Congressman, U.S. House of Representatives
First elected in 2016, Congressman Mike Gallagher represents Wisconsin’s 8th District in the U.S. House of Representatives. Mike is a 7th generation Wisconsin native, born and raised in Green Bay.
Mike joined the United States Marine Corps the day he graduated from college and served for seven years on active duty as a Counterintelligence/Human Intelligence Officer and Regional Affairs Officer for the Middle East/North Africa, eventually earning the rank of Captain. He deployed twice to Al Anbar Province, Iraq as a commander of intelligence teams, served on General Petraeus’s Central Command Assessment Team in the Middle East, and worked for three years in the intelligence community, including tours at the National Counterterrorism Center and the Drug Enforcement Agency. Mike also served as the lead Republican staffer for Middle East, North Africa and Counterterrorism on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Prior to taking office, Mike worked in the private sector at a global energy and supply chain management company in Green Bay.
After earning his bachelor’s degree from Princeton University, Mike went on to earn a master’s degree in Security Studies from Georgetown University, a second in Strategic Intelligence from National Intelligence University, and his PhD in International Relations from Georgetown.
Mike currently serves on the House Armed Services Committee, where he is a member of the Seapower and Projection Forces, as well as the Readiness Subcommittees. He also serves on the Homeland Security Committee, where he is a member of the Counterterrorism and Intelligence (CTI) and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection (CIP) Subcommittees.
Vice President, Networks, The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies
Nathan Kaczmarek is Vice President for Networks at the Federalist Society. He began his legal career in Detroit representing nationwide clients in all phases of healthcare litigation and complex medical malpractice claims. He has since served as a Senior Legal and Policy Advisor in the U.S. House of Representatives and as Counsel for the Subcommittee on Regulatory Affairs and Federal Management in the U.S. Senate. Prior to overseeing the Networks, he was Director of the Practice Groups, the Regulatory Transparency Project, and the Article I Initiative for the Federalist Society.
Nathan holds degrees from Hillsdale College and Thomas M. Cooley Law School. He is a Liaison Representative for The Administrative Conference of the United States. He also serves as Vice President of the Associates of St. John Bosco, a Virginia based non-profit dedicated to Catholic high school and college students.
Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, Elliot School of International Affairs, The George Washington University
Henry R. Nau is Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at the Elliott School of International Affairs, The George Washington University. From 1989-2016, he directed the US-Japan- South Korea Legislative Exchange Program, semiannual meetings among Members of the US Congress, Japanese Diet, and South Korean National Assembly. During the academic year 2011-12 he was the W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow and the Susan Louise Dyer Peace National Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
Professor Nau holds a B.S. degree in Economics, Politics and Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. Previously, he taught at Williams College and as Visiting Professor at Johns Hopkins SAIS, Stanford, and Columbia Universities. He is the recipient of grants from, among others, the Council on Foreign Relations, National Science Foundation, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Smith- Richardson Foundation, Century Foundation, Japan US Friendship Commission, Rumsfeld Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, and the Hoover Institution. From August 1975 to January 1977 he served as a special assistant to the Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs and from January 1981 to July 1983 as senior staff member and White House sherpa on President Reagan’s National Security Council responsible for G-7 Summits and international economic affairs.
Among numerous publications, he is the author of five single-authored University press books, including Conservative Internationalism: Armed Diplomacy Under Jefferson, Polk, Truman and Reagan (Princeton University Press, 2013; paperback with new preface 2015); Perspectives on International Relations: Power, Institutions, and Ideas (Sage/CQ Press, 5th Edition, 2016); At Home Abroad: Identity and Power in American Foreign Policy (Cornell University Press, 2002); The Myth of America's Decline: Leading the World Economy into the 1990s (Oxford University Press, 1990) and National Politics and International Technology: Nuclear Reactor Development in Western Europe (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974). His most recent articles and book chapters include “How Restraint Leads to War,” Commentary Magazine, (September 2015; Lead Article on Front Cover); “The ‘Great Expansion:’ The Economic Legacy of Ronald Reagan,” in Reagan’s Legacy in a World Transformed, edited by Jeffrey L. Chidester and Paul Kengor, (Harvard University Press, 2015); and “Ideas have consequences: The Cold War and today,” International Politics, (July 2011).
He is the recipient of the State Department's Superior Honor Award (1977), the Elliott School Harry Harding Teaching Prize (2007), and the Japanese Government's Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon (2016). From 1963-65 he served as a Lieutenant in the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, N.C.
Professor Emeritus of Law, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University
Jeremy A. Rabkin is a Professor Emeritus of Law at the Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University. Before joining the faculty in June 2007, he was for over two decades a professor in the Department of Government at Cornell University. Professor Rabkin serves on the board of directors of the Center for Individual Rights, a public interest law firm based in Washington, D.C. Previously he was a board member of the U.S. Institute of Peace and the board of academic advisors of the American Enterprise Institute.
Professor Rabkin’s books include Law Without Nations? (Princeton University Press, 2005). He authored “If You Need a Friend, Don’t Call a Cosmopolitan,” a chapter in Varieties of Sovereignty and Citizenship (Sigal R. Ben-Porath & Rogers M. Smith eds., University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). His articles have appeared in major law reviews and political science journals and his journalistic contributions in a range of magazines and newspapers, including the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal.
Senior Fellow and Director of Constitutional Studies, Manhattan Institute
Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. Previously he was executive director and senior lecturer at the Georgetown Center for the Constitution, and before that a vice president of the Cato Institute.
Shapiro is the author of Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites (2025) and Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America’s Highest Court (2020), coauthor of Religious Liberties for Corporations? (2014), and editor of 11 volumes of the Cato Supreme Court Review (2008-18). He has contributed to a variety of academic, popular, and professional publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, National Review, and Newsweek. He also regularly provides commentary for various media outlets, writes the Shapiro’s Gavel newsletter on Substack, and once appeared on the Colbert Report.
Shapiro has testified many times before Congress and state legislatures and has filed more than 500 amicus curiae “friend of the court” briefs in the Supreme Court. He lectures regularly on behalf of the Federalist Society, is a member of the board of fellows of the Jewish Policy Center, was an inaugural Washington Fellow at the National Review Institute, and has been an adjunct law professor at the George Washington University and University of Mississippi. He is also the chairman of the board of advisers of the Mississippi Justice Institute, a barrister in the Edward Coke Appellate Inn of Court, and a former member of the Virginia Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
Earlier in his career, Shapiro was a special assistant/adviser to the Multi-National Force in Iraq on rule-of-law issues and practiced at Patton Boggs and Cleary Gottlieb. Before entering private practice, he clerked for Judge E. Grady Jolly of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. He holds an AB from Princeton University, an MSc from the London School of Economics, and a JD from the University of Chicago Law School.
President, Hoppe Strategies
After serving 29 years on Capitol Hill, Dave Hoppe returned to the private sector as president of Hoppe Strategies, a strategic planning, lobbying and political consulting firm.
Hoppe brings a wealth of experience to this job, having dealt with legislative development and strategy at the highest levels on Capitol Hill. He directed Whip offices in both the House and Senate, and led the Senate Majority Leader’s office during the Clinton and Bush 43 administrations. Both positions oversaw and coordinated the flow of legislation through Congress, and both required working with political personalities on both sides of the aisle as well as the White House, to achieve passage for each bill. Hoppe recently reprised this role for Sen. Jon Kyl in the Senate Whip Office.
Additionally, Hoppe was the lead staff member on such historic Constitutional and structural events as the power shift in the Senate (when one Senator changed his party affiliation, throwing into chaos the entire Senate committee structure and requiring extensive negotiations between both parties), and the Senate impeachment trial of President Clinton. These events give him a unique perspective on the interaction of political agendas with legislative outcomes.
Other Hill positions held by Hoppe include Chief of Staff to Rep. Jack Kemp during his presidential bid, and Chief of Staff to Sen. Dan Coats who was appointed to replace former Senator Dan Quayle. Sen. Coats was required to conduct two statewide campaigns in a 4-year period in order to confirm his Senate appointment and then to retain the seat, unusual demands which impacted the work of his Senate office. Early in his Hill career, Hoppe served as energy and environmental policy analyst for the Republican Study Committee.
Among the highlights of Hoppe’s years on House leadership staff were the passage of the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 and the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981, both key elements of the first Reagan administration. During his tenure with Rep. Jack Kemp, the Tax Reform Act of 1986 was passed and signed into law. He was also involved with the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of 1997, and numerous other issues including welfare reform, tax policies and education reform.
In 2003, Hoppe left the Hill to work for the public affairs firm Quinn Gillespie & Associates, serving as President of QGA 2007-2011, when he returned briefly to the Senate to direct the Whip office for Sen. Kyl. Currently Hoppe is a Senior Policy Advisor at Squire Patton Boggs, he also serves as a Senior Advisor to the Bipartisan Policy Center, and is an advisor to the Jack Kemp Foundation. He is an emeritus member of the Board for Easter Seals of DC, Maryland and Northern Virginia, was Chairman of the Government Affairs Committee for the National Down Syndrome Society, and serves on the national board of SourceAmerica and of the Coalition to Promote Self Determination, a group of organizations working to empower disabled individuals to achieve greater independence.
He holds a B.A. in Government from the University of Notre Dame, and an M.A. in International Relations from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He is married and has three children.
Laurence H. Silberman Chair in Constitutional Governance and Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute; Co-Director, Antonin Scalia Law School’s C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State
Adam J. White is the Laurence H. Silberman Chair in Constitutional Governance and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on the Supreme Court and the administrative state. Concurrently, he codirects the Antonin Scalia Law School’s C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State.
Mr. White practiced constitutional and administrative law, particularly in the regulation of energy and financial markets. He started his legal career as a law clerk for Judge David B. Sentelle at the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit.
Mr. White has written for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, National Affairs, Commentary, Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, and Notre Dame Law Review, among other publications. He is a regular contributor to the Yale Journal on Regulation’s Notice and Comment blog, and for many years, he was one of the Weekly Standard’s lead writers on constitutional law and the Supreme Court.
Mr. White has testified often before Congress, including before the Senate’s Committees on the Judiciary; Commerce, Science, and Transportation; and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and before the House’s Judiciary and Financial Services Committees. In 2018, the Senate Committee on the Judiciary called him to testify in Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings to advise senators on Kavanaugh’s approach to administrative law.
In 2021, he served on the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States, where he criticized “Court packing” and other efforts to restructure the Supreme Court. In 2017, he was appointed to serve on the Administrative Conference of the United States. He also serves on the leadership council for the American Bar Association’s Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice Section, which he will chair in 2023–24. Before joining AEI, he was a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Mr. White has a JD from Harvard Law School and a bachelor of business administration from the College of Business at the University of Iowa.
United States Senator from Oklahoma
Senator Lankford of Oklahoma served four years in the U.S. House of Representatives and was elected to the U.S. Senate to complete an unexpired term on November 4, 2014 and re-elected to a full six-year senate term on November 8, 2016.
As chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Regulatory Affairs and Federal Management, Lankford fights unnecessary and burdensome regulation and advocates for a more restrained federal government.
Personal faith, local decision-making, and opportunity for every person, regardless of their background, are core values for Senator Lankford. Before his time in Congress, from 1995 to 2009, the Senator served as Director of Student Ministry at the Baptist Convention of Oklahoma and Director of the Falls Creek Youth Camp, the largest youth camp in the United States, with more than 51,000 individuals attending each summer.
Committee Assignments:
President, Ira Shapiro Global Strategies, LLC
Ira Shapiro is the President of Ira Shapiro Global Strategies, LLC, a consulting firm specializing in international trade, U.S.-Japan relations, and American politics, which he founded in 2014. He brings to the firm 40 years of experience in senior staff positions in the U.S. Senate, the Clinton administration, and private law practice. He is also the author of the critically acclaimed book, The Last Great Senate: Courage and Statesmanship in Times of Crisis, published in 2012.
Mr. Shapiro came to Washington, D.C., in October 1975, to work as Legislative Legal Counsel to Senator Gaylord Nelson (D.-Wisconsin), probably the greatest environmentalist ever to serve in the Senate. In his 12 years working in the Senate, Mr. Shapiro also worked for other Senators. He served as Minority Staff Director to the Governmental Affairs Committee, Staff Director and Chief Counsel to the special Senate Committee on Official Conduct, counsel to Senator Majority Leader Robert Byrd, and the first chief of staff for Jay Rockefeller.
During the deep recession of the early 1980’s, Mr. Shapiro began to focus on America’s position in international trade. He became one of a handful of Senate staffers seeking to define a new U.S. trade and competitiveness policy, working closely with leaders in business, labor, and academia concerned about the same issues. When Bill Clinton became president, Mr. Shapiro became General Counsel to United States Trade Representative Mickey Kantor in February 1993. As General Counsel, he played a central role in the negotiation and legislative approval of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the multilateral Uruguay Round that created the World Trade Organization and the current trade rules.
In 1995, President Clinton nominated Mr. Shapiro for Ambassadorial rank, which the Senate rapidly and unanimously approved. Ambassador Shapiro served as the principal U.S. trade negotiator with Japan and Canada, helping to successfully resolve some of the most contentious bilateral disputes with America’s two leading trading partners: autos and auto parts, semiconductors and insurance with Japan, and softwood lumber with Canada.
Mr. Shapiro has experience in dealing with the European Union, Canada, Mexico and China, but he has focused particularly on Japan, and U.S-Japan relations. He has 30 years of extensive and diverse experience in dealing with the Japanese government and business community. He first worked with Japan as Chief of Staff to Senator Rockefeller and played a key role in the efforts to save Wheeling Pittsburgh Steel through a joint venture with Nisshin Steel of Japan. After his work in the Clinton administration, as many other trade lawyers and consultants shifted their focus to China, Mr. Shapiro continued to concentrate his work on U.S.-Japan relations. In September 2012, Mr. Shapiro became the Chairman of the National Association of Japan-America Societies (NAJAS), the Washington-based organization that supports the activities of 36 Japan-America Societies around the country. As Chairman, he speaks frequently about U.S.-Japan relations and the importance of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations, appearing in Dallas-Ft. Worth, Atlanta, Houston, Philadelphia, San Diego, Cincinnati, Chicago, Denver, Seattle and San Francisco. On December 10, 2015, during a celebration of the 70th anniversary of the end of the War, Japanese Ambassador to the U.S., Ken-Ichiro Sasae, gave Mr. Shapiro the Foreign Minister’s Commendation, an award from the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs in recognition of his outstanding achievements in promoting friendship between Japan and the United States.
Mr. Shapiro is well known in Tokyo, where he has spoken regularly and been received considerable press coverage. In February 2014, he came to Tokyo at the invitation of the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO), and spoke to several leading business organizations, including Keidanren, the Japan Electronics Association (JEITA), and the Japan Foreign Trade Council. In September 2013, his remarks at the Japan National Press Club attracted 45 reporters. Mr. Shapiro’s interviews have appeared in Asahi Shimbun, Japan Times, Nikkei, and on NHK, where Tokyo’s best known interviewer, Kaori Iida, interviewed him for 30 minutes.
Mr. Shapiro has considerable experience working at the intersection of trade and health. From 2001-2003, representing the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids, he played a prominent role in the negotiation of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), the first global treaty negotiated under the auspices of the World Health Organization. He authored an article contending that cigarettes should be treated as an exception to the normal trade rules, because of their lethal nature. Most recently, Mr. Shapiro served on a Council on Foreign Relations task force studying the spread of non-communicable diseases in the developing world.
Since leaving government, Mr. Shapiro has practiced international trade law in Washington, D.C., and been a partner in several major law firms, most recently Greenberg Traurig, LLP. In August 2015, while continuing his own law work, he became a Senior Advisor to the Albright Stonebridge Group (ASG), a premier consulting firm with tremendous global reach co-chaired by Madeleine Albright, Sandy Berger and Carlos Gutierrez. He has specialized in WTO disputes, and played an important role in the landmark cases brought by the United States against China for copyright piracy, representing the motion picture, recording and publishing industries.
Mr. Shapiro has a long history of deep involvement in Democratic presidential campaigns, and was part of the legal teams that helped Bill Clinton and Al Gore make their vice presidential choices. Mr. Shapiro ran an unsuccessful, but widely admired, race for Congress in Maryland in 2002. A local newspaper described his campaign as the “antidote to cynicism that he promised to deliver.”
He writes and speaks frequently about U.S. politics, and particularly the U.S. Senate. After the publication of his book in 2012, Mr. Shapiro spoke in 19 states, including appearances at four Presidential Libraries (Kennedy, Ford, Carter and Clinton). His articles have been published in the New York Times, Bloomberg Review, ccn.com, and local newspapers in Seattle, Detroit, and Portland, Maine.
Mr. Shapiro graduated from Brandeis University, magna cum laude with honors in politics, in 1969, received his Master’s degree in political science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1970, and his law degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1973. Before coming to Washington to work in the Senate, Mr. Shapiro clerked for a federal district judge in Philadelphia and practiced law in Chicago.
Senior Fellow in Constitutional Jurisprudence, Independence Institute
Professor Robert G. Natelson is a constitutional scholar and author.
Rob’s constitutional scholarship has been cited repeatedly by justices and parties at the U.S. Supreme Court—as well as by federal appeals courts, and at least 18 state supreme courts.
Rob’s research into the Constitution’s original meaning has carried him to libraries throughout the United States and in Britain, including four months at Oxford University. His books and articles span many different parts of the Constitution, including groundbreaking studies of the Necessary and Proper Clause, the Indian Commerce Clause, federalism, Founding-Era interpretation, regulation of elections, and the amendment process of Article V. He created the first-ever online bibliography for 18th century materials used in constitutional research. He is a contributing author to the Encyclopedia of the Supreme Court of the United States (on Magna Carta). He contributed eight essays to the third edition of the Heritage Guide to the Constitution: five on the amendment procedure and one each on the Guarantee Clause, the Postal Clause, and the Recess Appointments Clause.
U.S. Supreme Court justices have relied explicitly on Rob’s research in 41 citations in 13 separate cases.
Joshua Dunlap, a member of Pierce Atwood’s Litigation Group and Appellate & Amici team, focuses his practice on civil litigation at both the trial and appellate levels. He appears in federal as well as state court, representing clients in various commercial litigation matters.
Joshua regularly defends clients in complex litigation, including class actions and multidistrict litigation. Much of his practice has involved representing financial institutions, manufacturers, retailers, and other institutional clients in state and national consumer class actions involving various issues, including bank overdrafts, products liability, and electronic data breaches.
Joshua also represents clients before federal and state appeals courts, and has argued and won before the Maine Supreme Judicial Court. Joshua is a former federal court of appeals law clerk, having clerked for the Hon. Paul J. Kelly Jr. on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. He has also acted as law clerk for two Special Masters appointed by the U.S. Supreme Court in original jurisdiction proceedings.
Founding Principles as Pillars of Our Foreign Policy
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Topeka Lawyers Chapter
Topeka, KS