Labor

There’s growing attention today to the hypocrisy of Senate Republicans planning to filibuster the nomination of Judge David Hamilton to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, and to the Obama administration’s failure to make judicial nominations a higher priority.
NPR’s Nina Totenberg this morning had an excellent roundup on the issue, while The New York Times, [...]

Because the bill was held up for so long in the Senate, an end-of-the-year filing deadline will prevent anyone from accessing the final six weeks of benefits, according to state officials and sources on Capitol Hill.

“This bill represents a textbook example of how not to deal with the economic challenges that our country faces,” said Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas).

When I wrote my earlier post about the group of illustrious Americans urging the Obama administration to close Guantanamo and bring suspected terrorists to justice in U.S. federal courts, I neglected to mention that Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), joined by Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Jim Webb (D-Va.), is today pushing a measure [...]

Recent policies put both illegal and legal works at risk.

Lindsay Beyerstein has the goods on Dede Scozzafava, the GOP’s luckless candidate in New York’s 23rd Congressional District. In September, Scozzafava’s campaign claimed she opposed the “card check” provision of the Employee Free Choice Act. But at the same time, she told the AFL-CIO, in a candidate questionnaire, that she supported EFCA’s provision that “would [...]

John Yoo should be fired, disbarred and prosecuted for war crimes, according to anti-war activists who greeted the University of California at Berkeley law professor when he returned to Boalt Hall, the law school where he has tenure, on Monday.
Yoo, of course, is the author of the infamous “torture memos” that justified the abuse and [...]

As the Senate Judiciary Committee readies for today’s vote on Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor, conservative judicial activists are taking stock of the battle that demanded so much of their energy for more than two months.

The Obama administration’s Detention Policy Task Force has issued a preliminary report recommending that Guantanamo Bay detainees be tried in federal court for criminal violations, if possible, and in military commissions if they’ve violated the laws of war.  But the big decisions about future detention policy, and issuance of a final report, have been postponed [...]

If anyone thought that a liberal President Obama, backed by large Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, was just going to write his way through Washington this year — think again.
It’s a moderate’s world on Capitol Hill right now, and the latest evidence arrived yesterday when the Democratic sponsors of a controversial labor-friendly proposal [...]