Posts by Daphne Eviatar

While one group of leading conservatives is pressing Republican senators to filibuster Obama’s nominee for a seat on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, others are opposing the filibuster attempt.
The Hill reports that 24 leading conservative, led by former Reagan administration Attorney General Edwin Meese, have signed a memo urging a fillibuster, saying “Judge [David] [...]

Maricopa County (Ariz.) Sheriff Joe Arpaio tweeted this morning that he’d met with Vice President Joe Biden, who was in Phoenix fundraising for Democratic members of Congress who could face tough Republican challengers in 2010. Biden was also touting the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
Curiously, the meeting was not listed on the vice [...]

The International Center for Transitional Justice usually focuses on bringing to light and holding perpetrators accountable for such heinous crimes as genocide, mass murder and systematic torture, often in far-off war-torn countries with dismal human rights records.
So it’s significant that today they’ve released a report calling on the United States to follow its legal obligation [...]

Yesterday’s announcement that the Obama administration will try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other 9/11 suspects in federal court has been hailed as everything from “an important step forward for justice” by Human Rights Watch to “a step backwards for the security of our country [that] puts Americans unnecessarily at risk” by Senate Minority Leader [...]

Attorney General Eric Holder just announced that he will seek the death penalty for the five 9/11 terror suspects. They will be tried in a New York federal court, as reported earlier this morning.

After much delay and speculation, the Obama administration has reportedly decided to try the alleged co-conspirators of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in a civilian federal court in New York. That’s a significant defeat for some lawmakers, who had hoped to ban the men from civilian courts and force their trial in military commissions.

Even though the military justice system hasn’t actually executed anyone in over 50 years, military prosecutors have decided to seek the death penalty in the case of alleged Fort Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, The Wall Street Journal reports this morning. Hasan was charged with 13 counts of premeditated murder on Thursday. That’s not [...]

Although the government has said that warrantless wiretapping under the Terrorist Surveillance Program has stopped, the Obama administration has not said that warrantless wiretapping isn’t ongoing under some other program.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) kicked off the annual Federalist Society convention today with a call to oppose President Obama’s liberal nominees for the federal judiciary, Legal Times reports.
“We are in a long and difficult fight,” Sessions told the gathering of leading conservative lawyers, judges and law professors from around the country. Sessions was referring to [...]

Immigrant and Latino advocacy groups, as well as some media watchdogs, are cheering the news today that longtime CNN anchor Lou Dobbs has resigned. The “Drop Dobbs” and “Basta Dobbs” campaigns have been urging CNN to remove Dobbs from its lineup for months now, and although Dobbs’ decision was apparently voluntary, it reportedly came only [...]