Another major medical association has announced its support of laws like Oregon’s Death With Dignity Act. The American Public Health Association (APHA) has announced its new position that it “supports allowing a mentally competent, terminally ill adult to obtain prescriptions for medication that the person could self-administer to control the time, place and manner of her or his impending death, whereas safeguards equivalent to those in the Oregon Death with Dignity Act are in place.” APHA’s stance puts it in line with the American College of Legal Medicine, the American Medical Students’ Association and the American Medical Women’s Association. Compassion & Choices, a nonprofit advocacy group, lauded the APHA’s action. Kathryn Tucker, the group’s legal director, said, “The review of Death with Dignity by APHA has confirmed once again the benefits and safety of the Act. APHA support should call other states’ attention to this important patients’ rights policy.”

Earlier this year, Tucker examined Oregon’s experience with the law. Her Issue Brief is available here.

Economists Phil Cook, Jens Ludwig and Justin McCray offer The New York Times’ Freakonomics Blog an ideologically divergent list of suggestions for “fighting crime.” The economists offer ideas on bolstering deterrence, helping low-income kids avoid criminal behavior and a couple ideas on regulating drugs, such as decriminalizing “possession of small quantities of marijuana.” The economists say “Frito sales might go up, but crime almost surely won’t.”

Virginia Senator Jim Webb (D) is attracting attention -- and some praise -- for a measure he plans to introduce this spring on finding ways to reform the criminal justice system. The Sentencing Law and Policy Blog lauds Webb’s endeavor, saying that although “too few federal lawmakers are concerned with overflowing prisons, due to an ailing economy and tight budgets nearly every state lawmaker is deeply concerned about how best to cut prison populations without hurting public safety.”

The blog cites, a recent Washing Post article on Webb’s prison reform work, but notes that it “makes Senator Webb seem like an odd duck for having this priority.” The Post article maintains that “as the country struggles with two wars overseas and an ailing economy, overflowing prisons are the last thing on many lawmakers’ minds.” The article, however, does cite Pew Center research showing that the United States “has imprisoned a higher percentage of its population than any other nation,” and Webb’s concern that a “disproportionate number” of those behind bars are African American.

The New York Times in a recent editorial also cites the nation’s propensity for packing its prisons, noting that it has “the world’s highest reported incarceration rate.” The editorial applauds Webb’s interest in prison reform, saying that he is “courageously stepping into the void, calling for a national commission to re-assess criminal justice policy” and urges other lawmakers to join him.  

The U.S. solicitor general is urging the Supreme Court to review a 2008 federal appeals court decision that invalidated a federal law banning videos depicting animal cruelty. The New York Times reports that the Federal Depiction of Animal Cruelty Act, signed into law by President Bill Clinton, was struck down in July by the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals as an unconstitutional violation of free speech. The law was enacted, in part, to outlaw the production of “crush videos,” which feature perverse acts of animal cruelty.

The 3rd Circuit case involves Robert J. Stevens who was found guilty of violating the act for selling videos of dogfights. The Human Society of the United States filed a friend-of-the-court brief in 3rd Circuit in favor of the animal cruelty law and has filed numerous lawsuits against the distribution of an array of videos showing animal cruelty. Wayne Pacelle, president and CEO of HSUS, has said creators of animal cruelty videos do not have “a First Amendment right to peddle animal cruelty in the United States. Congress is constitutionally empowered to stop this kind of illicit interstate trade.” But the Times notes that at least one constitutional law professor, the University of California’s Eugene Volokh, who believes that the Supreme Court, if it takes the case, is likely to conclude that the federal law runs afoul of the First Amendment.

African American coaches are struggling to make advancements in college football according to a report from the Sports Law Blog. The blog’s reporting notes that African American athletes make up more than half of the scholarship players in Division I college football, but that there are only six African American coaches of the 119 head coaching positions. The sports blog says that the hiring practices in college football clearly ignore an NCAA policy that is similar to the NFL’s “Rooney Rule,” which requires the pro football franchises to interview one or more minorities for head-coaching vacancies. “Athletic directors and university administrators, as per the usual, seem so beholden to the booster or the alum (the good old boy network), that what may be in the best interest of the athlete (and the program in the long term), is insignificant or even trivial,” the Sports Law Blog reports.

Last month, ACS distributed an Issue Brief by Douglas C. Proxmire, on the mixed impact of the Rooney Rule in the NFL. Proxmire, a partner at Patton Boggs LLP, noted the benefits of the rule, while asserting that more needs to be done to bolster diversity of the NFL’s coaching ranks. Proxmire, however, wrote that a similar rule should be instituted in college sports. The article, “Coaching Diversity: The Rooney Rule, Its Application, and Ideas for Expansion,” is available here.

More national media outlets are taking note of ACS leaders who have been tapped for top positions in the forthcoming administration or are advising its transition teams.

NPR’s Ari Shapiro reported on “Weekend Edition” that “a different legal group is on the rise in Washington: the American Constitution Society.” According to the NPR piece, during the Bush years, the conservative Federalist Society was influential and that now ACS appears to have a receptive audience forming in the capitol. University of California Berkeley law professor Goodwin Liu, the new chairman of the ACS Board of Directors, told NPR that, “Whereas I think the last seven or eight years we had mostly been playing defense, in the sense of trying to prevent as many – in our view – bad things from happening, now we have the opportunity to actually get our ideas and the progressive vision of the Constitution and of law and policy into practice.” NPR’s piece noted that President-elect Barack Obama has nominated ACS Board Member Eric Holder as attorney general and tapped former ACS Executive Director Lisa Brown to be the White House Staff Secretary.

The Politico also reported on ACS, noting that, “Sixteen appointees and advisers” of the president-elect’s Justice Department transition team have served on the ACS Board. Dawn Johnsen, whose term on the ACS Board of Directors recently ended, told Politico that, “ACS has functioned as a place and organization to keep some of us together, both physically at convention and conferences and also intellectually by developing issues, papers, and talking about legal theory.”

President-elect Obama today announced he was nominating Johnsen, a law professor at Indiana University, as the next Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel.

President-elect Barack Obama announced today that he “intends to nominate” Dawn Johnsen, a professor of law at Indiana University School of Law, and until a few days ago an ACS Board of Directors member, as Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel. A statement from the president-elect’s transition Web site, Change.Gov, notes Johnsen’s ACS affiliation and also that she served as the Acting Assistant Attorney General of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) from 1997-98.

ACS recently distributed an article by Johnsen on reforming the Office of Legal Counsel, in which she criticizes some of the office’s legal advice on torture. That article, “All the President’s Lawyers: How to Avoid Another ‘Torture Opinion’ Debacle,” is available here. Johnsen also outlined her concerns about the role the OLC played during the Bush administration at this ACS event.

The president-elect also announced that he was nominating Elena Kagan, Dean of Harvard Law School, and a frequent ACS participant, to be the next Solicitor General.

by Adam Winkler, Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law

In June, 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling on the Second Amendment right to bear arms, D.C. v. Heller. For over 70 years, the federal courts had read that amendment to protect only a state’s right to organize militias, like the National Guard. In a long-awaited victory for the gun rights movement, the Court in Heller held that the Second Amendment protected an individual’s right to own guns for personal self-defense. 

So far, the victory hasn’t turned out exactly as the gun rights folks had hoped.

As many legal scholars predicted, the Supreme Court’s decision led to a tidal wave of Second Amendment challenges to gun control. Every person charged with a gun crime saw Heller as a Get Out of Jail Free Card. 

To date, the lower federal courts have ruled in over 60 different cases on the constitutionality of a wide variety of gun control laws. There have been suits against laws banning possession of firearms by felons, drug addicts, illegal aliens, and individuals convicted of domestic violence misdemeanors.   The courts have ruled on the constitutionality of laws prohibiting particular types of weapons, including sawed-off shotguns and machine guns, in addition to specific weapons attachments. Defendants have challenged laws barring guns in school zone and post offices, and laws outlawing “straw” purchases, the carrying a concealed weapon, possession of an unregistered firearm, and particular types of ammunition. The courts have upheld every one of these laws. 

Since Heller, it’s Gun Control: 60, Individual Right: 0.

Before the Supreme Court’s decision, none of the numerous challenges to gun control laws raised in recent months would have had any hope of winning. Now, with a revolutionary ruling recognizing a renewed individual right to keep and bear arms, they still have no hope of winning. 

About the only real change from Heller so far is that gun owners have to pay higher legal fees to find out they lose.   

The basis for most of these lower court rulings upholding gun control was a paragraph near the end of the Supreme Court’s decision that, at the time, seemed like a throwaway. The Supreme Court wrote that “nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions on the commercial sale of arms.” 

What gun rights advocates are discovering is that the vast majority of gun control laws fit within these categories.

“I would have preferred that that not have been there,” said Robert Levy about the list of exceptions. Levy, executive director of the CATO Institute, which funded the Heller litigation, believes that paragraph in the Court’s opinion “created more confusion than light.” 

But to a die-hard gun rights advocate, the problem is exactly the opposite: the paragraph shed too much light. It revealed that the Supreme Court Justices believe that almost all gun control measures on the books today are perfectly lawful – a message that hasn’t been lost on the lower courts.

Hardliners in the gun rights community cannot help but be disappointed with their long-awaited triumph.

Winkler’s commentary also appears at The Huffington Post. For more analysis of the high court ruling in Heller, see Winkler’s June 26 ACSBlog post here.

The new administration and Congress are likely to move quickly on enacting legislation trumping a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court that stifled the ability of workers to bring employment discrimination claims, The New York Times reports. As the newspaper notes, President-elect Barack Obama, as a senator, sponsored a bill that would overturn the high court decision which tossed aside Lilly Ledbetter’s lawsuit against Goodyear alleging sex-based employment discrimination. Lower federal courts had upheld Ledbetter’s suit saying she was wrongly denied the same pay as her male co-workers to the amount of more than $200,000. The Supreme Court, however, in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. dismissed the lower court decisions, saying that Ledbetter waited too long to file the lawsuit against Goodyear. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has also been a consistent critic of the high court’s ruling, recently holding hearings on federal court cases that have limited workers’ access to courts. The Times reports that the legislation to be considered would “relax the statute of limitations under various civil rights laws, giving people more time to file charges.”

by Glenn Sugameli, Senior Legislative Counsel at Earthjustice. Sugameli has also headed Earthjustice’s Judging the Environment Project on federal judicial nominations and the environment since 2001.

One of President Obama’s most enduring legacies will be the nominees he selects for lifetime seats on trial courts, the circuit courts of appeal that have the final say in 99 percent of cases, and the Supreme Court.

There are 44 current and 21 announced future federal court vacancies. Retirements, deaths and likely passage of a bill to create badly needed new judgeships will result in many more nominations over the next four years.

The records of potential and pending judicial nominees on constitutional interpretation are a vital consideration, but far from the only one.  Lifetime judges must also be competent, fair and independent, and must fairly interpret and apply the statutes, treaties, and judge-made “common law” that are at issue in the vast majority of cases.

In addition, access to court is essential. It includes both constitutional and non-constitutional aspects of standing to sue, and statutory interpretation issues such as the definition of agency action that can be challenged.

Academic studies and judges have confirmed what every good appellate attorney knows—judicial selection is vital because rulings are affected by the makeup of circuit court panels.

As I described in a prior ACS guest blog posting, my review of the records of President Bush’s judicial nominees shows how important it is to ensure that judges do not fall short in one or more respects. These analyses bear out my prior experiences with judges who fail to take certain issues and categories of cases seriously, twist the facts and ignore binding legal precedents, violate their own court rules, are hostile to public interest group access to courts, and unjustifiably value corporate interests above those of ordinary Americans and the environment.

A combination of technical and legal barriers may impede the transfer of the Bush administration’s records to the National Archives by the end of its term, the Washington Post reports.  Among the 300 million electronic messages and 25,000 boxes of documents, there are hundreds of thousands of e-mails that were reported missing in 2005 that the White House only recently began trying to recover. Moreover, Vice President Cheney is asserting that his office may determine whether his records are official or personal, a contention that has spurred a lawsuit from a group of historians and non-profit organizations.

According to the Presidential Records Act of 1978, an outgoing administration must transfer official records to the National Archives at the close of its term. Since that time, the Reagan, first Bush, and Clinton administrations have sought to restrict access to some of their electronic records. In 2001, the Bush administration’s  Executive Order 13233 added barriers on presidential records, “reflecting military, diplomatic, or national security secrets, Presidential communications, legal work, or the deliberative processes of the President and the President’s advisers.”

The volume of electronic records from the Bush administration raises the stakes in this controversy. The delay of even some records would significantly hinder historians and scholars researching the Bush administration, as noted Thomas Blanton, the director of the National Security Archive, which has lodged a lawsuit over the matter against the vice president.

In October, ACS distributed an Issue Brief by Meredith Fuchs, the General Counsel of the National Security Archive, entitled, “The White House: Off Limits to Historians?” Fuchs examines the significance of the President Records Act of 1978 and Executive Order 13233, explores the recent controversies surrounding the Bush administration’s records, and makes a series of recommendations for the incoming administration.

by Dina Lassow, Senior Counsel, National Women’s Law Center. Ms. Lassow analyzes Fitzgerald v. Barnstable School Committee, which was recently argued before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Fitzgerald v. Barnstable School Committee, which was argued before the Supreme Court on December 2, 2008, presents the question – on which the Circuits are fairly evenly split – of whether Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 preempts a constitutional claim brought under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, the Reconstruction era law that was enacted to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment. Title IX bars discrimination on the basis of sex in education programs and activities that receive federal funds – such as the public school that Jacqueline Fitzgerald attended. The constitutional claim is for violation of the Equal Protection clause by the school district and its superintendent. 

Petitioners, Jackie’s parents, supported by groups including the National Women’s Law Center, contend that the Court should reject the preemption argument because it is clear that when Congress passed Title IX, it intended to create a new statutory remedy that would supplement, not replace, other remedies for sex discrimination.  Effective enforcement of both Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause remains essential if sex discrimination in educational institutions is to be eliminated.  

While much progress has been made since 1972, women and girls continue to face discrimination in many aspects of their education. They are still discouraged from pursuing the “STEM” subjects – science, technology, engineering and mathematics – as both students and professors. In career and technical education programs, high school girls are still clustered in the classes for traditional women’s occupations, which are much lower-paying than traditional men’s occupations. Women and girls are now playing school sports in large numbers, but those numbers are still lower than the numbers of men and boys who are playing. Those who are playing receive fewer resources and face unequal treatment by schools and public facilities. Sexual harassment is all too common in our nation’s educational institutions. Therefore, it is crucial that a full range of remedies remain available to those who face discrimination.

A California state court tossed aside an effort to prohibit the Los Angeles Unified School District from using affirmative action policy in admissions for its magnet school. A lawsuit was lodged against the school district by proponents of Proposition 209, which banned affirmative action policies by the state. The 2nd District Appellate Court, however, said that a judicial order of 1981 mandating affirmative action could not be undone by Proposition 209. The state appellate court noted that Proposition 209, approved by voters in 1996, included exceptions for “preexisting court-ordered desegregation programs,” the Los Angeles Times reported. An attorney with the ACLU who defended the school district’s policy said the ruling was “an unequivocal victory for students in this district and terrific news for students statewide.”

A ruling from the Environmental Protection Agency may ease the way for the construction of more power plants. The Washington Post reports that the ruling from late yesterday will allow the construction of new power plants without technology to limit carbon dioxide emissions. Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the EPA could regulate the gas under the Clean Air Act. But in the ruling from EPA administrator, Stephen L. Johnson, the agency declared it did not need to regulate the pollutant. “The current concerns over global climate change should not drive E.P.A. into adopting an unworkable policy of requiring emission controls,” he said. The ruling was the result of a challenge by the Sierra Club to the EPA’s issuance of a permit to a coal-fired plant in Utah, which was granted without requiring it to limit its carbon dioxide emissions, The Post reported. An attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council criticized the EPA for issuing a ruling “that so utterly disdains global warming responsibility and disdains the law at the same time.”

The Washington Post reports that Defense Secretary Robert Gates has asked his staff to create a plan to shutter the military prison at Guantanamo Bay. Gates’ press secretary Geoff Morrell told the newspaper that the Pentagon needs to have the plan ready by the time President-elect Barack Obama takes office on Jan. 20. A plan to close the prison would also likely touch on the future of the military commission, The Post reported. ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero lauded the announcement as “an important first step toward turning the page on eight years of shameful policies that allowed torture and violations of domestic and international law.” He added that the group is “confident that, once in office, President Obama will give us an America we can be proud of again and return to our tried and true established system of justice ….”

The Bush administration issued a new Health and Human Services regulation to yank funding from health care providers who do not comply with an order that allows a slew of health care workers to refuse treatment that they claim violates their religious beliefs. The regulation has long been pushed by religious lobbying groups, such as the Family Research Council. It would, according to The Washington Post, apply to more than 584,000 health care facilities and allow some pharmacists, citing religious reasons, to deny birth control medication to women. Additionally, the newspaper reports that the rule, which will cost more than $44 million to implement, could allow infertility doctors to turn away unmarried couples and lesbian women seeking pregnancy by artificial insemination.

The rule has been blasted by a range of medical associations and reproductive rights groups as not only unnecessary to protect the religious liberties of health care workers, but as a serious threat to the quality of health care services in America.

In a press statement, the Center for Reproductive Rights said the new HHS regulation would “drastically hinder women’s ability to get reproductive health services – including basic care such as contraception, counseling and information necessary to make decisions about their own health.” The group dismisses HHS officials’ claims that the regulation will protect health care workers from discrimination. In reality, the Center maintains, “it leaves women who rely on public programs unprotected and seriously violates their rights and needs as patients.”

Americans waiting for organ transplants continues to grow, reaching more than 100,000 according to a Wall Street Journal editorial. The problem, the newspaper opines, has been compounded by a federal law intended to bar the selling of organs. The editorial says the federal law, the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984, “has had the unintended consequence of discouraging almost all incentives to donate, including state tax deductions.” The WSJ and The New York Times take note of a measure likely to be introduced next year by Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) aimed at keeping the ban on profiting from organ donations but allowing states to “experiment with incentives like tax credits, contributions to 401K plans and tuition vouchers,” John Tierney writes for The Times.

Yesterday, TPM reported on a business lobbying group set to launch an advertising campaign aimed at scuttling passage of the Employee Free Choice Act. Part of the effort to defeat a bill intended to make it easier for workers to form unions includes airing television ads attempting to tie the measure to the investigation of corruption charges against Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich. TPM reported that the television ads, purchased by a group called Americans for Free Choice, will target states, such as Arkansas, Nebraska, Indiana and Colorado.

TPM’s Greg Sargent reports today on another figure “who will be the number one foe of the big unions as they try to pass their number one legislative priority next year: He’s a D.C. cartoon villain business lobbyist who fights efforts to restrict drunk driving, mandate healthier foods, and, of course, to hike the minimum wage.” Sargent reports that Rick Berman, head of a group dubbed “Center for Union Facts,” is notorious in Washington, D.C. for fighting unions. The TPM article includes information on Berman from a USA Today profile. The USA Today article noted that Berman has spent plenty of money on “in-your-face advertising.” His ads, often over-the-top in their attacks on unions and efforts to promote healthy foods, have appeared in national newspapers, on buses and in subway systems.

The New York Times noted in a 2006 article about his group that “Berman has faced criticism in recent years for arguing on behalf of his clients that drinking lots of soda does not contribute to diabetes and that Americans have been ‘force-fed a steady diet of obesity myths by the ‘food police,’ trial lawyers, and even our own government.’”

A rule adopted by the National Football League in 2002 to encourage the hiring of minorities for head coaching positions has produced decidedly mixed results, says Douglas C. Proxmire in a new Issue Brief released by ACS. Proxmire, a partner at Patton Boggs LLP, notes that heading into the 2008 season “only six of thirty-two (19%) NFL teams were coached by minorities,” up from two in 2002, down one from 2006. The “Rooney Rule,” named after Pittsburg Steelers’ President Dan Rooney, who chaired a 2002 committee to address minority hires in the NFL, “might appear to be solely about racial diversity in leadership positions within the NFL, but in fact, a discussion of the Rooney Rule involves broader issues that affect not just the NFL, but also other segments of the sports world …,” Proxmire maintains. He writes that more can be done to bolster the effect of the Rooney Rule in the NFL, and urges the adoption of a similar rule in other pro leagues and in college sports.

The Rooney Rule requires NFL teams with head-coaching vacancies to interview one or more minority candidates. Proxmire writes that only one team, the Detroit Lions, has been fined for violating the rule. The rule should be expanded, he writes, to other NFL positions, such as offensive and defensive coordinators, and to allow “non-monetary” penalties to be levied against teams, such as stripping them of draft picks. Proxmire also says other pro leagues and the college sports associations should adopt a measure in the mold of the Rooney Rule.

“Coaching Diversity: The Rooney Rule, Its Application, and Ideas for Expansion,” is available here.

While the Death Penalty Information Center reports a significant drop in executions and death sentences nationwide, lawmakers in Georgia are working to introduce legislation to make it easier for jurors to impose capital punishment. Georgia law requires juries to be unanimous in sentencing a convict to death. A high-profile case that ended last week with three jurors refusing to support imposing the death sentence has spurred Georgia lawmakers, The New York Times reports, to begin “lining up to introduce bills eliminating the requirement that juries be unanimous for a death sentence.” The case involved Brian G. Nichols, who was convicted of murdering four workers in Atlanta.  

The Equal Justice Initiative is urging the U.S. Supreme Court to review a sentence of life imprisonment of a 13-year-old. EJI says the sentence imposed on Joe Sullivan when he was 13 is one of only two cases in the country where youngsters have been “sentenced to die in prison for an offense in which no one was killed.” All the sentences were issued by Florida courts, EJI notes. EJI in a cert petition before the high court says Sullivan’s sentence violates the Eight Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. The Sentencing Law and Policy Blog notes the case, saying it hopes the Supreme Court will review it.

The use of executions and application of death sentences dropped to a 14-year-low in 2008 according to a report from the Death Penalty Information Center. The entire report is available here. The National Law Journal noted that half of the 37 executions in 2008 were carried out in Texas. Courts issued death sentences to 111 people in 2008, the lowest number in three decades according to The New York Times. In spring, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the use of lethal injections in Baze v. Rees, but according to The National Law Journal only nine states resumed executions. The Death Penalty Information Center’s report also noted that support for the death penalty continues to drop, citing Gallup polling. Richard C. Deiter, the center’s executive director, told The Times that a “moral opposition” may not be building against the death penalty, “but there is a greater scrutiny applied to the death penalty that wasn’t there before.”

The District of Columbia Council, not giving up on regulating handguns, approved a new ordinance requiring would-be gun owners to receive safety training and to register their weapons. The New York Times reported that the ordinance would also require gun owners to “undergo a criminal background check every six years.” Earlier this year, the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated the District’s longtime ban on handguns, concluding it violated the Second Amendment. The National Rifle Association bemoaned the Council’s new gun ordinance, telling The Times that the City Council “continues to try to make it harder and harder” for individuals to own guns. Adam Winkler, a law professor at UCLA, wrote in a guest ACSBlog post that the 5-4 majority in D.C. v. Heller while upholding an individual right to “bear arms for private purposes,” left many questions for lower courts to grapple with. For example, Winkler wrote, lower courts will face questions on how the Heller decision would apply to regulations on guns in the workplace, bans on sawed-off shotguns and bans on carrying concealed weapons.

Progressive organizations, including this one, are presenting ideas for the forthcoming administration on an array of public policy matters. The Center for Constitutional Rights is the latest group to launch a project devoted to encouraging the new administration to undue rafts of policy from the Bush administration. “100 Days to Restore the Constitution: Policy White Papers,” by CCR “focuses on the harm done by previous administrations and the hopes we have for making the country a better place for all.” The first White Paper, dubbed “The Right to Dissent” examines the “attacks upon and criminalization of dissent, from surveillance of activists to the federalization of local law enforcement, to the labeling of activists as ‘terrorists.’ It presents a vision for the First 100 Days of the next President’s administration that repudiates such attacks and upholds the First Amendment and our human rights.” The paper is available here.

The Center for American Progress Action Fund and the New Democracy Project released “Change for America: A Progressive Blueprint for the 44th President.” Much of the blueprint, which touches upon economic, domestic and national security policy, is available on CAPAF’s Web site. The Constitution Project has coordinated a program offering a “catalogue” that “includes recommendations drawn from the shared knowledge and experience of a broad coalition of groups devoted to exploring the intersection of civil liberties and national security.” The groups’ recommendations are available here.

The ACLU’s project, “Actions For Restoring America: How to Begin Repairing the Damage to Freedom in America After Bush,” offers a list of “actions that the new president should take in order to decisively signal a restoration of American values and a rejection of the shameful policies of the past eight years.” The ACLU’s list of recommendations can be downloaded here.

And ACS released a broad package of proposals for reforming law and justice policies. The proposals, by a number of experts in the field range from restoring integrity to the Department of Justice to bolstering the work of regulatory agenices. The ideas and proposals are available here.  

An extensive inspector general’s report slams the Interior Department for failing to implement regulations to protect endangered species. The New York Times reports that the Department’s inspector general “found that the agency officials often interfered with scientific work in order to limit protections for species at risk of becoming extinct, reviving attention to years of disputes over the Bush administration’s science policies.” The 141-page report issued yesterday singles out former Interior Department Deputy Assisstant Secretary Julie MacDonald, concluding that her “zeal to advance her agenda has caused considerable harm to the integrity” of the Endangered Species Act programs.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Public Lands and Forests, lauded the inspector general’s work in a press release. Wyden also said that, “This report makes it crystal clear how one person’s contempt for the public trust can infect an entire agency. Ms. MacDonald’s narrow focus on her own agenda not only endangered the Endangered Species Act, it opened the door for countless land-use decisions and developments that would never otherwise been considered.”

The inspector general’s report is available here.