Attorney General Mukasey gave a speech at the American Enterprise Institute on Monday morning in which he issued a call for a third round of Congressional legislation to ensure that this administration will never have to explain to a federal court why they have held our clients in Guantánamo for over six years. The other two rounds followed losses in the Supreme Court – the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 (passed a year and half after we won the first Guantánamo case, Rasul v. Bush, in the Supreme Court, and the Military Commissions Act of 2006, passed a few months after the administration’s defeat in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. The Supreme Court explicitly said last month in Boumediene v. Bush that the two prior attempts by Congress to intervene to prevent detainees from having access to the courts were unconstitutional, and that the lower courts should get on with the business of hearing these cases. Unfortunately, that hasn’t prevented our nation’s highest law enforcement official from trying again to ensure that no court has a chance to rule that one of our clients was wrongly detained during his watch.

Mukasey’s complaints and the accompanying proposals are another attempt to drag us into years of further legal challenges and delays in these cases. Let’s take a look at them, one by one. Read the rest of this entry »

On Wednesday, I introduced legislation yesterday which will require the Attorney General to create a pilot program to examine racial and ethnic disparities in the criminal justice system within 10 U.S. districts across the country. H.R. 6518, the Justice Integrity Act of 2008, is designed to increase public confidence in the justice system and address any unwarranted racial and ethnic disparities in the criminal process. Read the rest of this entry »

AARP is pleased to support the license policy recommendations released by the AAA Foundation last week. With less than a generation to spare before one in four drivers will be over age 65, it is refreshing to see a consensus building around how to keep the roads safe for everyone.

Three key elements will help reach that goal:

1) We must empower safe drivers to stay on the road for as long as possible with safer roads, safer cars and personal and family responsibility for maintaining safe driving skills and practices.

2) We must create more travel options for at-risk drivers so they can hang up their keys without losing their mobility. And perhaps most importantly,

3) We need to invest now in research to develop effective ways to identify at-risk drivers. Without this needed research, the license renewal process will not be successful in getting unsafe drivers off the roads and unfortunate crash related tragedies will continue.

Maybe the relentless climb in gas prices will push innovation in transportation choices, public, private and nonprofit. Meanwhile, AARP believes that everyone should be required to regularly renew their driver’s license in person. We want the roads safe and we want America to be ready for the aging of the largest generation in history.

AARP has and continues to offer resources and a place to discuss this issue to members and lawmakers and you can be sure that we’ll continue to watch this issue as it progresses.

I voted against it in the House. I was disappointed. I just think that there are just too many loopholes for Americans to have their lives opened to government. I think even when we consider it a national security interest, we at the same time have to balance that with making sure that government intrusions into the lives of Americans are not inconsistent with the Constitution. And I do believe that [this bill] is.  I’m just disappointed.

In their latest assault on free speech, the Democrats have forgotten or ignored Thomas Jefferson’s spirited defense of humanity’s God-given freedom of conscience:  “I have sworn upon the altar of almighty God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”

The bipartisan housing bill currently being debated in the Senate contains an unrelated amendment that will burden innovative Internet companies and threaten the civil liberties of every American.  Without any discussion, Senators added a provision to H.R. 3221 (The American Housing Rescue and Foreclosure Prevention Act of 2008) requiring electronic payment services to collect, aggregate, and transmit details of every sale to the federal government.

This includes not only major credit card providers such as Visa, MasterCard, and American Express, but also pioneers in online commerce such as Amazon, Google Checkout, and eBay’s PayPal.  These companies would be required to construct vast databases of personal information from merchants, including names, addresses, social security numbers, and detailed information about every electronic transaction.  Not only would these requirements trigger higher fees for merchants and higher prices for consumers, but they will also needlessly subject millions of small businesses to the risk of identity theft. Read the rest of this entry »

Our fight to enact sensible gun laws will be undiminished by the Supreme Court’s decision in the Heller case.  While we disagree with the Supreme Court’s ruling, which strips the citizens of the District of Columbia of a law they strongly support, the decision clearly suggests that other gun laws are entirely consistent with the Constitution.

For years, the gun lobby has used fear of government gun confiscation to thwart efforts to pass sensible gun laws, arguing that even modest gun laws will lead down the path to a complete ban on gun ownership. Now that the Court has struck down the District’s ban on handguns, while making it clear that the Constitution allows for reasonable restrictions on access to dangerous weapons, this ‘slippery slope’ argument is gone. Read the rest of this entry »

The rewrite of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 recently passed by the House (H.R. 6304) deals with some of the Bush Administration’s more Constitutionally challenged activities. Recognizing the role of the Judicial Branch, for instance, is a good idea. The Administration’s claim that Congress’ authorization of force after 9/11 somehow implicitly allowed the White House to operate a wiretapping program in this country outside the court system has always stretched credulity.

Unfortunately, though, the Democrats caved to the White House by giving the telecom companies a get-out-of-jail-free card for handing over private information about American citizens to government agents. I think most Americans would consider having their phone conversations secretly recorded and handed over to the government an example of unreasonable search and seizure. If this legislation is signed into law, all of the Americans who sued these telecom companies in protest will never have their day in court. As there are no Senators willing to stop this bill, we expect that chamber to also pass it. Read the rest of this entry »

We waited for so long for someone in the Democratic leadership to recognize that a compromise needed to be struck for the good of our country. I applaud Steny Hoyer for reaching across the aisle to get this done. This is a very responsible compromise, hammered out in a bipartisan way. The people who struck this compromise should be applauded.

In an election year with presidential candidates vying for the ultimate prize in 2009, it may seem natural for DC Vote to take some time to re-group until a new administration settles in. But, District residents have waited more than two centuries for equal representation in Congress, and the fight is not yet over during this legislative session. Our goal is ambitious – to end the Senate’s filibuster and bring the DC Voting Rights Act (S. 1257) back to the floor for a vote in summer 2008.

DC Vote is doing a number of things to make this goal a reality. We continue to travel to states and meet with advocacy groups, state leaders and college students to educate them about DC voting rights and garner support for the issue. On a recent trip to Mississippi, DC Vote staff met with Owen Brooks who, in 1950, hitchhiked from Boston to the Capitol steps to protest DC’s denial of representation in Congress. Another supporter, Rev. Hosea Hines, offered to organize a protest march through the streets of Jackson, MS, in support of DC voting rights. And last month, more than a dozen supporters in Montana took the initiative to stage a protest outside an event in Missoula where Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) was speaking. Read the rest of this entry »