senate judiciary committee

TWI reader ajm8127 wrote in this afternoon with a thought on the insurance industry: “For profit health care insurance providers are a conflict of interest.”
Well, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) agrees.

As Daphne pointed out, the insurance industry’s witness at yesterday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing to examine a law exempting health insurers from federal anti-trust rules was none-too-comfortable defending that exclusion from Democratic attacks. But you didn’t have to watch the proceedings to learn that University of Arkansas professor Lawrence Powell, representing the Physician Insurers [...]

As the debate over health care reform rages on, there’s been almost no attention to the fact that health and medical malpractice insurance companies since 1945 have been exempt from the federal antitrust laws aimed at keeping every other private market competitive. The McCarran-Ferguson Act has allowed insurance companies to dominate markets and reap enormous [...]

Jesselyn Radack at Daily Kos slams The Washington Post for its editorial yesterday praising the Senate Judiciary Committee for its highly compromised Patriot Act reform bill. “The Post turns a blind eye to the vast amount of civil liberties protections Senate Democrats and the Obama administration gave up at last week’s Patriot Act markup, instead [...]

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 [...]

Most of the senators on the Judiciary Committee today seem to be bending over backwards to give the FBI and Justice Department every benefit of the doubt when it comes to the tools they say they need to fight terrorism. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) just warned of all the people out there “that are trying [...]

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 [...]

Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) just gave a remarkable speech at the Senate Judiciary Committee markup session explaining why he’s voting against reauthorization of the Patriot Act provisions because the substitute Leahy-Feinstein bill, which I described earlier today, doesn’t adequately protect American civil liberties.
Responding to Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D-Calif.) assurances that the bill, as proposed, is [...]

The Senate Judiciary Committee’s subpanel on human rights and the law is holding a hearing today in which the Justice Department, State Department and FBI have sent officials to boast of their impressive record of prosecuting human rights violators. Really. The subcommittee isn’t addressing the U.S.’ record of prosecuting its own officials who have committed [...]

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 [...]