Caroline Fredrickson
GET UPDATES FROM Caroline Fredrickson
 
Caroline Fredrickson joined American Constitution Society in July 2009 as Executive Director. Prior to assuming leadership at ACS, she served as the director of the ACLU’s Washington Legislative Office, and also as General Counsel and Legal Director of NARAL Pro-Choice America. Before that, Caroline was Chief of Staff to Sen. Maria Cantwell and Deputy Chief of Staff to then-Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle. During the Clinton administration, she served as Special Assistant to the President for Legislative Affairs. She has been widely published and appears frequently in the media on topics including labor law, anti-discrimination law, and human and civil rights issues. She holds a law degree from Columbia and graduated summa cum laude from Yale.

Blog Entries by Caroline Fredrickson

Challengers Press for Radically Limited Government in Health Care Law Oral Arguments

10 Comments | Posted March 28, 2012 | 2:49 PM

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...

Read Post

Stop Over-the-Top Attacks on the Office of Legal Counsel, and Focus on Governing

3 Comments | Posted February 2, 2012 | 10:18 AM

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...

Read Post

Let's Help, Not Hinder, Schools in Teaching the Constitution

0 Comments | Posted September 16, 2011 | 11:37 AM

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...

Read Post

Divine Constitutional Abomination

271 Comments | Posted May 27, 2011 | 6:36 PM

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,

Read Post

Keep Politics Out of the Health Care Litigation

0 Comments | Posted March 24, 2011 | 5:04 PM

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...

Read Post

Broadening Discussion on the Constitution

0 Comments | Posted January 27, 2011 | 4:05 PM

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...

Read Post

How the Judicial Confirmation Crisis Threatens Our Constitution

0 Comments | Posted September 14, 2010 | 12:51 PM

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...

Read Post

Justice Suffers As Nominations Languish

0 Comments | Posted August 2, 2010 | 1:35 PM

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...

Read Post

Crack the Disparity Today

0 Comments | Posted April 28, 2009 | 11:16 AM

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...

Read Post

Reconciling Senator Leahy's Independent Commission Proposal

0 Comments | Posted February 10, 2009 | 3:04 PM

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...

Read Post

Mr. Rove: Nobody is Above the Law

0 Comments | Posted February 4, 2009 | 4:42 PM

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...

Read Post

Marching Toward Justice on the 217th Anniversary of the Bill of Rights

0 Comments | Posted December 15, 2008 | 4:49 PM

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...

Read Post

End the Fishing Expedition and Abide by (or Fix) the Law

0 Comments | Posted September 19, 2008 | 11:54 AM

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...

Read Post

GAO Report Details Need to Address Domestic Worker Abuse

0 Comments | Posted July 30, 2008 | 9:29 AM

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...

Read Post

A Loss of Freedom

0 Comments | Posted July 9, 2008 | 12:35 PM

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.

...
Read Post

Congress Set to Legitimize Warrantless Wiretapping

0 Comments | Posted November 13, 2007 | 4:59 PM

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...

Read Post

The Real Deal on Wiretapping Expansion

0 Comments | Posted August 3, 2007 | 12:06 PM

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,...

Read Post

In Praise of the Paycheck Fix

0 Comments | Posted July 12, 2007 | 11:06 AM

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...

Read Post

Immigration Reform Needed, But Not at This Cost

0 Comments | Posted June 19, 2007 | 4:05 PM

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.

...
Read Post