OAKLAND — Conservatives from Washington to the West Coast have
anointed attorney Harmeet Dhillon as their go-to legal warrior in
the culture wars of the Covid-19 pandemic. And they don’t even
seem to mind that she’s from San Francisco.
During the pandemic, Dhillon has emerged as a conservative thorn
in the side of Gov. Gavin Newsom, suing on behalf of pastors, gun
shop owners, protesters, cosmetologists and beachgoers. And now on
behalf of her fellow Republicans, who last weekend challenged the
Democratic governor for switching California to a mail-ballot
election in November.
The San Francisco attorney has also become a social media star
and a regular on top-rated Fox News shows for her legal expertise
and hard-charging political commentary.
Dhillon, 51, argues the pandemic has exposed a government
inclined to overreach — and the fragile nature of civil
rights.
“The Constitution is not suspended in a pandemic, any more
than it was suspended in every war that we’ve had in this
country,’’ Dhillon said in an interview. “There is no
emergency justifying the suspension of any civil rights in this
country.’’
Newsom on March 19 became the first governor to issue a
statewide stay-at-home order that shut down nonessential
activities. Dhillon’s lawsuits have focused on how the state
defines “essential.”
She has filed more than a dozen lawsuits through her own law
firm or her nonprofit, the Virginia-based Center for American Liberty, that
challenge Newsom’s orders on constitutional grounds. She has
questioned his criteria and ability to determine what activities
and businesses are necessary.
Some conservative states deemed gun stores and churches
essential early on. But California forced them to close until
Newsom on Monday allowed houses of worship to reopen.
Dhillon’s nonprofit also filed suit to block Governor Newsom’s
appropriation of $75 million toward nonprofits that are
providing $500 payments to undocumented immigrants who don’t
qualify for unemployment insurance.
Her red-state activism in overwhelmingly Democratic California
has earned her notice and increasing airtime from Fox News
conservative icons like Laura Ingraham, who lauds Dhillon as the
one “leading the charge to keep Gavin Newsom’s power grabs in
check,’’ and Tucker Carlson, who has said she is “at the
forefront of the fight against censorship.”
Dhillon has also caught the attention of President Donald Trump,
who kicked off a 2019 White House Social Media Summit — bringing
together a collection of conservative bloggers, journalists and
media watchers — by anointing Dhillon as “one of the leading
First Amendment lawyers in the country.’’ Trump’s praise came
on the heels of her advocacy for conservatives battling big tech
companies and what they claim is internet censorship as the divide
grew between the left and right on issues of civil rights.
She has emerged as a loyal Trump booster — and a big campaign
bundler. In Trump’s last visit to the Bay Area in September, she
corralled many of the 400 deep-pocketed donors who attended a
lavish fundraiser at the Portola Valley estate of Sun
Microsystems’ founder Scott McNealy, which helped raised $3
million for the president in one night.
The Indian-born daughter of a conservative Sikh family became
the first Republican to stand before the Republican National
Convention and deliver a Sikh prayer — in Punjabi.
She grew up in North Carolina before heading to Dartmouth
College, an Ivy League school where she became editor-in-chief of
the Dartmouth Review, the campus conservative newspaper. She later
graduated from the University of Virginia School of Law.
Dhillon traveled and worked around the world until she came to
San Francisco in 2000 for a Silicon Valley job opportunity during
the dot-com boom. She said circumstances changed, “but I fell in
love with Northern California and decided to stay.”
She opened her own practice, the Dhillon Law Group, in San
Francisco in 2006 — when she immersed herself in Republican
politics in one of the country’s most liberal bastions.
She took on the challenge of chairing the Republican Party in
San Francisco and ran twice unsuccessfully for public office —
but also raised her social media and political profile. Seeking to
become the first woman and Sikh vice chair in California Republican
Party history, she faced down prejudice and some attacks from the
far right in her own party’s ranks.
Dhillon took heat for being a former board member for the
American Civil Liberties Union in Northern California — a role
she pursued in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, she said. She was
later attacked as a “Taj Mahal princess” by anonymous opponents
at a state convention, where a county chair — later forced to
resigned — wrongfully accused her of being a Muslim who endorsed
beheading.
Dhillon’s steely drive and activism in the embattled
California Republican Party catapulted her to a post as the RNC’s
California committeeperson in 2016.
“She is a force; there’s no doubt about it,’’ said
Cynthia Bryant, the CRP’s longtime executive director. “I’ve
watched her grow so much in the last seven years … She’s very
determined and works extremely hard — and she’s absolutely
passionate about individual freedom and personal liberty.”
Dhillon became a party champion in the culture wars in 2016 by
representing Trump supporters who were the target of
counter-protesters after a San Jose rally by the then-candidate.
She went to bat for the University of California, Berkeley College
Republicans who took the school to court after canceling a planned
talk by conservative firebrand Ann Coulter.
She then represented Google software engineer James Damore, who
was fired after circulating a memo that suggested there was a
biological basis for the lack of women in the tech industry.
“I’m one of the few lawyers who’s willing to step up and
challenge the big tech companies on their privacy violations …
and on their discrimination on the basis of viewpoint,’’ she
says. “Most big law firms and big firm lawyers are very
interested in having those companies with clients — so they would
never sue them.”
But Dhillon has also been dismissed as a grandstander. Rep.
Jared Huffman (D-Calif.), in a recent tweet directed at Dhillon,
said that “as national co-chair of ‘Women for Trump,’ you’re
basically the Purdue Pharma of crazy pills.”
And critics point out that while Dhillon’s legal efforts may
give the right a rallying cry, she has so far gotten little
traction in the courts.
Mike Madrid, a GOP strategist and outspoken Trump critic who has
verbally battled with Dhillon and her team, said Dhillon’s growing
profile dramatizes the conservative movement that has brought the
GOP to its knees in California.
“Most of this is really just about trying to show the banner
for a dying, shrinking, angry despondent people’’ who make up
the party’s hardcore conservative base, he said. “So rather
than using her role as a national committeewoman to focus on
building the party — to try and win the hearts and minds of
Californians — they’re trying to grab a few headlines on a
couple of legal issues.”
On Sunday night, Dhillon’s
lawsuit on behalf of the South Bay Pentecostal Church, which
challenged Newsom’s Covid-19 shutdowns, reached the U.S. Supreme
Court
after a 9th Circuit panel rejected the challenge on a 2-1 split
vote.
“We’re dealing here with a highly contagious and often fatal
disease for which there presently is no known cure,’” Judges
Barry Silverman and Jacqueline Nguyen wrote in their majority
opinion rebuffing the case.
Dhillon countered that “the idea that you can trust citizens
to go behave responsibly in Costco and you cannot trust the same
citizens to go behave responsibly in church has no basis in
constitutional law or fact.”
Conservatives say her advocacy helped build pressure against
Newsom. President Donald Trump last week threatened to “override”
states that kept churches shut, while the U.S. Justice Department
told Newsom to reopen houses of worship.
On Monday,
the governor released new guidelines that will allow a limited
number of churchgoers to attend services, with the approval of
their local health departments.
Still, Loyola Law School professor Jessica Levinson, and host of
“The Legal Eagles Files” — a podcast about constitutional
issues — argues that Dhillon’s arguments are on weak legal ground
in the pandemic era.
“Yes, we have lots of constitutional rights — but none of
them are absolute,’’ she said. “We have these incredibly
robust state police powers that are there to protect our health,
safety and welfare.” She noted how states have the ability to
require seat belts and speed limits for safety reasons.
Dhillon remains undeterred.
“I don’t know anybody who wants to get sick from this disease,”
she said recently on Fox News. “However, I don’t know anybody in
my Republican circle who wants to live on their knees, either —
or at the whim of the governor who picks up the fake news and looks
at one [beach] photograph and says, ‘Oh, let me punish Orange
County.'”
