If you look at some of the most significant Supreme Court cases on cultural issues coming out in the last three terms, where have they come from?” the attorney quizzed the crowd of activists, advocates, and elected officials gathered in an air-conditioned Colorado Springs event center in August. He answered his own question: “Colorado.” He meant it as good news, and the crowd of attendees at the 2025 policy summit of a small but influential organization named Colorado Leaders for Academic Success, or CLAS, took it as such.
“Colorado is producing some great vehicles to take these issues up to the U.S. Supreme Court and win,” Julian Ellis of conservative law firm First & Fourteenth went on. “You really are at ground zero on some of this litigation.”
With his comments, Ellis summarized one of the main takeaways from the August gathering of right-wing education reformers: we might be outnumbered in Colorado, but we can get to the Supreme Court, and we can win.
In recordings taken surreptitiously during the event and obtained by the Colorado Times Recorder, Ellis, fellow conservative attorney and CLAS founder, Brad Miller, and other guests at the policy summit can be heard laying out something between a vision and a plan: to enlist friendly school boards as plaintiffs in controversial cases in hopes of riding those cases all the way to the Supreme Court. Though it might sound like the wishful thinking of conservative activists in an increasingly blue state – a fantasy of slingshotting past the pesky will of the voters and having the nation’s high court institute their desired laws by fiat – the plan they were discussing was neither hypothetical nor future tense: they already have irons in the fire, local cases they hope might be their ticket to that fantasy.
With the current makeup of the Supreme Court, they might be right.
In August, the CLAS policy summit brought together the players who hope to make it happen: school board members, “parents’ rights” activists, statewide elected officials, and the lawyers who will be on the frontlines. Speakers included Kristi Burton Brown, the former executive director of the Colorado Republican Party and a current member of the state board of education, as well as Senate Minority Leader Cleave Simpson, then-House Minority Leader Rose Pugliese, and representatives from national conservative organizations like the Leadership Institute and School Boards for Academic Excellence. Republican state Senator and gubernatorial candidate Barbara Kirkmeyer was also billed as a speaker. A handout obtained at the event lists Colorado conservative organizations like the Independence Institute and Advance Colorado as “partners and sponsors” of the event.
The fact that CLAS could gather the state’s top elected Republicans, critical national allies, and a handful of advocates together into one room is a testament to the organization’s growing success, and to the success Miller has had in turning Colorado into a laboratory for conservative legal advocacy – and he seems to know as much. “We ought to be optimistic right now,” Miller told the crowd at the conference. “This room probably wasn’t possible three years ago.”
Founded last year by Miller and others in the right-wing education reform space, CLAS has set itself up as a more ideological alternative to the Colorado Association of School Boards, or CASB – part of a pattern of emerging conservative alternatives to other nonpartisan groups like AARP and the American Library Association. The group offers member districts assistance with policy governance, professional development, communications, lobbying, and networking, a suite of services which give Miller and CLAS a long reach into district affairs. With the SCOTUS strategy laid out at the August policy summit, the organization appears interested in extending that reach much further.
The summit, which was an all-day affair on August 23 held at District 49’s Creekside Success Center, featured panels about “parents’ rights” issues, a Q&A with Brown and fellow member of the state board of education, Sherri Wright, and presentations by partner organizations. It was the afternoon legal panel, though – featuring Miller and attorneys from First & Fourteenth – where plans for the future were discussed.
The problem, as the reformers gathered at CLAS see it, is that Colorado is too liberal. School boards in the state have a lot of latitude and very little oversight, but even the most aggressive school board can only change reality for students within its boundaries. They cannot ban books or transgender athletes in other districts; they are each confined to their own. To have a wider impact would require action by the legislature, and there is no reasonable expectation of Republicans obtaining majorities in that body any time soon. Without that, there’s no clear way to enshrine the post-2020 incarnation of “parental rights” any further into the law, or to circumvent the non-discrimination provisions which are already there.
The plan? Lose all the way to the Supreme Court, then win.
“We anticipate, particularly in Colorado, losing a lot of these cases at the trial level,” Ellis told the crowd. “The federal district court bench has seven active judges, five of whom were appointed by President Biden. It is a very, very left-of-center court with a decent backstop in the 10th circuit.” The good news, he laid out, is that each loss allows them to appeal to a higher court. To hear Ellis discuss it, the strategy is not uncommon.
“They lost all the way to the Supreme Court,” Ellis said of the plaintiffs in Mahmoud v. Taylor, a case decided by SCOTUS earlier this year which held that parents may opt their children out of education discussing gender and sexuality if those discussions go against the parents’ religious convictions. “That’s a common theme in a lot of these cases, particularly the right-of-center oriented cases that work their way up to the Supreme Court.”
While the lawyers on the CLAS legal panel all expressed support for the decision in Mahmoud, the case does not accomplish everything they hoped for: it only provides a shield for religious parents.
“The next level of the fight will be what happens when a non-religious parent decides that they don’t want their children to be exposed to that because it’s inconsistent with their values and beliefs,” Ellis said. Unlike the Mahmoud case, a non-religious parent’s complaint could not be litigated as a religious freedom case, it would require another legal vehicle to claim constitutional legitimacy.
CLAS, Ellis, Miller, and their allies believe they have found just such a vehicle: the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. That’s the one which reads, “nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
Ellis believes that, if presented with the chance, the current Supreme Court will be willing to interpret that clause as broadly enshrining a whole host of what advocates call “parents’ rights.” To be clear, the actual rights of parents in the United States are already thoroughly enshrined in law. The problem many advocates have with those rights is that, though very broad, they are not unlimited. The problem those same advocates might find further down this road is that much of what they have termed “parents’ rights” over the last five years has been about a wish to regulate other parents’ children, not their own – an attempted infringement on the parental rights which already exist.
But I digress.
In order to give SCOTUS the opportunity to rule in their favor, the advocates need a case which fits the bill; a case to drive home a parents’ rights interpretation of the due process clause. Here in Colorado, they think they have at least two.
The first of those cases is the Miller-organized lawsuit launched by a number of his client school districts against CHSAA, the Colorado High School Activities Association, which regulates high school sports in the state. The plaintiffs’ demand? They want CHSAA to ban transgender students from participating in athletics. Before launching the suit, the school districts that are now suing the organization attempted an easier route: a strongly worded letter. When CHSAA was unmoved by the missive, the districts launched a lawsuit.
While Miller has been the main organizer behind the effort — as I detailed earlier this year, most of the letter’s signatories are clients of Miller’s firm — First & Fourteenth is leading the actual litigation. The suit, initially launched by District 49 before being joined by other districts, targets both CHSAA and CADA, the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act. How does this pertain to the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause? Don’t ask me, I’m not a lawyer, but sources involved with the litigation confirmed to me that the case’s claims are based on that clause.
The suit is ongoing. During the CLAS legal panel, Miller seemed bullish about its chances. “I’m very optimistic that this is going to lead to a change, at least in Colorado, with regard to how this works,” he said.
The other potentially SCOTUS-worthy iron in the fire is the ongoing lawsuit between Elbert County’s Elizabeth School District, represented by Miller and attorneys from First & Fourteenth, and district parents represented by the ACLU. While the CHSAA lawsuit targeting trans students attempts to move the ball forward on one of the parents’ rights movement’s favorite topics, the Elizabeth lawsuit seeks to advance legal protections for another: book bans.
Of note, the Elizabeth district is more tightly yoked to CLAS than any of the organization’s other member districts: district superintendent Dan Snowberger, who facilitated the event’s various panels, also serves as CLAS’ executive director. The district’s board secretary, Mary Powell, also serves on CLAS’ three-member board of directors alongside Mike Lynch, who serves on the Montezuma-Cortez school board and Beth Suppes, who sits on Delta County’s school board.
Last year, the district removed books from its libraries based on ideological opposition to their contents. Earlier this year, a judge ordered those books returned to the shelves. The 2,500 student district says it has complied while appealing the ruling, and now the suit could be used as a vehicle to take book banning all the way to the Supreme Court.
The Elizabeth case, Ellis told the crowd in August, could help “strengthen that parental rights component of the Constitution,” which he sees as being enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause. The case is now before the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, climbing the appellate ladder as intended.
“We anticipated losing that case at the trial level,” Ellis said, “but this is a mission where our ultimate relief will come at a much higher court.”
There is also a third Colorado case that Miller and his allies might see elevated to the Supreme Court: the fight over Riverstone Academy in Pueblo, which has been billed as Colorado’s “first public Christian school.” What seemed at first like a blatant attempt to force the issue of giving state funds to religious institutions was revealed on closer inspection to be exactly that. According to reporting from Chalkbeat, the effort to open Riverstone Academy is part of a search between Miller and national conservative organization Alliance Defending Freedom for a case to “[test] the existing limits of church-state separation.”
Though not affiliated with CLAS, the Riverstone Academy project shows that Miller’s ambitions of taking a red case from a blue state all the way to the high court are not futile: if he is already working with the Alliance Defending Freedom – an organization which has represented plaintiffs in no fewer than 15 Supreme Court wins – then things are progressing exactly as he should hope.
For those with visions for the public school system that do not align with Miller’s, that should be cause for concern. Once one of these cases makes it all the way to D.C., the chances of stopping it from having national ramifications are low.
Miller and Ellis seem aware of that, too. For all the discussion of getting cases to the Supreme Court, the CLAS legal panel spared little concern for what will happen once they get there. They did not seem worried about the arguments they would make, or the Justices they would have to win over. They seemed to understand as well as any observer of the nation’s highest court that the decisions made by that body are not the product of careful jurisprudence or the judicious weighing of legal doctrines. The decisions are made purely by ideology – and that bodes well for the ideologues of CLAS.
“Ultimately,” Ellis told the crowd, “I think we have enough Justices on the Supreme Court to agree with us.”
