Full Court Press

~ In Partnership with Democracy Forward ~

For years, right-wing extremists have abused the courts to reshape American policy. Democracy Forward, a legal organization led by Skye Perryman, has stepped up to fight back for abortion access, labor rights, freedom of speech, and basic democratic freedoms in courtrooms across the country. They say there’s no community too small to be worth fighting for.

Words by Gray Chapman | Illustrations by Cristiana Couceiro

September 10, 2024

Skye Perryman is in the middle of a sentence when she does something out of character: The career litigator clams up. 

Perryman, who has served as President and CEO of the legal organization Democracy Forward since 2021, is talking to me from a conference room in the Pacific Northwest, where she’s meeting with a philanthropic organization about the state of American democracy. She’s using her break time to talk with me on Zoom. Last time we spoke, she was coming off a red-eye to meet with a court-accountability group in Boston before heading back home to D.C. in time for an 8 a.m. meeting with dignitaries the following day. “My calendar looks like a Jackson Pollock,” she jokes from behind her Zoom user icon. 

We are supposed to be talking about Democracy Forward’s 2023 lawsuit that challenged West Virginia’s strict abortion law, which severely curtails access to mifepristone — part of a two-step, FDA-approved regimen that accounts for well over half of all abortions in the country. 

“We will use all the tools available to protect our democracy, to advance our democracy, and to improve the lives and well-being of people,” Perryman is explaining. “We think that the fight for democracy involves everybody,” she continues, “and I think our team, in a lot of ways … our team …” 

She trails off, then goes completely silent for a beat. Her video is off, but I can hear her phone persistently buzzing in the background. 

A few agonizing moments pass, and after a deep sigh, Perryman shares breaking news from a different case, in a different part of the country: As we’re speaking, the Texas Supreme Court has just ruled in the case of Zurawski v. State of Texas, a case brought by 20 women who suffered from life-threatening pregnancy complications and were denied emergency abortions. Testimony in this case was horrific; one of the women, recalling the trauma of her experience, vomited on the stand. As Perryman and I are speaking, the court has just ruled on the case, unanimously rejecting the women’s request to clarify medical exceptions under the state’s abortion ban. 

I am quietly clicking headlines and absorbing this news while Perryman conducts quick triage and taps out directives to her team. (DF had supported the case with an amicus brief on behalf of a dozen doctors and nurses associations.) “Do you need to go?” I ask. “No,” she says, “this happens all the time.” Then she takes a deep breath and picks up her train of thought right where she left it: on mifepristone in West Virginia.

You can tell Perryman is used to this sort of thing, in the way that many of us have unwillingly become used to this sort of thing: going about our days, doing our work, tending to our families or our lives, only to be derailed by a gut-punch of news — what feels like a steady and coordinated unraveling of rights, delivered incrementally and in real time via push notifications. And on that particular day, the two of us couldn’t even maintain a conversation about this death-by-a-thousand-cuts without being interrupted by yet another cut.

Our conversation is happening almost exactly two years from the day that Politico published the devastating leaked Supreme Court opinion that would ultimately overturn Roe v. Wade. Meanwhile, in a recent Senate committee hearing, doctors are asking lawmakers questions like, “Do I have to wait until she has a stroke?” In the 21 states with abortion bans, women are being airlifted across state lines to legally get the emergency care they need. In places like Louisiana, rape victims — including children — are being forced to carry their unwanted pregnancies to term.  

For women, for anyone with the ability to become pregnant, for anyone paying even a bit of attention, the post-Dobbs landscape is hellishly frightening and purposely cruel. 

But what keeps Perryman up at night isn’t just abortion bans. Or library book bans. Or voter suppression, or election denialism, or Project 2025. It’s all of these things ensnared together in a bigger, higher-stakes, and far scarier crisis: the end of our democracy itself. 

This is what Perryman and Democracy Forward are fighting against, in battles unfolding from  the libraries of Prattville, Alabama, all the way up to the Supreme Court. It’s why earlier in her career Perryman left a coveted job in the private sector and all of its trappings — designer shoes, slick corporate office, high-profile clients, meetings on Wall Street — behind to join the legal team of an organization that, at the time, didn’t have desks or a website. And it’s why, in the span of just a few years, representing hundreds of clients and filing hundreds of cases and countless legal briefs, Democracy Forward has taken on some of our country’s hardest fights — and built an organization meant to withstand assaults on democracy, for the long haul.

Democracy Forward began in 2017 as a small and scrappy organization specifically focused on challenging Trump policies in the courts. But since the end of that administration, the group has evolved in both scale and mission to become an institution with scores of lawyers and staff and hundreds of partners across the country working across nearly 40 states to defend rights and disrupt harmful policies through litigation. They’ve filed over 650 legal actions since its inception across a full spectrum of progressive issues, from freedom of speech to abortion access to labor rights. While other legal organizations like the ACLU have made a longstanding commitment to individual rights, Democracy Forward has dedicated their work to protect our democracy as a whole. They offer legal representation and support to clients and partner organizations free of charge, with a focus on protecting democracy and fighting extremism in the courts.

Anti-democratic extremism isn’t lurking in dark corners of the internet anymore. It has seeped into the places where laws are written and policies are enforced, into judges’ chambers and district attorneys’ offices, on county boards and city councils. In their early days of challenging Trump, the Democracy Forward team quickly came to understand more and more of the extremists’ playbook: flooding the system with extremism and then working to reshape the American courts to impose interpretations of the laws to match their regressive ideologies. “The heart of this extreme political power has always been their legal movement,” Perryman says.  

Ultraconservative organizations like the Federalist Society have spent decades amassing power and methodically transforming the American judiciary, from the local level all the way up to the Supreme Court. According to ProPublica, 86 percent of the judges Trump appointed to circuit courts and the Supreme Court were former or current Federalist Society members. (Many of those appointees were in federal appeals courts, for many cases, the final stop before the Supreme Court will consider taking it up.) And as a result, ultraconservatives have turned many courts into a weapon for taking rights away, as opposed to protecting them — “which is fundamentally not how courts are supposed to operate,” says Perryman. 

This movement is a multi-decade, highly coordinated, extreme (and extremely well-funded) effort that is rolling back individual rights and continuing to gain power. And we don’t have decades to undo the damage: Our democracy is already in decline. 

Eight years ago, a skeleton crew of litigators, strategists, and other experts began to observe that decline in the wake of the 2016 election and started working quickly to get a new legal organization off the ground. The founding members of Democracy Forward came from senior positions in government, the Department of Justice, and elite private firms, all to join a fight that felt urgent and important. They each had their own reasons for joining. “They all have a story,” says Perryman. “They did it for their kids, they did it for something that they hoped the world could be, they did it for what they hoped their community could be.” 

In the aftermath of the Trump administration’s 2017 “Muslim ban,” Democracy Forward Senior Counsel Benjamin Seel remembers the scene at airports, where lawyers showed up to render emergency legal assistance like doctors parachuted into a war zone. “It had already become pretty clear that there wasn't going to be much of a moderating effect on Trump,” he says. He left a job at a private firm to join the team of lawyers in 2017.

When Max Levy, a staffer at a digital communications firm, heard about a startup organization working to hold the Trump administration accountable in new and different ways, it “just felt like something I couldn’t pass up,” he says. Levy, now Democracy Forward’s Digital Strategy Director, was nervous about leaving his job, “but I was just really excited about working with such smart, passionate people, who all saw a huge need in the world, and dropped things to try and build something brand-new.” 

Robin Thurston stepped away from a beloved job as a civil servant in the Department of Justice to join the mission. Thurston, who was on maternity leave during the 2016 election, had spent time reflecting on how to be most in service to the country during what she felt was a national emergency. “I believed that as a lawyer, I had a particular set of skills that provided me with a particular ability to contribute to the response to this threat.” She joined Democracy Forward as a as a litigator in 2017 and now serves as one of the organization’s legal directors.

Perryman had seen how extremist ideology can shape a community, because she grew up in a place long steeped in it. In Waco, Texas, she had an early glimpse of anti-democratic maneuvering when a controversial 2003 redistricting effort began a series of anti-democratic activities that ultimately ousted a representative who’d served the district for 20 years. This maneuvering gave Texas Republicans a majority of federal House seats for the first time since Reconstruction. “I’ve seen what these extremists can do,” says Perryman. ”I’ve seen it my whole life.” 

After law school, Perryman was working at an elite global firm representing some of the world’s most high-profile clients. During that time, two important things happened that shaped Perryman’s future. In 2015, Perryman became a mother. And the following year, Donald Trump won the presidential election.

When Anne Harkavy, a senior lawyer Perryman admired who served as the founding executive director of Democracy Forward asked if Perryman would be willing to join a startup legal organization built to disrupt the administration’s harmful policies, there was little hesitation. “Those are the kinds of conversations where it feels like you’re watching a movie, and you know what the person has to say,” Perryman says. “You can't go for comfort, you have to go for the right thing.” 

Just a few months later, an early win reinforced that she’d made the right choice: After filing a Freedom of Information Act request, Democracy Forward exposed an unlawful decision by the administration to cut off funding for the national, evidence-based Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program. The case, which most people thought couldn’t be won, not only revealed abuses of power but also led to litigation Democracy Forward and others filed that restored $100 million to the program.

Carrie Flaxman, at the time a litigator for Planned Parenthood Federation of America, first worked with Democracy Forward at the time. “I was able to see the DF model at work in that case,” says Flaxman, who later joined the organization as Senior Legal Advisor in 2023. “After pursuing FOIA requests that showed the unlawful animus against the program, Democracy Forward worked with important clients and pursued two rounds of litigation against the Trump administration, stopping the illegal attacks.”

For Democracy Forward, it wasn’t just a win but a proof of concept for the organization’s model. “Democracy Forward were able to use the law to restore funds to programs across the nation,” Perryman says. “Without the ability of lawyers to help challenge it, and really to help uncover what had happened there, Democracy Forward would not have been able to help restore the funding, for sure … and we may not even have known about that extremism to begin with.”

Sunu P. Chandy, who was then legal director of the National Womens’ Law Center, noticed the impressive results that Democracy Forward was able to achieve through their legal partnerships. When the Trump administration blocked an equal pay data collection initiative, Democracy Forward and National Women’s Law Center sued the Trump administration together. A federal district court judge agreed, ruling that the administration had broke the law when it stopped employers from reporting pay data by race, ethnicity and gender and job category. Chandy would later go on to join Democracy Forward as a Senior Advisor in 2023.

In those early days, Democracy Forward’s lawyers crammed into a bare-bones office inside the Center for American Progress, passing a laptop around with a shared Word account in order to write briefs. An early photo shows a group of lawyers late into the evening in midconversation — some sitting on the floor — in jeans and chinos, polos and Hawaiian shirts, circled around a six-pack of Sierra Nevada. 

But what began as a group of lawyers spitballing in a cramped office and printing out briefs on the floor quickly turned into an agile legal team regularly challenging the executive branch’s most anti-democratic actions. 

For the next two years, Democracy Forward peppered the Trump administration with over 100 legal challenges, from reversing the Trump USDA’s rollback of healthy school lunches to undoing harmful asylum restrictions enacted by an illegally appointed official. “It was a scary moment for the country,” Thurston recalls, “but to be with a group of really smart, dedicated people who were figuring out how we could try to respond to this threat, with what would become a lot of partner organizations and really wonderful clients, was incredibly energizing.” 

As the 2020 election cycle brought the Trump administration to an end, Democracy Forward wasn’t sure what its role would look like in the years ahead — or if they would even need to exist. January 6 gave them their answer.

While most of us remember Jan. 6 as just that — a single, horrific date on the calendar — Perryman reminds me that its events were years in the making, and far from isolated.

“This was about a movement that had been afoot for decades, that the people were not effectively countering,” says Perryman, who vividly remembers getting calls and texts from lawmakers and staffers inside the Capitol on that day. Having litigated against far-right tactics for years, she knew how dangerous this was. “I’ve seen what these extremists can do,” she says, “and seeing it on a national stage is equally terrifying.” She can’t help but wonder how Jan. 6 might have been even scarier had no one challenged the administration’s early efforts to collect and store personal data on every voter, referencing a litigation effort Democracy Forward undertook against the Pence-Kobac Voter Commission.

In its scrappy, nimble early days, Democracy Forward had been laser-focused on the Trump administration, built to resist the whack-a-mole of undemocratic policies coming from the White House each week. But on Jan. 6, 2021, as an armed mob sought to overthrow an election, it became viscerally clear that the real threat was no longer contained to a single administration, or to its demagogue.

Later in 2021, the board of Democracy Forward tapped Perryman to usher the organization into a new chapter, as its president and CEO, to prepare for a future in which democracy itself hangs in the balance. Not just by challenging a single bad actor, but by defending progressive policies, disrupting anti-democratic activity, and using the law to build collective power in communities. 

With this new era, more members were moved to join the team, and Democracy Forward has built a powerhouse institution that works in communities across the country – not just Washington. “I had already built a whole career as a consumer lawyer -- which I found rewarding because consumer law, at its root, is about fairness and transparency in markets and at a structural level, fairness in the economy,” Victoria Nugent says. “What made the prospect of working at Democracy Forward so thrilling -- genuinely thrilling -- was the opportunity to look at democracy through a similarly wide lens.” Nugent left her firm to serve as Legal Director for Democracy Forward in the post-Trump era.

Perryman and her team have followed that work across the country, including to the nation’s highest court: This past April, Perryman sat in the front row of the Supreme Court during arguments for Idaho and Moyle v. United States, representing tens of thousands of physicians in the case that weighed whether federal EMTALA (Emergency Treatment and Labor Act) law preempts state abortion bans when pregnant women are bleeding out in emergency rooms. (The Supreme Court dismissed the case in June.)

But the fight has also taken them to libraries in Arkansas and public schools in Florida. Rural towns in red states; small communities whose fights may never make headline news, just like the town Perryman herself grew up in. 

“One thing about Skye that has really inspired me is her commitment to going to the hard places,” says Levy. “And the idea that there's no challenge too big and no community too small, or in too difficult a political environment, to still be worth going in and fighting for.”

In 2022, shortly after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, West Virginia became the second state in the U.S. to swiftly pass an abortion ban. West Virginia’s history of outlawing abortion is older than the state itself: Its 1849 ban was written before West Virginia joined the Union, and before women or Black people had the right to vote. That law, which carries draconian criminal penalties for women seeking abortions, is still technically on the books today. To some people, including to some so-called liberals, places like these — places like West Virginia, or Alabama, or Perryman’s hometown in Texas — are foregone conclusions. This callous, elitist disregard toward Southern states, and the real people suffering the consequences in them, can be heard in familiar refrains: What do you expect, living in a place like that? And: This makes me glad I live in California. And: You get what you vote for. 

For Perryman, the question of getting involved in the West Virginia case was about pushing back on the kind of extremism that bulldozes federal law and doesn’t care how many lives get caught in its path. Even, and especially, in a complicated place others might simply write off. 

Though in the mifepristone case Democracy Forward represented a drugmaker, which of course has a vested interest in being able to do business in the state, the implications go far beyond commerce. It even goes beyond depriving people of medicine. West Virginia’s functional ban on mifepristone, Perryman argues, brazenly conflicts with federal law and undermines the authority of the FDA, Congress, and the country’s entire drug regulation system. “When a federal law conflicts with the state law, our Constitution makes it clear that it's the federal law that should take precedence,” explains Perryman. 

Perryman isn’t afraid of a fight with long odds. What she is afraid of is the idea that people might give up. “These far-right forces want you to believe there's no hope; they want you to believe there's no reason to go challenge something, no reason to show up at the Supreme Court, no reason to vote, no reason to do anything because they've got it in the bag and nothing's going to change,” she says. “But we know that people have that power, and we see in our work every day the ways in which hope exists.” 

On that Zoom call with Perryman, just a few minutes after she’s regrouped from the Texas news and we’ve gotten back to our original agenda, I’m having trouble switching gears. It feels impossible in the moment to compartmentalize women going septic in Texas so that we can get back to discussing teenagers forced to give birth in West Virginia — “bleak” doesn’t begin to cover it. So, as she’s talking about mifepristone, we’re interrupted again, only this time it’s my fault. “I’m sorry, I have to ask because this is happening right now,” I say, less articulately than I’d like. “How … how are you feeling? When this happens? I mean, you’re in the middle of this work, and you’re just … hit with a loss like this.”

She sighs, then she tells me that sometimes, the purpose of a fight like this isn’t just to change the law, but also to let people know that someone is fighting for them. And to ensure that history knows this is something that a state Supreme Court has done, flying in the face of these women and the harrowing experiences they were forced to endure. And to make it hard, at every step of the way, for these extremists to play out their vision of what our country should look like. And also, to make it hard for everyone else to look away. 

We have been instructed relentlessly to hope, to fight, to stay mad, to pay attention, to nevertheless persist. The protest signage and fundraising verbiage that, in early 2017, may have once roused my own righteous anger now tends to make me tired and sad. When this level of suffering is so normalized, when unelected officials sweep away a fundamental right with nearly a half-century of precedent, when women are laying bare their most profound trauma before lawmakers over and over again only to be ignored and dehumanized again and again — the cruelty feels too much to bear. And despite what the protest signs might say, defeat does indeed feel like an option, and it feels tempting to slither into an abyss of despair rather than stand up and fight. Which, of course, is the point. 

But listening to Perryman’s unscripted response to this moment we’re sharing — as people, as women, as Southerners, as mothers — I can hear that she isn’t speaking from a list of talking points, but from conviction. Her response is unrehearsed and unpolished, but unlike me she doesn’t fumble for words. It underscores a resolve that doesn’t quite translate into slick fundraising brochure copy so much as it shows up in the daily rhythms of the work itself: the red-eye flights, the ceaseless meetings, the splatter-paint Google calendar, the tough fights and the long, long odds. The powerful moments, which aren’t necessarily the same as the headline-making ones. 

We like to imagine progress as cinematic moments of triumph on the steps of the Supreme Court. But progress might also be nudged along in the tedium of legal briefs and defended in the bureaucracy of public records requests: a long, sustained, unglamorous grind of a fight.  Perryman believes that if we do both, democracy will prevail. And as she’s saying all this, I can feel myself backing away from the abyss, because I believe her.

Gray Chapman is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Atlanta Magazine, Garden & Gun, and other magazines, newspapers, and books, spanning subject matters ranging from urban wildlife to consumer subcultures. In recent years, her work has focused on maternal health disparities and reproductive access; her reporting on Georgia's abortion legislation was awarded a Planned Parenthood Media Excellence Award in 2019. She is a lifelong Georgian and lives in Atlanta with her husband, two children, and dog.

Cristiana Couceiro is an illustrator and designer, living in Lisbon, Portugal. Her work has been published by The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Vanity Fair, New York Magazine, Wired, Le Monde and has been recognized by American Illustration, The Society of Publication Designers and Association of Illustrators.