We've heard this argument before -- a federal law aimed at advancing national interests is actually a threat to liberty. As former Solicitor General Walter Dellinger noted in a recent piece for the Washington Post, challengers to Social Security, to the minimum wage, to laws banning private restaurant...

The head of the Office of Legal Counsel, Virginia Seitz, a former Rhodes Scholar and clerk for Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, hardly needs a shout-out for her stellar work providing legal advice to the White House. But the attacks leveled against her from Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary...

Constitution Day is upon us and in the spirit of a day meant for school officials to spend more time teaching youngsters about the Constitution, my organization, the American Constitution Society, is bringing lawyers and law students to public schools nationwide to teach nonpartisan and objective lessons on...

Recent news reports have revealed that the nation's largest Tea Party umbrella group is seeking to infiltrate our public schools with the radical theory that the Constitution is divinely inspired.

The Tea Party "Patriots" are pushing a constitutional curriculum designed by the National Center for Constitutional Studies,

It should come as little surprise that attacks on the landmark Affordable Care Act have included every conceivable objection, including constitutional claims. Throughout our history, many of our nation's most significant legislative achievements, including several provisions of the Social Security Act and the minimum wage law, were subjected to similar...

A teachable moment on the Constitution is being muddied by the extreme, lopsided view being presented to Congress by Tea Partiers, led by U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann.

The organization I lead, the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy (ACS), believes that this moment offers...

The Senate voted Monday to confirm Jane Branstetter Stranch to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, at long last filling a seat on one of our nation's most important courts that had been vacant for two-and-a-half years. This inexcusable delay in Stranch's confirmation highlights a growing problem...

The federal courts play a vital role in our democracy, ensuring constitutional rights and principles are protected and providing justice to citizens who have been wronged by discrimination, corporate malfeasance, criminal activities and other transgressions of the rule of law.

Congress also cannot easily take action to help uphold...

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.