Who Is Roman Martinez?

Unlike typical amicus curiae briefs filed by outside interest groups, an amicus attorney is a lawyer appointed by the Court itself to argue a position that would otherwise go undefended.

Martinez is a partner at international corporate law firm Latham & Watkins, where he heads the firm’s Supreme Court and appellate practice. In 2011, Martinez worked for the Mitt Romney presidential campaign and helped coordinate debate preparation for vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan. He clerked first for then Washington, DC Circuit Judge Brett Kavanaugh and later for Chief Justice Roberts during the 2009–2010 term — while Roberts was deliberating Citizens United.

In 2018, during Kavanaugh’s contentious confirmation hearings, Martinez became a prominent defender of his former boss, appearing several times on Fox News to vouch for Kavanaugh’s “balanced, judicious temperament.”

Martinez also served in the Solicitor General’s office in the Obama administration before returning to private practice in 2016. Since then, he has led high-profile cases for corporate clients and political lobbying interests.

His most notable recent win came in Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce, one of the cases that led the Supreme Court to overturn Chevron deference, a legal precedent that had long allowed federal agencies to interpret and enforce ambiguous statutes. The decision marked a landmark victory for conservatives and business groups seeking to kneecap government regulators.

In a 2024 interview, Martinez described a guiding principle in his work as challenging “government overreach” and “government arbitrariness or arrogance.” Martinez called Chevron “a doctrine that puts the thumb on the scale in favor of the government” at the expense of fairness, and said its reversal was a “major constitutional correction” that restored the judiciary’s role in “policing the boundaries on agency authority.”

Martinez did not respond to The Lever’s request for comment.

Though he hasn’t litigated campaign finance cases directly, Martinez has closely tracked the conservative legal movement’s objectives. In a 2020 podcast, he argued that the Court’s pro-business leanings stem from the laws it interprets, not judicial ideology. “There’s a concern,” he said, “that [agency power] has gotten out of control.” Still, he predicted the conservative-majority court would reshape the administrative state, reviving doctrines that would roll back agency power and expand judicial control.

Martinez is active in groups that reflect that worldview. He is a member of a group focused on government regulations run by the Federalist Society, a right-wing legal organization that has been an incubator of all the conservative, anti-regulatory justices who now populate the Supreme Court. And he advises the US Chamber of Commerce, the nation’s largest business lobbying group, on lawsuits against the government

In 2022, Martinez authored a brief for the US Chamber in Percoco v. United States, a political bribery case involving a top aide to former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D). In the brief, Martinez defended lobbying as a core democratic practice, writing, “Such petitioning for redress is a central component of American politics and self-governance.”

Martinez also argued that the lower court ruling convicting Cuomo’s aide wrongly went “beyond traditional quid pro quo corruption and moves too far toward criminalizing the appearance of influence and access.”

The Court ultimately reversed the fraud conviction and narrowed the scope of federal anti-corruption laws — a decision welcomed by business interests.

Despite Martinez’s conservative background, some legal experts are reserving judgment on how he will act during National Republican Senatorial Committee v. FEC.

“I would much rather give the argument to someone else than have the Justice Department make a half-hearted argument in favor of the law’s constitutionality,” said Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. “They’re either in it or they’re not.”

Weiner, from the Brennan Center for Justice, added: “You could make the case that appointing an amicus [attorney] who understands the thinking of the justices most likely to uphold the law could be a net positive. It’ll depend on the briefs he files.”

Malloy with the Campaign Legal Center said she’s confident that Martinez will take his role seriously and provide a good-faith defense of the law. But she warned that the arrangement has put the law’s defenders at a structural disadvantage.

“[I]t’s very different than when an agency with decades of expertise is defending their own law,” she said.

While Martinez was appointed to serve for the defense, his former client — the US Chamber of Commerce — tapped a separate firm to push for the repeal of campaign finance rules. The lobbying group filed an amicus brief in National Republican Senatorial Committee v. FEC, arguing that the spending limits make it difficult for businesses to use donations to coordinate their desired political messaging on issues like taxes and regulation.

“A restriction on the operation of a political party is thus a restriction on the operation of democracy itself,” it concludes.

A Narrow Case With Sweeping Stakes

With federal attorneys refusing to defend political spending limits in National Republican Senatorial Committee v. FEC, the Democratic Party’s main campaign committees have also stepped in to help preserve the campaign finance law. In June, the Supreme Court granted the groups a formal role in the case, and they’re now represented by election lawyer Marc Elias, whose firm has led legal challenges against Trump-era efforts to weaken voting and campaign finance laws.

Republicans fighting the campaign finance rule, meanwhile, are represented by attorneys including Don McGahn, Trump’s former White House counsel, who helped secure the appointments of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh. McGahn previously chaired the Federal Election Committee, where he worked to defang the agency from within.

While National Republican Senatorial Committee v. FEC focuses on only a specific class of campaign finance restrictions, the Roberts Court has a track record of turning narrow cases into sweeping precedents with far-reaching consequences. Exhibit A: Citizens United, in which the high court’s conservative majority used the case — which could have presented a narrower question of electioneering rules into a Trojan horse that made sweeping changes to campaign finance law.

At issue in the current case is a technical question: how much money can parties spend in coordination with their candidates?

Since the 1970s, federal law has capped the amount of cash that political parties can deploy at the behest of candidates. The rationale is straightforward: When a party spends money at a candidate’s direction, such as on advertisements, consultants, events, or other campaign expenses, donors can use the party as a pass-through to bypass the contribution limits that apply directly to the candidate.

Since 2022, party committees reported $241 million in coordinated spending, compared to over $858 million in “independent” expenditures on individual campaigns. Striking the coordinated-expenditure cap could shift vast sums into direct, mega donor–driven collaborations between parties and candidates.

Worse, legal experts warn, is what else the court could decide as part of its ruling. If justices raise constitutional scrutiny of contribution limits in general, it may open the door to overturning Buckley v. Valeo, a 1976 post-Watergate ruling that upheld core elements of campaign finance laws and protected contribution limits.

That’s exactly what some Republicans are asking for. In a recent brief, Johnson and other GOP leaders urged the Court to adopt a “text, history, and tradition” legal framework used in a 2002 opinion by conservative Justice Clarence Thomas that expanded gun rights — and to discard Buckley altogether.

If enough of the conservative justices take that route, this case won’t just chip away at a political spending rule. It could tear down the country’s entire remaining campaign finance structure.

This isn’t the first time a solicitor general has undercut campaign finance law from within. In 1975, conservative icon Robert Bork, then Solicitor General under President Gerald Ford, famously filed two conflicting briefs in Buckley: one formally defending contribution limits and another casting constitutional doubt on the issue.

The tactic allowed the Ford administration to appear neutral on the matter while giving the Court a roadmap to undermine campaign finance law.

“I see a through-line from Bork’s arguments in the 1970s to the arguments that the conservatives on the Supreme Court are accepting today,” says Hasen at the University of California.

Now, nearly fifty years later, a Republican administration is taking matters a step further and offering no defense of campaign spending limits at all. Arguments in National Republican Senatorial Committee v. FEC could begin as early as December, and the results may mark the next step — or the final leap — in a decades-long effort to deregulate money in politics.