John Bonifaz is a dedicated leader who has spent years working with citizens across the country to protect the right to vote and to broaden citizen participation in the democratic process.
In 1994, he founded the National Voting Rights Institute(NVRI) and after directing the organization for a decade, he now serves as its general counsel. NVRI today is a prominent legal and public education center committed to preserving the right of all citizens to vote and to participate in the electoral process on an equal and meaningful basis. Since founding NVRI, Bonifaz has been at the forefront of many of the key voting rights struggles facing the nation today.
In 1999, in recognition of his pathbreaking work with the National Voting Rights Institute, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation awarded Bonifaz with a prestigious MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellowship.
In addition to his leadership of NVRI, Bonifaz has also been at the forefront of opposing the Bush administration's war in Iraq. In 2003, he served as the plaintiffs' lead counsel in John Doe I v. President Bush, a constitutional challenge to President George W. Bush's authority to wage war against Iraq absent a congressional declaration of war or equivalent action. Bonifaz represented a coalition of US soldiers, parents of US soldiers, and Members of Congress arguing that the president's planned first-strike invasion of Iraq violated the War Powers Clause of the US Constitution.
Bonifaz is the author of
Warrior-King: The Case for Impeaching George W. Bush (NationBooks 2004) on the illegality of the Iraq war. He has also written numerous articles on the war and on the fight for democracy here at home which have appeared in publications such as
The Boston Globe, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, TomPaine.com, The Columbia Law Review, and
The Yale Law & Policy Review.
Bonifaz is also a co-founder of AfterDowningStreet.org, a national coalition of veterans' groups, peace groups, and public interest organizations seeking a formal congressional investigation into whether President Bush has committed impeachable offenses in connection with the Iraq war. The coalition, launched in May 2005, focuses on the new and compelling evidence revealed by the release of the Downing Street Minutes, showing that the President may have engaged in a conspiracy to deceive and mislead the United States Congress and the American people about the basis for sending the nation to war.
Bonifaz ran as a Democratic candidate for Massachusetts Secretary of State in the 2006 Democratic primary and received nearly 130,000 votes. He continues to press for electoral reforms and other changes which would make Massachusetts a model for democracy for the nation.
Bonifaz also maintains a private practice with his father, Cristóbal Bonifaz who immigrated to the U.S. from his native Ecuador. They specialize in international human rights and environmental law cases and serve as co-counsel for thousands of indigenous people living in the Ecuadorian and Peruvian Amazon in an ongoing case against the Texaco oil company for the company's environmental destruction of their homeland.
