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Thomas Tai

Headshot of Thomas Tai, legal and research fellow
Staff Attorney

Thomas Tai serves as a staff attorney at the League of Women Voters of the United States. In this role, he provides legal research and litigation support for the Advocacy and Litigation team. He is also the attorney responsible for managing federal litigation and supporting state litigation in the 9th and 10th Circuits, which include the states of Alaska, Hawaii, Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Oklahoma, and Kansas.

Thomas earned his Bachelor of Arts in Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. Upon graduating, he worked at NationBuilder, a Los Angeles-based technology startup specializing in content management and customer relationship management software. Thomas then attended Loyola Law School, Los Angeles on a near-full scholarship. During law school, he was research assistant to Professor Justin Levitt and a legal intern at Common Cause and the League of Women Voters of the United States. Professor Levitt previously served as White House Senior Policy Advisor for Democracy and Voting Rights to President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.

Along with his voting rights experience, Thomas also worked as a clinical student in the Loyola Immigrant Justice Clinic, where he assisted undocumented victims of crime, abuse, trafficking, and abandonment in seeking immigration relief.

Thomas is licensed to practice law in California. In his spare time, he can be found reading books, cooking, lifting weights, and exploring new restaurants in his lifelong home, the San Gabriel Valley. 

When you vote for the President of the United States, you are not voting directly for a candidate. Instead, your vote — and the votes of everyone else in your state — directs the votes of the people who vote directly for President: presidential electors, otherwise known as members of the Electoral College.  

This blog, and those that will follow, will explain how the Electoral College works, the history of the Electoral College — including its racist origins — and why it must be abolished. 

The Lochner era marked the beginning of the US Supreme Court’s (SCOTUS) expansion of its powers into unenumerated rights, and by extension, Americans’ economic and social lives, which persists today. 

The development of substantive due process brought many unenumerated rights under the Constitution, meaning SCOTUS had the power to expand and protect them. But as seen with abortion, substantive due process also made it possible for SCOTUS to overturn unenumerated rights; after all, an institution that can grant rights may also take them away. The end of Roe v. Wade was a powerful lesson that personal freedoms depend upon courts and judges being willing to defend and protect them.  

During the 2022 Supreme Court term, the League of Women Voters filed amicus briefs in four cases: Moore v. Harper, Allen v. Milligan, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, and 303 Creative, LLC v. Elenis.  

We recap the case and its impact on voting rights, discrimination, and redistricting.

Like the legislative and executive branches, the Supreme Court of the US is subject to checks and balances. These restrictions are part of the United States Constitution and may be exercised by elected branches with the political will to do so. The Court may act, but its fellow branches may respond.  

This blog, the first of a three-part series, will discuss the Supreme Court’s powers under the constitution, Congress’ power to check the Court, and the history of Congress’ use of these powers.  

Native Americans, the first people to inhabit the area now known as the United States, have tragically been disenfranchised for much of the nation’s history.