u.s. constitution

Yesterday’s announcement that the Obama administration will try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other 9/11 suspects in federal court has been hailed as everything from “an important step forward for justice” by Human Rights Watch to “a step backwards for the security of our country [that] puts Americans unnecessarily at risk” by Senate Minority Leader [...]

As Marcy Wheeler and Glenn Greenwald both pointed out over the weekend, Eric Holder on Friday once again declared that a case charging government lawbreaking must be dismissed because to let it continue would reveal important “state secrets.” That’s despite the fact that Attorney General Eric Holder not long ago announced that he’d be asserting [...]

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 issue in Kiyemba v. Obama is whether the [...]

This seems almost too weird to be true, but Wired reports that on Oct. 1, federal agents seized the computers, manuscripts and pickaxes of an anarchist social worker in Queens, N.Y., claiming he violating anti-rioting laws on Twitter.

On Tuesday I reported that an Arizona judge had ordered Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio to stop pre-charging female prisoners for the transportation and security costs associated with their obtaining abortion services at a medical clinic. The American Civil Liberties Union had won its argument that the charges — which ranged from $300 to $900 [...]

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 [...]

The National Defense Authorization Act, passed yesterday by the House of Representatives, includes a largely overlooked provision that modifies the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which allows the government to try certain terror suspects — now called “unprivileged enemy belligerents” instead of the Bush-era term, “unlawful enemy combatants” — in military proceedings rather than Article [...]

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 [...]

A finding that the Second Amendment protects individuals’ right to own a gun could also provide more solid ground for recognition of the right to abortion, to sexual privacy, to gay marriage, and to a wide variety of other rights that conservative justices on the court and “originalist” Constitutional scholars have long opposed.

It’s hard to know whether this is good news or bad, but theoretically, at least, it could have been worse.
The Obama administration said on Wednesday that it will not seek new legislation from Congress authorizing the indefinite detention of about 50 terrorism suspects being held without charges at Guantanamo Bay. While that still upsets many [...]