Author, The Indispensable Electoral College: How the Founders’ Plan Saves Our Country from Mob Rule and Enlightened Democracy: The Case for the Electoral College
Tara Ross is nationally recognized for her expertise on the Electoral College. She is the author of Why We Need the Electoral College (2019), The Indispensable Electoral College: How the Founders’ Plan Saves Our Country from Mob Rule (2017), We Elect A President: The Story of our Electoral College (2016), and Enlightened Democracy: The Case for the Electoral College (2d ed. 2012). She is also the author of She Fought Too: Stories of Revolutionary War Heroines (2019), and a co-author of Under God: George Washington and the Question of Church and State (2008) (with Joseph C. Smith, Jr.). Her Prager University video, Do You Understand the Electoral College?, is Prager’s most-viewed video ever, with more than 60 million views.
Tara often appears as a guest on a variety of talk shows nationwide, and she regularly addresses civic, university, and legal audiences. She’s contributed to several law reviews and newspapers, including the National Law Journal, USA Today, the Washington Examiner, The Hill, The Washington Times, and FoxNews.com. She’s appeared before institutions such as the Cooper Union, Brown University, the Dole Institute of Politics, and Mount Vernon. She’s appeared on Fox News, CSPAN, NPR, and a variety of other national and local shows.
Tara is a retired lawyer and a former Editor-in-Chief of the Texas Review of Law & Politics. She obtained her B.A. from Rice University and her J.D. from the University of Texas School of Law. She resides in Dallas with her husband and children.
Vice-chair, U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and Adjunct Scholar, American Enterprise Institute
Abigail Thernstrom is the vice-chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. She was a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute in New York from 1993 to 2009, and a member of the Massachusetts State Board of Education for more than a decade until her third term ended in November 2006. She also serves on the board of advisors of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. She received her Ph.D. in 1975 from the Department of Government, Harvard University.
In 2007 she and her husband, Stephan Thernstrom, along with James Q. Wilson, Martin Feldstein, and John Bolton, were the recipients of a Bradley Foundation prizes for Outstanding Intellectual Achievement.
Thernstrom and her husband, Harvard historian Stephan Thernstrom, are the co-authors of No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning (Simon & Schuster, October 2003), which has been awarded the 2007 Fordham Foundation prize for “for distinguished scholarship,” and was named by both the Los Angeles Times and the American School Board Journal as one of the best books of 2003.
They also collaborated on America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible (Simon & Schuster), which the New York Times Book Review, in its annual end-of-the-year issue, named as one of the notable books of 1997.
They are the editors of a Beyond the Color Line: New Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity. Their lengthy review of William G. Bowen and Derek Bok's much-noticed work, The Shape of the River, appeared in the June 1999 issue of the UCLA Law Review.
Whose Votes Count? Affirmative Action and Minority Voting Rights (Harvard University Press) won four awards, including the American Bar Association's Certificate of Merit, and the Anisfield-Wolf prize for the best book on race and ethnicity. It was named the best policy studies book of that year by the Policy Studies Organization (an affiliate of the American Political Science Association), and won the Benchmark Book Award from the Center for Judicial Studies. Along with her husband, she also won the 2004 Peter Shaw Memorial Award given by National Association of Scholars.
She is currently completing a book entitled Voting Rights and Wrongs: The Elusive Quest for Racially Fair Elections, and is working, as well, with her husband on another book with the tentative title of Don’t Call it Segregation: The Myth of Contemporary Apartheid. She (and two co-authors) submitted an amicus brief in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle, challenging the constitutionality of Seattle's racial balancing plan.
Her frequent media appearances have included Fox News Sunday, Good Morning America, and This Week with George Stephanopoulos. For some years, she was a stringer for The Economist, and continues to write for a variety of journals and newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and the (London) Times Literary Supplement.
She serves on several boards, and from 1992 to 1997 was a member of the Aspen Institute's Domestic Strategy Group.
Chairman, Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths
Betsy McCaughey is a patient advocate and former Lt. Governor of New York State. In 2004, she founded and is now Chairman of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths (also known as RID), a nationwide educational campaign to stop hospital-acquired infections. RID has made hospital infections a major public issue. It has provided compelling evidence that preventing infection improves hospital profitability as well as saving lives, and RID has won legislation in 34 states and Washington, D.C. for public reporting of infection rates. RID has become synonymous with patient safety and clean hospital care.
Betsy McCaughey’s research on how to prevent infection deaths has been featured on Good Morning America, the CBS Morning Show, ABC’s 20/20, and many other national programs.
Betsy McCaughey is the author of more than one hundred scholarly and popular articles on health policy, infection, medical innovation, the economics of aging, and Medicare. Her writings have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, New Republic, Policy Review, Forbes Magazine, New York Law Journal, Los Angeles Times, U.S. News & World Report, and many other national publications. Her 1994 analysis of the dangers of the Clinton health plan in The New Republic won a National Magazine Award for the best article in the nation on public policy. She has been profiled in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, The Washington Post, and other publications.
Prior to entering the health policy field, Betsy McCaughey earned a Ph.D. in constitutional history from Columbia University. She is the author of two books on that subject. She has taught at Vassar College and Columbia University, and she produced prize-winning studies while at two think tanks, the Manhattan Institute and later the Hudson Institute.
From 1995 to 1998, she served as Lt. Governor of New York State. She focused on health issues, and her bills became models for legislation in many states and in Congress.
Former United States National Security Advisor
John R. Bolton served as Assistant to the President and National Security Advisor from April 2018 to September 2019.
Prior to his appointment, Ambassador Bolton served as a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI); of counsel at Kirkland & Ellis; a contributor to FOX News Channel and FOX Business Network; and his op-ed articles were regularly featured in major media publications.
Ambassador Bolton was appointed as United States Permanent Representative to the United Nations on August 1, 2005 and served until his resignation in December 2006. Prior to his appointment, Ambassador Bolton served as Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security from May 2001 to May 2005.
Other positions he has previously held include Assistant Secretary for International Organization Affairs at the Department of State, 1989-1993; Assistant Attorney General, Department of Justice, 1985-1989; Assistant Administrator for Program and Policy Coordination, U.S. Agency for International Development, 1982-1983 and General Counsel, U.S. Agency for International Development, 1981-1982.
Ambassador Bolton is the author of Surrender is Not an Option: Defending America at the U.N. and Abroad, published by Simon and Shuster (November 2007) and How Barack Obama is Endangering our National Sovereignty, published by Encounter Books (April 2010).
Ambassador Bolton was born in Baltimore, Maryland. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree, summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, from Yale College in 1970, and received his Juris Doctor from Yale Law School in 1974. He currently resides in Maryland with his wife, Gretchen. They have one daughter, Jennifer Sarah, who also graduated from Yale College, and received her MBA and SM degrees from MIT in 2014 and is currently a senior manager at Nissan’s facility in Nashville.
Senior Fellow, National Review
Bestselling author Andrew C. McCarthy is a contributing editor at National Review, a senior fellow at National Review Institute, and a Fox News contributor. He is a former Chief Assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of New York and led the terrorism prosecution against the “Blind Sheikh” (Omar Abdel Rahman) and eleven other jihadists for conducting a war of urban terrorism against the United States that included the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and a plot to bomb New York City landmarks. During is 20-year career as a prosecutor, he received numerous honors, including the Justice Department’s highest awards. Andy speaks and writes widely on law and national security, radical Islam, politics, and culture. He has testified before Congress as an expert on issues of constitutional law, counterterrorism, and law-enforcement. He is a columnist for The Hill, and his essays and book reviews appear frequently at The New Criterion. His most recent New York Times bestselling book is Ball of Collusion (Encounter Books, 2019), about the Russiagate controversy (an updated version was published in 2020). His other books include Willful Blindness (2008), The Grand Jihad (2010), Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy (2012), and Faithless Execution (2014). He has also written several pamphlets in the Broadside series published by Encounter Books, most recently Islam and Free Speech (2015).
Former United States Attorney General
Michael B. Mukasey is the former Attorney General of the United States, the nation’s chief law enforcement officer. As Attorney General from November 2007 to January 2009, he oversaw the U.S. Department of Justice and advised on critical issues of domestic and international law.
From 1988 to 2006, Judge Mukasey served as a district judge in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, becoming Chief Judge in 2000.
From 1972 to 1976, Judge Mukasey served as an Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and as Chief of the Official Corruption Unit from 1975 to 1976. His practice consisted of criminal litigation on behalf of the government, including investigation and prosecution of narcotics, bank robbery, interstate theft, securities fraud, fraud on the government and bribery. From 1976 to 1987 and from 2006 to 2007 he was in private practice.
Judge Mukasey has received numerous honors, including the Federal Bar Council’s Learned Hand Medal for Excellence in Federal Jurisprudence. He served as Chairman of the Committee on Public Access to Information and Proceedings of the New York Bar Association from 1984 to 1987. He served on the Federal Courts Committee of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York from 1979 to 1982 and its Communications Law Committee from 1983 to 1986. Judge Mukasey was also a part-time lecturer at Columbia School of Law from January 1993 to May 2007, teaching trial advocacy.
He received his LL.B. from Yale Law School in 1967 and his B.A. from Columbia College in 1963.
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