has been named to WIRED’s “2016 Political Power List” and Advertising Age’s “Digital A-List,” and was included on Rolling Stone’s list of the “100 People Who Are Changing America.”

Led by some of the most creative and analytical minds from the political, nonprofit, and brand worlds, Blue State Digital is a part of WPP Digital and has more than 240 employees in six offices around the world.

Trevor Morrison is dean and also the Eric M. and Laurie B. Roth Professor of Law at NYU School of Law. Before coming to NYU, he was on the faculties of Cornell Law School (2003-08) and Columbia Law School (2008-13). In 2009, Morrison served as associate counsel to President Barack Obama. Morrison’s research and teaching interests are in constitutional law, federal courts, and the law of the executive branch. His scholarship has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, and the Columbia Law Review, among other publications. He was previously a law clerk to Judge Betty B. Fletcher of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (1998-99) and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the US Supreme Court (2002-03). Between the two clerkships, he was a Bristow Fellow in the US Justice Department’s Office of the Solicitor General (1999-2000), an attorney-adviser in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (2000-01), and an associate at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering (2001-02). Morrison received a BA with honors in history from the University of British Columbia in 1994, and a JD from Columbia Law School in 1998. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and a member of the American Law Institute, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the US State Department’s Advisory Committee on International Law. In 2016, President Obama appointed him as chair of the Public Interest Declassification Board.

Frederick S. Yang is a partner with the Garin-Hart-Yang Research Group. He also serves as a senior vice president with Hart Research Associates, Garin-Hart-Yang’s parent company.

Mr. Yang has achieved a reputation for providing insightful analysis in his approach to political survey research, and for his hands-on involvement with his clients’ campaigns.  Campaigns & Elections magazine has singled out Mr. Yang for “his ability to master the local nuances of a race.”  And Capitol Hill’s newspaper, Roll Call, named Mr. Yang as one of 10 Democratic consultants on its list of “Consultants Who Make a Difference.”

Mr. Yang counts several US senators as his clients, including Maryland’s Barbara Mikulski and Pennsylvania’s Bob Casey (whose victory was the first for a Democratic senatorial candidate in a regular general election since 1962).  Mr. Yang also is the pollster for several members of the US House of Representatives, including Maryland’s Chris Van Hollen, Connecticut’s Elizabeth Esty, and California’s Lois Capps.  He also worked for several longtime veterans of the House, including John Dingell (MI-12), Rush Holt, Jr. (NJ-12), and Henry Waxman (CA-33).

Despite the tough political environment for Democrats in 2010, Mr. Yang helped Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley defeat Bob Ehrlich by 56% to 42%, more than DOUBLE the margin by which O’Malley defeated then-Governor Ehrlich in 2006.  Mr. Yang was also the pollster for Bev Perdue, who in 2008 was the first woman to be elected governor of North Carolina.

Mr. Yang’s CURRENT clients include Governor Steve Beshear (Kentucky), Attorney General Eric Schneiderman (New York), Secretary of State Bill Galvin (Massachusetts), Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake (Baltimore, MD), Mayor Michael Nutter (Philadelphia, PA), Mayor Francis Slay (St. Louis, MO), Mayor Eric Garcetti (Los Angeles, CA), and Washington DC’s newly elected mayor, Muriel Bowser.

Mr. Yang is a regular contributor to network and cable television news programs such as MSNBC’s “The Daily Rundown,” and he has been part of NBC News coverage of the national election returns.  Currently, Mr. Yang collaborates with Republican pollster Bill McInturff on the monthly NBC News/Wall Street Journal national survey.

Mr. Yang, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Stanford University, got his start in politics at age 14, when he worked in his state assemblyman’s district office.  Before joining Hart Research, he worked on several political campaigns in a variety of roles, from precinct walker to field coordinator.