This fall’s election is only a few months away and now is the time for voters to start researching their state legislative candidates. Voters in state House District 35, which covers parts of northern Wake County including Wake Forest and Rolesville, will have all new candidates on their ballots because current Rep. Terence Everitt (D) is running for state Senate.
One of those new candidates is Republican Mike Schietzelt, a 37-year-old married father of four who served in the U.S. Marine Corps as part of the Marine Drum and Bugle Corps and currently works as a litigation attorney at a Raleigh law firm. Voters should be cautious about buying into what Schietzelt (pronounced Sheet-zelt) is selling. It’s easy to be fooled when reading what he thinks about providing more funding for our public schools or supporting efforts to keep our air and water clean. Once you scratch below the surface and look deeper into his background, the picture of who he is as a candidate becomes clearer – and it’s not pretty.
Schietzelt has ties to one of the most important behind-the-scenes figures involved in Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. He also takes pride in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade because he helped draft and submit an amicus brief in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health to the Supreme Court, the ruling that overturned Roe.
Schietzelt briefly clerked for then-North Carolina Supreme Court Chief Justice Mark Martin before he resigned in February 2019 to become the dean of Regent University Law School in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Martin had the reputation of being a “moderate” Republican until he took the position at Regent, which is a right-wing private Christian school that counts George W. Bush’s Attorney General John Ashcroft and current Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito as law school faculty members.
Schietzelt’s connection to the efforts to overturn the 2020 election is through Martin’s role as a legal advisor to Trump. Martin’s name appeared in Jan. 6 reports.
According to the New York Times, Martin had a huge role in Trump’s unconstitutional attempted power grab. The News & Observer reported that he “helped write lawsuits to overturn Biden’s election in key states and that it was Martin who incorrectly told the president that Vice President Mike Pence had the ability to throw out any election results he viewed as fraudulent.”
After losing his clerkship due to Martin’s retirement, Schietzelt became a Constitutional Fellow at the right-wing John Locke Institute for one year. He and his family then moved to Virginia Beach so he could serve as a fellow at Pat Robertson’s Regent University Robertson Center for Constitutional Law where he took part in the Dobbs amicus brief. The brief he worked on asked the court to “restore our constitutional traditions and return to the people the role of determining abortion-related policy.”
Schietzelt was quoted in the victory press release after Dobbs was overturned:
“This is a generational victory for the pro-life movement and the rule of law,” said Brad Lingo, dean of Regent University School of Law and executive director of the Robertson Center for Constitutional Law. “We were honored to partner with the Christian Legal Society and the Hon. Kenneth Starr on our brief,” said Mike Schietzelt, the Robertson Center’s constitutional law fellow — who co-authored the Center’s brief.
Schietzelt spent two and a half years at the Robertson Center before returning to North Carolina in 2022.
Even on a topic like education where Schietzelt appears to be more moderate, the reality is that he’s not. Despite his apparent belief that public schools deserve more funding, he is a supporter of the so-called “Opportunity Scholarship” program, which expanded the state GOP’s private school voucher scheme through funding cuts to North Carolina’s public schools. Under the expanded program, millionaires can now receive taxpayer-funded vouchers to send their children to private schools that are not subject to oversight and are not held accountable to the public. These private schools can choose who they allow to attend based on race, religion, gender, or anything else – a policy Schietzelt favors – even though they take public money.
While Schietzelt’s politics are essentially the same as other extremist Republicans running for office across the state, the difference is that he hides his extremist beliefs by giving vague responses to some policy questions and overly nuanced explanations to others. At the end of the day, Schietzelt will be a rubber-stamp for the NCGOP’s extremist policies because he’s a man who has tied himself to Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson and received endorsements from multiple right-wing organizations like The Calvin Coolidge Project, Americans for Prosperity, Liberty First Grassroots and the NC Values Coalition.
