Judicial

In March, Central District of California Judge Valerie Fairbank took senior status following five years of service. Her action left the Central District with three vacancies in 21 judgeships. The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts has denominated all three emergencies due to the burgeoning, complex caseload. These vacancies, which comprise 14 percent of the Central District posts, restrict the delivery of justice. Therefore, the Senate must promptly approve President Barack Obama’s three nominees, so the court can operate well.

Any business run like the federal criminal justice system would fail. Businesses understand that survival depends on generating a return on investment. However, a new report released today by the Urban Institute Justice Policy Center reveals that the federal criminal justice system has a massive resource allocation problem.
 
The Bureau of Prison’s (BOP) budget is swelling. President Obama’s FY 2013 budget requests $6.9 billion for BOP — over a quarter of the total Department of Justice budget. This massive spending will house over 217,000 federal prisoners — a number expected to continue to rise.

Why isn't the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) holding Google to the same "honest broker" standard to which it holds every other company in the U.S. economy?
 
After an eighteen-month investigation of the most extensive alleged "deceptive and unfair business practices" in FTC history, FTC investigators recommended the FTC prosecute Google for deceptive search bias in a 100-page memo. That recommendation built upon the evidence collected by a bipartisan Senate Antitrust Subcommittee investigation of Google search bias last year. In addition last May, the European Commission concluded Google's search bias is illegal.

As President Obama’s first term wore on, a signature plank of his 2008 campaign – his pledge to close Guantánamo – went from policy pillar to policy pariah. The political and popular hurdles to closure – legislation, funding restrictions, outcry in some quarters over terrorist trials – multiplied. The President’s bold act on his first day of office -- an executive order requiring closure of the detention center within the year -- gave way to the ratification of military commissions as an alternative to trials in federal courts, detention without charge was embraced, and transfers from the facility slowed to a trickle.  

After going mum on the topic for most of his 2012 campaign, Obama finally renewed his pledge to close Guantánamo during an appearance on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart show in late October. This pledge will be put to the test even before his second term begins. The reauthorization of the National Defense Authorization Act, soon due for a final vote in Congress, will either offer the president more leeway to restart the machinery of Guantánamo closure, or offer another excuse to maintain the current paralysis. If the president’s campaign pledge means more this time around than it did in 2008, he must use the mandate he won in early November to veto this year’s NDAA if it hinders progress on Guantánamo.

Like a hard calculus equation, the conundrum of what to do with the 166 detainees still housed at Guantánamo is best addressed by breaking the problem into parts and solving them one by one. The obvious starting point is the 55 Guantánamo detainees who the administration named this September as cleared for transfer. Many of these men have been held in the facility for a decade or more where there are no grounds for continued detention. These are the relatively easy cases, men who the administration has no intent to charge with any crime. While the details of many of the cases remain secret, some Guantánamo experts assert that many if not all of these men may be cleared for release entirely, meaning that they are entitled to their freedom yet remain captive.

One well-known example in this group is Shaker Amer. He is a U.K. citizen, and the British government has repeatedly requested his transfer to be reunited with his wife and children in London. He remains held without charge. He said back in November 2005 that, "I am dying here every day, mentally and physically... We have been ignored, locked up in the middle of the ocean for four years."

Three elements are critical right now to advance the transfer of the Guantánamo 55 and help close Guantánamo.

As the Senate lame duck session continues after President Barack Obama won reelection and Democrats increased their Senate majority, this is an excellent time to assess the judicial openings crisis. The judiciary now experiences 67 empty seats in the 679 district court judgeships, two of which are in the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut. Thus, the chief executive must swiftly nominate, and the Senate promptly approve, nominees, so that the bench can dispense justice.

The elections showed that, nationally, the landscape of who is engaging with political representation in this country is changing. By all accounts the votes of women, immigrants, people of color, Native people, LGBT people and youth changed the presidential and some state elections. For the national conservative platform, relying on an agenda that often alienated these communities ('legitimate rape,' anyone?), the 2012 election results revealed a need for a change of rhetoric.

The federal courts now experience 83 openings in 858 appeals and district court judgeships. The Tenth Circuit has two in a dozen, one of which is an Oklahoma position, and the Northern District of Oklahoma encounters one in three. These vacancies undercut justice. Accordingly, President Barack Obama must promptly nominate, and the Senate expeditiously confirm, judges to fill the empty seats. The upper chamber needs to immediately vote on two superb Oklahoma nominees.

Activists around the world are engaged in the “16 Days of Activism to End Gender Violence” campaign, calling on governments to take action on crimes from rape in war to domestic abuse by International Human Rights Day on December 10. In the United States, activists have added motivation for pushing policymakers to act within this timeframe. Congress is at an impasse over renewing the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), the country’s primary national legislation addressing domestic abuse, sexual violence, and stalking. With the remainder of the 112th Congress now a matter of weeks, it is a very real possibility that the act will not be renewed.
 
If that happens, it will constitute an alarming failure of Congress as a whole and in particular of members of the House of Representatives who rallied against a progressive renewal bill.

As the details of the General Petraeus affair continue to unravel, there still remains a shroud of mystery over the FBI leak that prompted this whole media frenzy. We know that FBI agent Fred Humphries was the whistleblower who first reported the agency’s investigation to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. We know that Humphries was the agent to whom Florida socialite Jill Kelley directed the threatening emails she received from Petraeus paramour Paula Broadwell, which triggered the investigation. We know that Humphries is a family friend of Kelley (and once sent her a shirtless photo of himself, a silly side note to this sordid saga). And we know that Humphries was for some reason unhappy with the pace and direction of the FBI’s investigation which caused him to reach out to Congress.

Today, if the police want to come into your house and take your personal letters, they need a warrant. If they want to read those same letters saved on Google or Yahoo they don’t. The Fourth Amendment has eroded online.

Americans for Tax Reform and the American Civil Liberties Union are members of the Digital Due Process Coalition, a wide-ranging group of privacy advocates, think tanks and businesses, like Microsoft, Google, Apple, AT&T, that often disagree on different issues. However, we can agree on consistent privacy protection for digital documents.