Manuel Miranda

After serving with the U.S State Department at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad as Director of the Office of Legislative Statecraft for one year, Manuel Miranda serves again as chairman of the Third Branch Conference, a coalition of over 150 organizations nationwide engaged on judicial matters, initially organized as the National Coalition to End Judicial Filibusters.

Mr. Miranda served previously as Counsel to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, leading 51 Republican staffs on judicial confirmations. Before that he served as Senior Nominations Counsel to the Senate Committee on the Judiciary. He is credited by the extremist liberal organization MoveOn.org as the architect of the Republican "nuclear option," and the Washington Post and others have noted that he was the first and the leading voice against President Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court.

In February 2006, Mr. Miranda was awarded the Ronald Reagan Award by the American Conservative Union for his leadership on judicial nominations. The Ronald Reagan Award is considered the highest award of the conservative movement. He has also been a Visiting Legal Fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a Senior Counsel at the Family Research Council. He has published 35 articles as a columnist for the Wall Street Journal on the judicial nominations issue.

Manny was born in Cuba and raised in Spain and New York City. He received degrees from Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service and the University of California's Hastings College of the Law. At Georgetown, he was the Circumnavigators' Foundation Fellow for 1981 and at Hastings he was the Charles Rummel Scholar. Between 1987 and 1998, Mr. Miranda practiced law with leading firms in New York and Washington, D.C.

Before going to the Senate, Manny was president of the Cardinal Newman Society for Catholic Higher Education. In 1992, he led the canon law effort to have Georgetown University de-fund a pro-abortion student group all the way to the Vatican. In 1996, he led the effort to restore crucifixes to Georgetown classrooms. Both efforts had nationwide consequences for Catholic universities.