Congress has until Friday at midnight to pass 12 appropriations bills for fiscal year 2012, as well as stopgap spending legislation to keep the government running until Dec. 16 while lawmakers continue to debate more controversial spending measures. As the Associated Press reports, if the stopgap measure does More…
Congress targets abortion for the second week in a row on Thursday, when the Senate is expected to debate an amendment recently filed by Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) to an appropriations bill related to agriculture, commerce, science, transportation and housing and urban development. DeMint’s amendment, if successful, would bar More…
We’d already set aside the January 2010 deadline for closing the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay that President Obama set on his first day in office. But now the administration is acknowledging that it probably won’t close the prison down until 2011 — at the earliest.
While funding is the More…
The Senate this afternoon defeated an amendment to an appropriations bill proposed by Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) that would have prevented the Pentagon from using funds to adapt or build any new facilities in the United States to house Guantanamo detainees. That would have included anyone charged, tried or More…
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 More…
Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSblog points out that the Supreme Court’s decision to hear the case of 17 Chinese Muslim Uighur detainees who a judge ordered released into the United States will likely also force the Justices to consider the constitutionality of two bills President Obama signed yesterday.
The More…
One small and largely overlooked part of the $44.1 billion Homeland Security budget that passed the Senate on Tuesday involves a provision to expand the Department of Homeland Security’s E-Verify program, which relies on the Social Security database to verify a job applicant’s immigration status. Although the GOP lost More…
House and Senate members today approved language for a homeland security appropriations bill that would give the Pentagon the right to continue withholding photos of the abuse of detainees in its custody, the ACLU reported on Wednesday.
The ACLU has been trying to get its hands on More…
Since writing my last post, I received this from Tracy Schmaler at the Justice Department, responding to my earlier request for comment on the habeas corpus case of Mohammed Jawad:
We have informed the judge in this case that we will not contest the writ of habeas corpus
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