Leahy

I just spoke to Kevin Bankston, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s senior attorney specializing in free speech and privacy law, about his reaction to today’s Senate Judiciary Committee markup session on the Patriot Act, which resulted in passage of the Leahy-Feinstein bill, with a few amendments. Bankston, who’s been following this debate closely, was not pleased.
“We’re [...]

The Leahy-Feinstein substitute bill I discussed in my piece this morning about the USA PATRIOT Act was just approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee 13-8, with only minor word changes.
Amendments proposed by Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) that would have required that the target of a National Security Letter have some alleged connection to terrorism, and [...]

An amendment to the Patriot Act provision authorizing National Security Letters that would have required the letters to target only people with some connection to a foreign power or the activities of a foreign power, so as to ensure that the NSL is actually issued to investigate terrorism rather than, say, fishing expeditions, was just [...]

Though the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last week included lots of expressed concern that the USA Patriot Act compromises civil liberties, the version of the bill being debated in that committee today fails to adequately address the problems, argues Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) and  the American Civil Liberties Union.
According to the ACLU, the committee substituted [...]

From CQ:
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., says he will schedule a vote on Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court for July 21, though any committee Republican can hold over the vote for one week.

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) made an eloquent case in The Boston Globe on Sunday for why the United States needs the “commission of inquiry” he’s proposed to get at the truth of how torture and abuse became accepted U.S. policy and practice.
Referring to the abusive interrogation techniques used on detainees, Leahy wrote:
The techniques are wrong [...]

In an interview with Katie Couric, Eric Holder dodged specifics on Justice Department plans.

As expected, the Senate confirmed Elena Kagan as solicitor general Thursday.  Kagan, the first woman to hold the post, was confirmed by a vote of 61-31.
As I reported earlier, she had some vehement Republican critics. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) made a point of noting, in announcing her confirmation, that every solicitor general [...]

As TWI’s lightning-fast national security reporter Spencer Ackerman just wrote, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence just formally announced what we’ve known and been reporting on for weeks now: it will review the CIA’s detention and interrogation program during the Bush years.
That’s welcome news for all of us who’ve been eager to learn more about [...]

During President Obama’s first prime time press conference tonight, he was asked his opinion of Sen. Patrick Leahy’s (D-Vt.) proposal to start a comprehensive “truth and reconciliation commission” to investigate the conduct of the Bush administration over the last eight years.  Obama skillfully waffled on his answer: