Monday, February 6

Religion: On Monday, the ACLU will submit comments objecting to a proposed Department of Commerce regulation that would eliminate a constitutionally required prohibition on using buildings constructed with taxpayer funding for religious purposes. The ACLU will also join coalition comments.

Immigrants’ Rights: Legislative Counsel Joanne Lin will be on the Kojo Nnamdi show on NPR, for an episode titled the “Ripple Effect of Immigration Enforcement,” which will look at the impact of state racial profiling laws, as well as federal immigration tactics that have detained and deported U.S. Citizens.
 
Tuesday, February 7

Death Penalty: the ACLU and the ACLU of Florida will hold a press conference in Tallahassee on pending legislation in the Florida legislature to privatize all prisons in Southern Florida. S.B. 2038 would require Florida to privatize the management and operation of 29 correctional facilities in 18 counties and S.B. 2036 would circumvent the usual appropriations process for outsourcing projects, so that privatization could take place immediately.

Reproductive Rights: On Tuesday, the House Judiciary Committee will mark up the Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act of 2011 (H.R. 3541).

Privacy: The Transportation Security Subcommittee of House Homeland Security Committee will hold a hearing titled "Screening Partnership Program: Why is a Job-Creating, Public-Private Partnership Meeting Resistance at TSA [Transportation Security Administration]?"

Wednesday, February 8

National Security: The House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology will hold a hearing titled “Cybersecurity: Threats to Communications Networks and Private Sector Responses.”

Thursday, February 9

Free Speech: The Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a markup of S. 1945, a bill to permit the televising of Supreme Court proceedings.

Privacy: ACLU Legislative Counsel Michelle Richardson will speak on a panel along with representatives from The Constitution Project and the Center for Democracy and Technology about pending cybersecurity legislation and its potential impact on privacy. 

Friday, February 10

The Voting Rights Project’s Katie O’Connor will participate in a panel discussion at the Charlotte Law School’s Law Review Symposium – “Behind the Curtains: Election Law and the 1st and 14th Amendments.” Other panelists include the Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky.

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Also, the first hearing under North Carolina’s Racial Justice Act began today and is expected to run for a couple of weeks. The ACLU is part of a team of lawyers representing Marcus Robinson, a black defendant convicted in the death of a white person and who received a far harsher judgment than white defendants who committed comparable crimes from a jury that may have been tainted by a racially biased jury selection process.

Monday, January 30

Criminal Justice: Today, we will file a friend-of-the-court brief in the U.S. Supreme Court in Hill v. United States and Dorsey v. United States. Both cases concern the Fair Sentencing Act (FSA), which reduced the sentencing disparity between mandatory minimums for crack and cocaine offenses from 100-to-1 to 18-to-1. The Court will consider whether people whose offenses predate the enactment of the FSA, but who were sentenced afterwards, should be sentenced based on the old 100-to-1 ratio or the new, fairer 18-to-1 ratio. In our brief, we urge the Court to hold that Congress intended the FSA to apply in all sentencing proceedings that occur after its enactment.

Tuesday, January 31

National Security: On Tuesday at 10 a.m., the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence will hold a hearing called “Worldwide Threats.” Witnesses will include FBI director Robert Mueller III, Defense Intelligence Agency director Ronald Burgess and National Counterterrorism Center director Matthew Olsen.

Privacy: The Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law will hold a hearing titled "The Video Privacy Protection Act [PL 100-618]: Protecting Viewer Privacy in the 21st Century." The ACLU is submitting a statement.

Thursday, February 2

Women’s Rights: The Senate Committee on the Judiciary will hold a markup of the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2011 (S. 1925).

National Security: The Georgetown Center on National Security and the Law will hold a discussion of the book by the American Bar Association Section of Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice titled The Law of Counterterrorism.

Friday, February 3

Voting Rights: The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights will hold a hearing on enforcement of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act during the current redistricting cycle. ACLU Voting Rights Project (VRP) director Laughlin McDonald will testify at the hearing. The VRP and the ACLU’s Washington Legislative Office will be submitting testimony for the record.

National Security: The House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations and Management will hold a hearing titled "Is DHS [Department of Homeland Security] Effectively Implementing a Strategy to Counter Emerging Threats?"

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Also this week, the Senate may introduce cybersecurity legislation that could affect all Americans’ First and Fourth Amendment rights online. This could include an Internet “kill switch,” which would give the president undefined authority to cut off or limit access to the Internet in case of national security threat or emergency, and more information sharing between private companies and the government.

Monday, January 23

On Monday, several nationally renowned forensic pathologists will file a friend-of-the-court brief in the Mississippi Supreme Court on behalf of ACLU client and death row inmate Leslie Galloway, supporting our claim that Galloway’s crime was rendered eligible for the death penalty based solely on scientifically invalid testimony by the prosecution’s expert.  

Tuesday, January 24

Criminal Justice: The House Judiciary Committee will begin marking up H.R. 3796, the Adam Walsh Reauthorization Act, in order to provide funding for the sex offender registry, which was established under the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006.

Wednesday, January 25

LGBT Rights: Wednesday is National Gay-Straight Alliance Day. As part of National GSA Day, the ACLU will be promoting advocacy in support of the Student Non-Discrimination Act (S. 555) on Facebook and Twitter. 

National Security: The House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations and Management will hold a hearing titled "Is DHS [Department of Homeland Security] Effectively Implementing a Strategy to Counter Emerging Threats?"

Racial Justice: The American Enterprise Institute will hold a panel discussion titled "The Muslim-American Muddle: Where Do Muslims Fit in American Society?”

Thursday, January 26

Women’s Rights: The Senate Committee on the Judiciary may hold a markup of the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2011 (S. 1925) on January 26 at 10 a.m.

National Security: The Brookings Institution will hold an event titled “The Future of the National Security Industrial Base,” at which Representative Mac Thornberry will speak. 

Friday, January 27

Women’s Rights: In one of the first nationwide class action sex discrimination cases to be decided following the Supreme Court’s decision last June in Wal-Mart Stores v. Dukes, the United States Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit will hear oral arguments on Friday in Davis v. Cintas, a case concerning sex discrimination in hiring.  The case involves a system for hiring sales workers that the plaintiffs allege is subjective and standardless, and that the plaintiffs claim discriminates against women applicants.  The court will decide whether a class can properly be certified. The case could significantly affect women’s ability to address broad patterns of discrimination in the workplace. The ACLU co-authored an amicus brief with the ACLU of Michigan and the Impact Fund. 

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It would be hard to find anything 84 percent of Americans could agree on. But a new poll released today, the first day of a new legislative session, finds 84 percent of Americans disapprove of the way Congress is doing its job. Who says Congress is divisive?

Speaking of disapproval: the big news this week is the planned online blackout tomorrow to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). Major players in online news, including Reddit, Raw Story, BoingBoing and Wikipedia will be down for most of the day to demonstrate how such sites could be shut down if these bills pass.

Also, this week we’ll announce the details of our settlement with South Carolina’s Chesterfield County School District. Last December, we filed a lawsuit on behalf of a district student and his father, both atheists, challenging the district’s pervasive practice of school-sponsored prayer, preaching and religious activities, as illustrated in this video.

Tuesday, January 17

Detention: The military commission hearing in the case of Abd al-Rahim Hussayn Muhammad al-Nashiri beginning today will once again put on the world stage two of the worst U.S. ideas: Guantánamo and the death penalty. At issue in the pre-trial hearing is an indigent defendant’s right to receive funding for the necessary investigation and experts needed to defend against capital charges and the death sentence, and to ask for that funding outside the interested ears of the prosecution.

Wednesday, January 18

Online Piracy: It sounded like a good idea at first: SOPA was introduced in the House as an effort to reduce online copyright infringement by taking down sites that allow Internet users to acquire pirated versions of original artistic content online. But the proposed legislation’s vague definition of what constitutes copyright infringement could lead to the restriction of completely lawful non-infringing content, which is why the ACLU opposes SOPA. (PIPA, introduced in the Senate, is similar legislation.)

See the statement we submitted to the House Judiciary Committee on SOPA, and read our blog posts following the developments. And join us in urging Congress to oppose SOPA and craft a bill that more narrowly targets pirated material online.

Thursday, January 19

The American Constitution Society and the ACLU will host a panel discussion about the role the U.S. Sentencing Commission plays in sentencing guidelines after the 2010 passage of the Fair Sentencing Act.

Friday, January 20

ACLU Legislative Counsel Michelle Richardson will speak at American University’s Washington College of Law conference entitled “Transparency and the Obama Administration: A Third Year Assessment” about unnecessarily unclassified information.

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This week, we reflect on 10 years since the first prisoners arrived at the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay. Later today, we’ll release a new infographic about detention at Gitmo. And later this week, we’ll have a podcast interview with Lakhdar Boumediene, who wrote about his 7 ½-year detention in The New York Times yesterday. Boumediene was also the lead plaintiff in Boumediene v. Bush, the landmark Supreme Court case that ruled prisoners like him must have a meaningful opportunity to challenge their confinement.

January 11

National Security: January 11 marks 10 years since the first prisoner arrived in Guantánamo Bay, making it the longest-standing war prison in U.S. history. Almost 800 men have passed through Guantanamo’s cells.Today, 171 men remain, 89 of whom security services and military have unanimously determined should be released.

Reproductive Rights: Oral argument at the Supreme Court in the Coleman v. Maryland case concerning the self-care provisions of the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) is coming up on January 11. The Court is going to decide whether state employees may sue their employers for violations of the FMLA’s self-care provision. If not, state workers who need to take time off for pregnancy and childbirth, as well as other medical conditions, may not be able to, setting women workers back many decades. The ACLU and the ACLU of Maryland signed on to an amicus brief by the National Partnership for Women and Families.

Criminal Law Reform: The ACLU and the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities will release Improving Budget Analysis of State Criminal Justice Reforms: A Strategy for Better Outcomes and Saving Money. The report’s suggested improvements will help states better understand the fiscal savings of these reforms and enact new laws that will rely less on prisons, continue to protect public safety, and promote fairness.

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