It's time for Congress to take the unjust, unwarranted laws for crack sentencing off of the books.

Right now, federal law mandates an automatic five-year prison sentence for possession of five grams of crack cocaine and 500 grams of powder cocaine. That's a 100:1 disparity for possession of the identical...

Yesterday Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, floated the idea of a truth and reconciliation commission to investigate Bush administration policies — and perhaps even pre-Bush policies — on warrantless wiretapping and the politicization of the Justice Department among many others. During a speech at...

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers has subpoenaed former presidential advisor Karl Rove to testify twice on his role in the Bush administration’s politicization of the Department of Justice. Now, if Mr. Rove’s message on the Fox TV show The O’Reilly Factor is to be believed, he plans...

Our march toward justice has been long and not without setback, but as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once reminded us, "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." His words have special resonance for me today, the 217th anniversary of the...

For the past seven years, Vice President Dick Cheney has captained a vast fishing expedition into the private lives of Americans. That expedition is now even more apparent as Pulitzer Prize winner Barton Gellman's Angler hits the stands this week.

According to Gellman, after September 11, the Bush...

Yesterday, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) released its report [PDF] on government efforts to address the abuse of domestic workers by foreign diplomats within the United States. The report confirmed what advocates, service providers and victims have long known: that this deeply troubling problem runs deep, and...

After years of outrage and empty promises to rein in the president's warrantless wiretapping program, the House of Representatives recently passed an unconstitutional bill to give the president even greater powers to spy on our phone calls and emails. The Senate is poised to do the same this week.

In December of 2005, the New York Times revealed that, following the events of 9/11, President Bush authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) to monitor and collect the e-mails and phone calls of American citizens without a warrant. This revelation was shocking because these actions violated both the...

The Bush administration is trying to pull yet another fast one. And Congress appears to be taking the bait.

After intensive lobbying by the White House, the intelligence community, and the corporate telecom giants, Congress may enact revisions this week to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA,...

On June 22, 2007, Representative George Miller (D-CA) and 23 other House co-sponsors introduced H.R. 2831, the "Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2007," in order to fix a recent Supreme Court decision that undermines protections against discrimination in compensation, which have been bedrock principles of civil rights laws...

Immigration is a hot topic these days, and everyone seems to be talking about the many problems with the Senate's immigration reform bill. Unfortunately, for some reason there has been very little talk about several of the bill's key provisions that would undermine the civil liberties of all Americans.