Judiciary Committee

The Washington Post’s story today about liberals who are frustrated that the Obama administration isn’t pressing harder to win confirmation for liberal-leaning judges to the federal courts should also serve as a reminder that there are a whole lot of key Justice Department posts still not confirmed yet, either. Whether that’s because the White House [...]

Seven major civil rights and open government organizations today sent a letter to leaders of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees urging them to pass legislation to restrict the government’s ability to use the “state secrets” privilege to dismiss litigation charging government wrongdoing. Although the Obama administration yesterday announced a new policy in which it [...]

Eight years after it was passed, the USA Patriot Act remains among the most controversial pieces of counterterrorism legislation in the so-called “war on terror.”

One of the highlights of today’s House Judiciary subcommittee hearing on the expiring provisions of the USA Patriot Act was Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers’ (D-Mich.) repeated lamentations about the sneaky way that the Patriot Act got passed in the first place, offering an interesting glimpse into the behind-the-scenes workings of Congress.
After the House Judiciary [...]

Emails provided to the House Judiciary Committee at closed-door hearings yesterday reveal that President George W. Bush’s political adviser Karl Rove and other high-ranking officials in the former administration had even more influence over the politically charged firings of U.S. attorneys three years ago than has been previously revealed.
The Washington Post has obtained those emails [...]

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) has taken his case against Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor to the public, explaining why he plans to vote against a nominee that even some in his own party are saying is among the most qualified candidates for the high court in decades.
Still, it’s not completely clear if he’s warning conservatives [...]

Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) has said he’ll vote against Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court, Politico reports.
A key member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Kyl’s vote could encourage other Republicans on the committee to vote against Sotomayor as well. He was reportedly undecided as early as yesterday.
Sotomayor is still expected to [...]

Claiming that Americans must “Stop Sotomayor” from wreaking havoc and terrorism on the country from a perch on the nation’s highest court, this new Committee for Justice ad warns that like “Barack Obama’s buddy, Bill Ayers,”  Judge Sonia Sotomayor led a group supporting violent terrorists. That support apparently took the form of a statement by [...]

The endlessly repeated remark that Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor made in speeches and law review articles that she “would hope that a wise Latina woman, with the richness of her experiences, would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life” is an odd one, if [...]

Under intense grilling from Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) this afternoon, Judge Sonia Sotomayor was forced to confront directly her words in various speeches to minority law students over the past two decades in which she said that gender and ethnicity can affect how a judge views a case, and may in some situations affect the [...]