No. 19-5161

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS

FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CIRCUIT

CITIZENS FOR RESPONSIBILITY AND ETHICS IN WASHINGTON; 

NOAH BOOKBINDER,

Plaintiffs-Appellants,

vs.

FEDERAL ELECTION COMMISSION,

Defendant-Appellee.

Appeal from the United States District Court

for the District of Columbia

No. 1:18-cv-00076

The Honorable Rudolph Contreras

BRIEF OF AMICI CURIAE SENATORS SHELDON WHITEHOUSE, JEFFREY 

A. MERKLEY, RICHARD BLUMENTHAL, MAZIE K. HIRONO, ELIZABETH 

WARREN, AND CHRIS VAN HOLLEN IN SUPPORT OF PLAINTIFFSAPPELLANTS’ PETITION FOR EN BANC REHEARING

Eric Alan Isaacson

LAW OFFICE OF ERIC ALAN ISAACSON

6580 Avenida Mirola

La Jolla, CA 92037

Telephone: (858) 263-9581

Attorney for Amici Curiae Senators Sheldon Whitehouse, Jeffrey A. Merkley, 

Richard Blumenthal, Mazie K. Hirono, Elizabeth Warren, and Chris Van Hollen

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- iCERTIFICATE AS TO PARTIES, RULINGS, AND RELATED CASES

Pursuant to Circuit Rule 28(a)(1), amici curiae Senators Sheldon Whitehouse 

of Rhode Island, Jeffrey A. Merkley of Oregon, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, 

Mazie K. Hirono of Hawaii, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, and Chris Van 

Hollen of Maryland hereby certify as follows: 

(A) Parties and Amici. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington 

and Noah Bookbinder are plaintiffs in the district court and appellants in this Court. 

The FEC is the defendant in the district court and the appellee in this Court. No amici 

appeared before the district court. The following individual and entity have appeared 

as amici before this Court: Randy Elf and Campaign Legal Center. U.S. Senators 

Sheldon Whitehouse, Jeffrey A. Merkley, Richard Blumenthal, Mazie K. Hirono, 

Elizabeth Warren, and Chris Van Hollen have filed a motion seeking an invitation 

to file this brief as amici curiae supporting a petition for rehearing en banc.

(B) Ruling Under Review. Plaintiffs-appellants appealed the March 29, 2019 

order of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia (Contreras, J.), 

which denied plaintiffs’ motion for summary judgment and granted the FEC’s crossmotion for summary judgment. The district court’s order appears in the Joint 

Appendix (“JA”) at 138; the Memorandum Opinion is reported at Citizens for 

Responsibility & Ethics in Washington v. FEC, 380 F. Supp. 3d 30 (D.D.C. 2019), 

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and is reprinted at JA139-61. A panel of this Court affirmed the district court’s 

decision with an opinion issued April 9, 2021, and published as Citizens for Resp. & 

Ethics in Washington v. Fed. Election Comm’n, 993 F.3d 880 (D.C. Cir. 2021). 

(C) Related Cases. There are no related cases within the meaning of Circuit 

Rule 28(a)(1)(C). 

DATED: June 30, 2020 LAW OFFICE OF ERIC ALAN ISAACSON 

/s/ Eric Alan Isaacson

Eric Alan Isaacson

LAW OFFICE OF ERIC ALAN ISAACSON

6580 Avenida Mirola

La Jolla, CA 92037-6231

Telephone: (858) 263-9581

ericalanisaacson@icloud.com

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

CERTIFICATE AS TO PARTIES, RULINGS, AND RELATED CASES ............. i

TABLE OF CONTENTS.........................................................................................iii

TABLE OF AUTHORITIES....................................................................................iv

I. STATEMENT OF INTEREST .......................................................................1

II. ARGUMENT ..................................................................................................2

A. As Citizens United Transformed the Campaign Finance Landscape 

FEC Commissioners Ideologically Opposed to Campaign Finance 

Regulation Have Deadlocked the FEC and Eviscerated Enforcement 

of the Federal Election Campaign Act..................................................2

B. Extreme Deference to FEC “Prosecutorial Discretion” Frustrates 

Congress’s Clear Campaign Finance Regulatory Scheme....................7

C. FEC is a Captured Agency and the Court Should Not Blindly Defer to 

Its “Discretion” ...................................................................................10

III. CONCLUSION .............................................................................................12

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TABLE OF AUTHORITIES

CASES

Citizens United v. FEC,

558 U.S. 310 (2010)....................................................................................2, 3

CREW v. FEC (American Action Network), 

209 F. Supp. 3d 77 (2016)...............................................................................9

CREW v. FEC, 

892 F.3d 434 (D.C. Cir. 2018) (“Commission on Hope”)...............................8

CREW v. FEC, 

923 F.3d 1141 (D.C. Cir. 2019) (“Commission on Hope II”)......................10

STATUTES 

26 U.S.C. §501(c)(4)..............................................................................................3-4

52 U.S.C. §30106(a)(1).............................................................................................7

52 U.S.C. §30106(c)..............................................................................................5, 7

52 U.S.C. §30109(a)(8)(A)........................................................................................7

RULES

Fed.R.App.P. 29(a)(4)(E)..........................................................................................1

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OTHER AUTHORITIES

Paul Blumenthal, 

Super PAC Mega-Donors Expand Election Influence with Record 

$1 Billion in Contributions, HUFFINGTON POST (Nov. 1, 2016)...............3

Matea Gold, 

Trump’s FEC Nominee Has Questioned the Value of Disclosing 

Political Donors, Washington Post (Sept. 15, 2017)....................................10

Karl Evers-Hillstrom, 

More Money, Less Transparency: A Decade Under Citizens United,

OpenSecrets.org (Jan. 14, 2020).....................................................................3

Michael S. Kang, 

The End of Campaign Finance Law, 98 Va. L. Rev. 1 (2012).......................6

Daniel Lippman & Zach Montellaro, 

FEC losing quorum again after Caroline Hunter resigns,

POLITICO, June 26, 2020............................................................................11

Anna Massoglia & Karl Evers-Hillstrom, 

‘Dark money’ topped $1 billion in 2020, largely boosting Democrats, 

OpenSecrets, Mar. 17, 2020............................................................................4

Note, 

Eliminating the FEC: The Best Hope for Campaign Finance 

Regulation?, 131 Harv. L. Rev. 1421 (2018)..................................................5

Trevor Potter, 

A Dereliction of Duty: How the FEC Commissioners’ Deadlocks 

Result in a Failed Agency and What Can Be Done,

27 Geo. Mason L. Rev. 483 (2020)...................................................2, 6, 8, 10

Trevor Potter, 

Money, Politics, and the Crippling of the FEC: A Symposium 

on the Federal Election Commission’s Arguable Inability 

to Effectively Regulate Money in American Elections, 

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69 Admin. L. Rev. 447 (2017).....................................................................4-5

Trevor Potter & B. B. Morgan, 

The History of Undisclosed Spending in U.S. Elections & 

How 2012 Became the Dark Money Election,

27 Notre Dame J.L. Ethics & Pub. Pol’y 383 (2013)......................................4

Ann M. Ravel, 

Dysfunction and Deadlock at the Federal Election Commission, 

New York Times, Feb. 20, 2017...................................................................11

Ann M. Ravel, 

Dysfunction and Deadlock: The Enforcement Crisis at the 

Federal Election Commission Reveals the Unlikelihood of 

Draining the Swamp (FEC, Feb. 2017)........................................................11

Ann Ravel, 

A New Kind of Voter Suppression in Modern Elections, 49 U. Memphis L. 

Rev. 1019, 1034 (2019)...............................................................................2, 3

Daniel P. Tokaji, 

Beyond Repair: FEC Reform and Deadlock Deference,

in Democracy by the People: Reforming Campaign Finance in 

America 172-200 (Eugene D. Mazo & Timothy K. Kuhner, eds.; 

Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press 2018).....................6, 8

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I. STATEMENT OF INTEREST

Amici curiae presenting this brief are U.S. Senators Sheldon Whitehouse of 

Rhode Island, Jeffrey A. Merkley of Oregon, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, 

Mazie K. Hirono of Hawaii, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, and Chris Van 

Hollen of Maryland. 

As popularly elected U.S. Senators, amici have seen firsthand how Citizens 

United v. FEC, 558 U.S. 310 (2010), upended our political ecosystem. We now are 

witnessing the FEC’s utter failure to regulate in that decision’s aftermath. We are 

disturbed and frustrated that a partisan non-majority of FEC Commissioners can 

neutralize the Federal Election Campaign Act, block the FEC’s investigative powers, 

and then evade judicial review merely by uttering the magic words “prosecutorial 

discretion.” We ask the Court to grant en banc review to restore the judicial oversight 

over the FEC that Congress intended. 1

1 This brief is being lodged with a Rule 35(f) Motion for Invitation to File Brief of 

Amici Curiae. All parties were informed of amici’s intention to file a motion for an 

invitation to file this brief. Petitioner-Appellants expressed consent to the motion. 

Defendant-Appellee stated that “takes no position and entrusts [amici’s] motion to 

the Court’s discretion.” No counsel for a party authored this brief in whole or in part, 

and no counsel for a party, nor any person other than the amici curiae, or their 

counsel, contributed money that was intended to fund the preparation or submission 

of this brief. See Fed.R.App.P. 29(a)(4)(E). 

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II. ARGUMENT

A. As Citizens United Transformed the Campaign Finance 

Landscape FEC Commissioners Ideologically Opposed to 

Campaign Finance Regulation Have Deadlocked the FEC 

and Eviscerated Enforcement of the Federal Election 

Campaign Act

Citizens United v. FEC, 558 U.S. 310, 319 (2010), sent a seismic shock 

through our campaign-finance system, to the benefit of wealthy political players with 

vast means and motive to spend massive sums in elections. Political spending by 

deep-pocketed special interests exploded. The Center for Responsive Politics reports 

that super PACS spent over $3 billion on federal elections from 2010 through 2020.2

In fact, “[s]uper PACs account for more expenditures in campaigns than those spent 

by the individual candidates.”3 Non-party independent groups spent $4.5 billion on 

elections from 2010 through 2020, compared with just $750 million in the two

2 See Trevor Potter, A Dereliction of Duty: How the FEC Commissioners’ 

Deadlocks Result in a Failed Agency and What Can Be Done, 27 Geo. Mason L. 

Rev. 483, 494 & n.69 (2020) (citing data available at 

https://www.opensecrets.org/outsidespending/summ.php?cycle=2010&chrt=V&dis

p=O&type=S and explaining that “for the spending total from 2010 to 2020, click 

on the ‘select CYCLE’ drop down menu and select each cycle from 2010 to 2020, 

then add all the spending cycles together.”).

3 Ann Ravel, A New Kind of Voter Suppression in Modern Elections, 49 U. Memphis 

L. Rev. 1019, 1034 (2019) (hereafter “New Kind of Voter Suppression”).

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decades prior.4 The 2016 election saw “90 billionaires with Super PAC contributions 

totaling $562 million.”5

The theory undergirding Citizens United was that campaign-spending 

corruption would be checked by disclosure requirements allowing voters’ to see 

what interests are behind the messages designed to influence them. Citizens United 

was expressly premised on the bedrock assumption that “[g]overnment may regulate 

corporate political speech through disclaimer and disclosure requirements.” Citizens 

United, 558 U.S. at 319. 

The Court’s opinion presumed that “effective” and “prompt disclosure of 

expenditures [would] provide shareholders and citizens with the information needed 

to hold corporations and elected officials accountable.”6 But effective disclosure 

requires effective enforcement—which the FEC has not provided, as this case 

dramatically shows. Sophisticated players funnel vast sums of cash into entities 

organized under section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code that do not have to 

4 Karl Evers-Hillstrom, More Money, Less Transparency: A Decade Under Citizens 

United, OpenSecrets.org (Jan. 14, 2020),

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/reports/a-decade-under-citizens-united .

5 Ravel, New Kind of Voter Suppression, supra note 3, at 1034 (citing Paul 

Blumenthal, Super PAC Mega-Donors Expand Election Influence with Record $1 

Billion in Contributions, HUFFINGTON POST (Nov. 1, 2016), 

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/super-pac-donors_us_5817b30be4b0390e69d21648 ). 

6 Citizens United, 558 U.S. at 370.

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publicly disclose their contributors, turning those organizations to political work.7

Since 2010, § 501(c)(4) “dark money” organizations have spent over $900 million 

on political expenditures, compared to $103 million in the previous decade.8

DonorsTrust and other groups strip identities off donations and launder the “dark 

money” into super PACs in the political arena. And the problem is only getting 

worse.9

Former FEC commissioner Trevor Potter writes: “As the Court made clear in 

Citizens United, the law still has very important requirements of full disclosure of 

the sources of campaign funding and of the independence from campaigns and 

parties of the new unlimited spending. And it is these requirements—transparency 

and non-coordination—that the gridlocked FEC has been unable to enforce.”10

7 See, e.g., Trevor Potter & B. B. Morgan, The History of Undisclosed 

Spending in U.S. Elections & How 2012 Became the Dark Money Election,

27 Notre Dame J.L. Ethics & Pub. Pol’y 383, 463-64 (2013) (discussing 

the formation of Crossroads GPS, a 501(c)(4) spin-off of super PAC 

American Crossroads, formed to protect donors from disclosure).

8 Outside Spending, OPENSECRETS.ORG, 

https://www.opensecrets.org/outsidespending/index.php?type=A&filter=N.

9 See Anna Massoglia & Karl Evers-Hillstrom, ‘Dark money’ topped $1 billion in 

2020, largely boosting Democrats, OpenSecrets, Mar. 17, 2020,

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2021/03/one-billion-dark-money-2020-

electioncycle/ (documenting $660 million contributions to super PACs from dark 

money groups).

10 Trevor Potter, Money, Politics, and the Crippling of the FEC: A Symposium on 

the Federal Election Commission’s Arguable Inability to Effectively Regulate 

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The FEC, the designated cop on the beat, has been deliberately disabled by a 

non-majority of its own Commissioners who seek to prevent meaningful 

enforcement of campaign-finance laws. The FEC managed to function for its first 

three decades because commissioners of both parties generally were committed to 

the rule of law. That no longer is true. Political polarization has led to the 

appointment of commissioners who adamantly oppose meaningful enforcement.11

With four votes needed to approve any agency action, 12 “the FEC consistently 

Money in American Elections, 69 Admin. L. Rev. 447, 450 (2017) (hereafter 

“Crippling of the FEC”).

11 Former Commissioner Trevor Potter writes that “a new set of Commissioners 

arrived in 2008, and since then the partisan gridlock in Congress was imported into 

the FEC, and the Commission has deadlocked time and again on virtually every 

important issue.” Potter, Crippling of the FEC, supra note 10, at 449: 

12 See 52 U.S.C. §30106(c) (“the affirmative vote of 4 members of the Commission 

shall be required in order for the Commission to take any action in accordance with 

paragraph (6), (7), (8), or (9) of section 30107(a) of this title or with chapter 95 or 

chapter 96 of title 26”). “Since a four-member majority is required for the 

Commission to perform most significant actions, a three-member bloc is enough to 

prevent action.” Note, Eliminating the FEC: The Best Hope for Campaign Finance 

Regulation?, 131 Harv. L. Rev. 1421, 1431 (2018). 

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stalemates on important questions.”13 As a result of “its persistent stalemates on 

critical questions, the FEC is no longer capable of performing its basic functions.”14

“Over the past decade,” Potter writes, “the only government agency tasked 

with administering and enforcing campaign finance laws has systematically failed at 

both of those tasks, and, in doing so, has ushered in an era of secret, unaccountable 

political spending on an unprecedented scale, and a political system that voters 

increasingly perceive to be tilted in favor of wealthy special interests.” 15

If the premise of Citizens United is true that election funding transparency 

protects the public from corruption, then the reciprocal must also be true: without 

transparency there will be corruption in our democracy. This is no small thing. It 

demands redress. 

13 Daniel P. Tokaji, Beyond Repair: FEC Reform and Deadlock Deference, at 172, 

in Democracy by the People: Reforming Campaign Finance in America 172-200 

(Eugene D. Mazo & Timothy K. Kuhner, eds.; Cambridge & New York: Cambridge 

University Press 2018) (hereafter “Beyond Repair”).

14 Tokaji, Beyond Repair, supra note 13, at 173; see also Michael S. Kang, The End 

of Campaign Finance Law, 98 Va. L. Rev. 1, 40-41 (2012) (“What has happened 

since Citizens United ... is not new regulation—it is the rollback of existing 

regulation. Instead of a hydraulics of campaign finance regulation, we are seeing a 

reverse hydraulics of campaign finance deregulation ....”).

15 Potter, Dereliction of Duty, supra note 2, at 502.

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B. Extreme Deference to FEC “Prosecutorial Discretion” 

Frustrates Congress’s Clear Campaign Finance Regulatory 

Scheme 

Congress has a strong interest in the faithful enforcement of FECA, especially 

with respect to regulation and transparency surrounding outside spending. The 

Court’s deference to claims of supposed “prosecutorial discretion” that strategically

limit judicial review undermines that intent.

Congress designed the FEC to have a bipartisan structure with a total of six 

commissioners, and never more than three from the same party;

16 and provided that 

the FEC would be able to take action only on the vote of four commissioners.17 This 

balance of power ensured that the agency would not pursue a partisan enforcement 

agenda. But it created the danger of deadlock: when commissioners divide three-tothree along party lines, no agency action can be taken. To protect effective 

enforcement of campaign-finance laws against deadlock, Congress built into the 

system a provision for citizens aggrieved by inaction to take their complaints to 

court.

18 Congress thus ensured judicial review of FEC partisan gamesmanship that 

could frustrate enforcement.

16 See 52 U.S.C. §30106(a)(1). 

17 See 52 U.S.C. §30106(c). 

18 See 52 U.S.C. §30109(a)(8)(A).

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That intent of Congress has been frustrated in this Court by a jurisprudence of 

deference that allows commissioners unable to garner a majority for their position

nonetheless to block enforcement with deadlock and then to block review. Former 

Commissioner Potter noted this Court’s perplexing “inclination to treat the 

deadlocking, or controlling, Commissioners’ statement of reasons for their refusal 

to enforce the law as the agency ‘decision’ when, in many ways, no decision has 

actually taken place.”19 This permits non-majority positions articulated by 

commissioners who block enforcement by deadlocking the commission to prevail—

preventing the enforcement intended by Congress.

20

Worse still, recent panel decisions in CREW v. FEC (“Commission on 

Hope”)21 and in this case allow non-majority commissioners to also block judicial 

review, simply by adding the “magic words” that the deadlock is a matter of 

“prosecutorial discretion.”22 Again, taking the premise of Citizens United to heart, 

19 See Potter, Dereliction of Duty, supra note 2, at 497.

20 Tokaji, Beyond Repair, supra note 6. 

21 892 F.3d 434 (D.C. Cir. 2018).

22 Potter, Dereliction of Duty, supra note 2, at 498 (“In an apparent effort to render 

a 3-3 ‘decision’ not to proceed unreviewable, these Commissioners, who have not 

effected a majority decision, have nevertheless begun sprinkling ‘passing 

invocation[s] of prosecutorial discretion’ into their statements of reasons justifying 

their votes blocking enforcement....”)

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if a partisan minority can systematically block disclosure, it can systematically open 

a gate for corruption, so it is no small matter when the Court accepts this stratagem. 

The panel opinion in this case allows a partisan non-majority of FEC 

commissioners to create law without any review, in violation of the APA and 

FECA’s requirement of bipartisanship. A minority of just two FEC Commissioners 

overruled the General Counsel’s opinion to conclude that New Models was not a 

political committee. They spent 30 pages justifying that decision, but failed to 

mention a recent, potentially controlling case rejecting their legal analysis.

23 This 

created questionable agency law that Congress intended courts to review. Yet the 

panel majority explained: “Despite the authority to review a nonenforcement 

decision to determine whether it is ‘contrary to law,’ we recently held that a 

Commission decision based even in part on prosecutorial discretion is not 

reviewable.”24 As Judge Millett pointed out in her dissent, “under the majority 

opinion, whether the words are inserted by the controlling commissioners in a 

deadlocked vote or by a majority of the full Commission, a final agency decision 

becomes unreviewable with just a rhetorical wink at prosecutorial discretion.”25

Likewise, Judge Pillard observed in a similar case, “If a partisan bloc of the FEC can 

23 See CREW v. FEC (American Action Network), 209 F.Supp.3d 77 (2016).

24 Slip op. at 2 (citing Commission on Hope, 892 F.3d 434).

25 Millett, J., dissenting, at 2. 

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thwart a case like this one, FECA’s controls on campaign money, including the 

political-committee registration and disclosure requirements here, are not worth 

much.”26

C. FEC is a Captured Agency and the Court Should Not 

Blindly Defer to Its “Discretion”

The FEC has a non-majority bloc of commissioners exhibiting a pattern and 

practice to undermine, not enforce, campaign-finance laws. They are “ideologically 

opposed to the mission of the agency.”27 This case is a classic example: In addition 

to all of the other flaws we discuss, here the commissioners delayed acting on 

CREW’s complaint for three years and then pointed to the time lapse as a reason for 

not investigating the complaint. 

In 2017, former commissioner Ann Ravel warned that “a controlling bloc of 

three Republican commissioners who are ideologically opposed to the F.E.C.’s 

26 CREW v. FEC (“Commission on Hope II”), 923 F.3d 1141, 1145 (D.C. Cir. 2019) 

(Pillard, J., dissenting from denial of en banc rehearing).

27 Potter, Dereliction of Duty, supra note 2, at 501; see also, e.g., Matea Gold,

Trump’s FEC Nominee Has Questioned the Value of Disclosing Political Donors,

Washington Post (Sept. 15, 2017) (“James E. ‘Trey’ Trainor III, the conservative 

Texas lawyer nominated by President Trump this week to serve on the Federal 

Election Commission, has challenged the principle that the public benefits from the 

disclosure of political donors, arguing that voters could be distracted from the 

content of political messages if they focus on who is financing ads.”), 

http://wapo.st/2y3YYbQ [https://perma.cc/5QKA-CJND].

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purpose regularly ignores violations or drastically reduces penalties.”28 The pattern 

is obvious. When Caroline Hunter, a longtime Republican commissioner announced 

last summer that she was leaving the Commission to join the Koch-funded legal team 

at “Stand Together,” she bragged that she had dedicated her time as an FEC 

commissioner to opposing “unnecessary government regulations and unfair 

enforcement actions.”29 The Trump White House then said that it would nominate 

Allen Dickerson, the “legal director at the Institute for Free Speech, which broadly 

takes an anti-regulatory approach to campaign finance.”30 The deliberate

“dysfunction and deadlock” so eloquently exposed by Commissioner Ravel clearly 

is going to continue. The FEC’s dysfunction heightens the need for robust judicial 

review.

We might as well be blunt. America is presently besieged by a massive covert 

operation funded by dark money and seeking ever-increasing dominance over our 

governance. Hundreds of articles in the press and academia document this dark28 Ann M. Ravel, Dysfunction and Deadlock at the Federal Election Commission, 

New York Times, Feb. 20, 2017; see generally Ann M. Ravel, Dysfunction and 

Deadlock: The Enforcement Crisis at the Federal Election Commission Reveals the 

Unlikelihood of Draining the Swamp (FEC, Feb. 2017). 

29 Daniel Lippman & Zach Montellaro, FEC losing quorum again after Caroline 

Hunter resigns, POLITICO, June 26, 2020 

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/26/fec-caroline-hunter-resigns-341396

30 Id.

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money armada. It is essential to this armada’s operation that the FEC be disabled. 

And that is why we are where we are.

III. CONCLUSION

The full Court should grant rehearing en banc in order to restore the judicial 

review of FEC actions as Congress intended. 

DATED: June 30, 2021

/s/ Eric Alan Isaacson

Eric Alan Isaacson

LAW OFFICE OF ERIC ALAN ISAACSON

6580 Avenida Mirola

La Jolla, CA 92037

Telephone: (858) 263-9581

ericalanisaacson@icloud.com

Attorney for Amici Curiae Senator 

Sheldon Whitehouse, Jeffrey A. Merkley, 

Richard Blumenthal, Mazie K. Hirono, 

Elizabeth Warren, and Chris Van Hollen

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CERTIFICATE OF COMPLIANCE

Pursuant to Fed.R.App.P. 32(g), I hereby certify that this brief complies with 

the type-volume limitation of Fed.R.App.P. 29(b)(4) because its body contains 

2,509 words, excluding the parts exempted by Fed.R.App.P. 32(f). I further certify 

that this brief complies with the typeface requirements of Fed.R.App. 32(a)(5) and 

the type-style requirements of Fed. R.App.P. 32(a)(6), because the brief was 

prepared in a 14-point Times New Roman font using Microsoft Word. 

/s/ Eric Alan Isaacson

Eric Alan Isaacson

LAW OFFICE OF ERIC ALAN ISAACSON

6580 Avenida Mirola

La Jolla, CA 92037

Telephone: (858) 263-9581

ericalanisaacson@icloud.com

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CERTIFICATE OF SERVICE

I hereby certify, pursuant to Fed.R.App.P. 25(d) and D.C. Cir. Rule 25 that on 

June 30, 2021, I am causing the foregoing proposed brief of amici curiae to be 

electronically lodged with the Clerk of the Court using the CM/ECF system, which 

will send a notification to the attorneys of record in this matter who are registered 

with the Court’s CM/ECF system. 

/s/ Eric Alan Isaacson

Eric Alan Isaacson

LAW OFFICE OF ERIC ALAN ISAACSON

6580 Avenida Mirola

La Jolla, CA 92037

Telephone: (858) 263-9581

ericalanisaacson@icloud.com

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