Thread: AMERICAN CONSTITUTION SOCIETY FOR LAW AND POLICY - Secret?

www.DiscoverTheNetwork.org	Date: 1/23/2018 7:52:34 PM
AMERICAN CONSTITUTION SOCIETY FOR LAW AND POLICY (ACSLP)
1333 H St, NW - 11th Floor Washington, DC 20005	Phone 202) 393-6181 Email :info@ACSLaw.org URL :http://www.americanconstitutionsociety.org/
Washington, DC think tank Building a network of hard-left operatives to infiltrate the legal profession The American Constitution Society for Law and Policy (ACS) is a Washington, DC-based think tank with many thousands of affiliates nationwide—mostly law students, law professors, practicing attorneys, and judges. In addition to its student chapters at some 200 law schools across the U.S., the organization also maintains nearly 40 professional chapters in various cities and states. ACS was co-founded by Walter Dellinger III (who served as Bill Clinton’s Solicitor General in 1996-97) and Peter Rubin (a Georgetown law professor who was counsel to Al Gore in the two Supreme Court cases involving the Florida presidential recount controversy of 2000). Dellinger and Rubin launched ACS on July 30, 2001, with the goal of countering what they saw as the corrupting influence that the conservative views of the Federalist Society were having on young law students from coast to coast. A growing “activist conservative legal movement,” says ACS today, “threatens to dominate our courts and our laws, [and] does a grave injustice to the American vision.” In response to this perceived danger, ACS “works for positive change” by: “shaping debate on vitally important legal and constitutional issues” and “building networks of lawyers, law students, judges and policymakers dedicated to … countering the activist conservative legal movement that has sought to erode our enduring constitutional values.” The organization aggressively recruits and indoctrinates young law students, with the objective of helping them rise to positions of power within the legal system—and thereby dragging all of American jurisprudence further to the political left. One crucial part of this indoctrination involves giving law students and young attorneys first-hand exposure to the passionately articulated agendas of leading leftists. Among the high-profile guest speakers who have addressed ACS conventions are: Tammy Baldwin, Mary Frances Berry, Joe Biden, Sherrod Brown, Hillary Clinton, Marjorie Cohn, David Cole, Angela Davis, Rosa DeLauro, John Edwards, Russ Feingold, Eric Foner, Barney Frank, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Al Gore, Tom Harkin, Eric Holder, Jesse Jackson Jr., Ted Kennedy, Bill Lann Lee, John Lewis, Ralph Nader, Eli Pariser, Janet Reno, Jan Schakowsky, and Charles Schumer. While condemning what it calls “judicial activism” by conservative judges, ACS in fact encourages such activism by the left. Toward that end, the Society has formed an Issue Group devoted to “Constitutional Interpretation and Change,” which seeks to “debun[k] the purportedly neutral theories of originalism and strict construction” that “ideological conservatives” have used to smear “judges with whom they disagree” as “judicial activists who make up law instead of interpreting it.” This Issue Group is part of ACS’s “The Constitution in the 21st Century” project, which aims to “formulate and advance a progressive vision of our Constitution and laws,” and to “popularize progressive ideas through papers, conferences and media outreach.” In 2005 at Yale Law School, ACS and the Center for American Progress co-hosted a “Constitution in 2020” conference laying out a blueprint for how the U.S. Constitution should be rewritten by judges over the ensuing 15 years. Speakers at this gathering included John Podesta and Cass Sunstein. According to Human Events magazine, the conference was “an extension” of Sunstein’s 2004 book about former President Franklin Roosevelt's “Second Bill of Rights,” which called for the federal government to guarantee for every American “a useful and remunerative job,” “a decent home,” “a good education,” “adequate medical care,” “the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health,” and “adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment.” These goals are central to the ever-expanding welfare state and entitlement mentality that ACS would like to see the federal judiciary blend into the Constitution. Other ACS Issue Groups include the following: The “Access to Justice” Issue Group condemns “efforts to … insulate wrongdoers from suit, limit remedies and deprive legal aid services of resources.” The “Criminal Justice” Issue Group produces and disseminates reports founded on the premise that “racial inequality permeates the [justice] system from arrest through sentencing.” The “Democracy and Voting” Issue Group seeks to eliminate “barriers to political participation” that “stem from race, redistricting, the partisan and incompetent administration of elections, registration difficulties [including an absence of same-day voter registration options], felon disenfranchisement,” and voter ID requirements. The “Equality and Liberty” Issue Group is devoted to “combating inequality resulting from race, color, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, disability, age and other factors.” The “Economic, Workplace and Environmental Regulation” Issue Group addresses matters like “workplace democracy, climate change and the enforcement of environmental laws, the regulatory process, corporate governance, and wealth inequality.” The “Health Care Reform” Issue Group asserts that if employers wish (for religious reasons) to be exempted from the Affordable Care Act’s mandate that they provide their workers with health insurance that covers the costs of contraception and abortifacients, they should be required to make a written application for such exemption. The “First Amendment” Issue Group “explores the appropriate relationship between church and state in contemporary society, as well as the rights of free speech, free press, and free association.” The “Separation of Powers and Federalism” Issue Group was established by ACS to “promote the ability of government at all levels to pursue progressive policies,” and to counter what it described as then-president George W. Bush's efforts to “increase … executive power at the expense of the other branches of the federal government.” With an eye toward cultivating ever-new generations of future leftists, ACS has developed a “Constitution in the Classroom” program whereby volunteers, under the rubric of “education,” indoctrinate primary- and secondary-school students across the United States. In June 2008, then-ACS Board of Advisors member Eric Holder, whom president-elect Barack Obama would later name as his first Attorney General, spoke at an ACS convention. Predicting an Obama victory in the November election, Holder told his audience that the U.S. would soon be “run by progressives” who “are going to be looking for people who share our values,” and that a “substantial number of those people” were likely to be recruited from ACS. By December of that year, several major ACS figures had in fact secured positions in the forthcoming Obama administration. For details about these individuals, click here. Over the years, ACS’s Board Of Directors (BOD) and Board Of Advisors (BOA) have included a large roster of officials and key representatives from organizations like the ACLU, Alliance for Justice, the Center for American Progress, the Center for Community Change, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Center for Reproductive Rights, the Children's Defense Fund, the Democratic National Committee, the Ford Foundation, Human Rights First, Human Rights Watch, the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights under Law, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the Open Society Institute, People for the American Way, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, and the Rockefeller Foundation. Prominent former members of the BOA include Hillary Clinton, Mario Cuomo, and Laurence Tribe. Among the more noteworthy current members of the BOA and BOD, respectively, are Peter Edelman and Debo Adegbile. To view comprehensive lists of everyone currently serving on each of these ACS boards, click here. To promote and disseminate its views as broadly as possible, ACS has published and distributed issue briefs on a large number of topics. For example: An issue brief on Immigration asserts that “the major lesson learned from past reforms is that harsh, punitive measures both in criminal and civil immigration law have not deterred unlawful immigration, nor have they made us safer; rather our current laws wreak havoc on families, particularly U.S.-born children who have been left fatherless or motherless.” An issue brief on the Death Penalty calls for the creation of a “public defender office” with a “capital defender unit” that is “funded at a level proportionate to the DA’s office” and is “responsible for all indigent cases” involving potential death sentences. An issue brief on Alternatives to Prison Sentences for Youth rejects the notion that public safety is enhanced by harsh sentencing; the brief also aims to “highlight troubling racial disparities and inconsistent sentencing application” in youthful offender cases. An issue brief on the War on Drugs laments that “the United States leads the world in incarceration at 2.3 million,” and that “[t]his nation’s war on drugs...more than any other single factor, has fueled this historic incarceration boom,” which ACS views as racially discriminatory against nonwhites. An issue brief on Felon Voting Rights contends that many “disfranchisement laws” which deny people “the right to vote because of criminal convictions” are racially discriminatory and originated in “the Jim Crow era when they were designed to stop African Americans from voting.” A 2013 issue brief on the Environment urged President Barack Obama to “make climate change, energy policy, and environmental protection top priorities in his second term.” In 2013, ACS created an online Reproductive Rights Resource Page to “celebrate the 40th Anniversary of the Supreme Court's landmark 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade,” and to detail “ACS's work on the lasting impact of Roe and the new threats to reproductive rights.” Over the years, numerous foundations, corporations, and labor unions have given financial support to ACS. Among these benefactors are the AARP Foundation, the ACLU, the AFL-CIO, the AFSCME, Alliance For Justice, the American Association for Justice, the Barbra Streisand Foundation, the Bauman Family Foundation, the Brennan Center for Justice, Facebook, the Ford Foundation, the Glaser Progress Foundation, the Human Rights Campaign, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, NARAL Pro-Choice America, the National Education Association, the National Partnership for Women & Families, the National Women's Law Center, George Soros’s Open Society Institute, Planned Parenthood, Public Citizen, the Public Welfare Foundation, the Service Employees International Union, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. For lists of additional funders of ACS, click here, and also consult the Foundation Center. For additional information on ACS, click here. http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/p...asp?grpid=6707

It is an interesting notion.....

As of December 2008, the following ACS-affiliated individuals had already secured positions in the forthcoming Obama administration:

• ACS Executive Director Lisa Brown had been named as Obama’s White House Staff Secretary. In the 1990s, Brown served as an Attorney Advisor in the Clinton Justice Department and as Counsel to Vice President Al Gore.
• ACS Board of Directors member Goodwin Liu(also a Board member of the ACLU’s Northern California chapter) had been named to the Obama-Biden transition team.
• Joining Liu on the transition team was another ACS Board of Directors member,Dawn Johnsen, who had spent five years in the Clinton Justice Department, five years as Legal Director of NARAL, and one year as a Staff Counsel Fellow for the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project.
• Former ACS staffer Melody Barnes had been selected to direct the Obama administration’s Domestic Policy Council. Barnes previously had served as Executive Vice President for Policy at the Center for American Progress, and as Chief Counsel to Senator Ted Kennedy on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
• Former ACS Board member Ronald Klain had been named chief of staff to Vice President Joe Biden. In 1993 Klain directed the judicial selection process that resulted in the confirmation of Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court. The following year, Klain became chief of staff and Counselor to Attorney General Janet Reno, and in 1995 he became Assistant to President Bill Clinton and chief of staff to Vice President Al Gore.
• http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/v...ry.asp?id=2542

Attorney General Eric Holder: If the President Does It, It’s Legal


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By John W. Whitehead
March 18, 2013

“I never thought I would see the day when a Justice Department would claim that only the most extreme infliction of pain and physical abuse constitutes torture and that acts that are merely cruel, inhuman and degrading are consistent with United States law and policy, that the Supreme Court would have to order the president of the United States to treat detainees in accordance with the Geneva Convention, never thought that I would see that a president would act in direct defiance of federal law by authorizing warrantless NSA surveillance of American citizens. This disrespect for the rule of law is not only wrong, it is destructive.”—Eric Holder, June 2008 speech to the American Constitution Society

Since the early days of our republic, the Attorney General (AG) of the United States has served as the chief lawyer for the government, entrusted with ensuring that the nation’s laws are faithfully carried out and holding government officials accountable to abiding by their oaths of office to “uphold and defend the Constitution.”

Unfortunately, far from holding government officials accountable to abiding by the rule of law, the attorneys general of each successive administration have increasingly aided and abetted the Executive Branch in skirting and, more often than not, flouting the law altogether, justifying all manner of civil liberties and human rights violations and trampling the Constitution in the process, particularly the Fourth Amendment.

No better example is there of the perversion of the office of the AG than its current occupant Eric Holder, who was appointed by President Obama in 2009. Hailed by civil liberties and watchdog groups alike for his pledge to “reverse the disastrous course that we have been on over the past few years” and usher in a new era of civil liberties under Obama, Holder has instead carried on the sorry tradition of his predecessors, going to great lengths to “justify” egregious government actions that can only be described as immoral, unjust and illegal.

Indeed, Holder has managed to eclipse both John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzalez, whose tenures under George W. Bush earned them constant reproach by Democrats and other left-leaning groups for justifying acts of torture, surveillance of American citizens and clandestine behavior by the government. Holder, however, has largely been given a free pass by these very same groups in much the same way that Obama has. The reason, according to former Senate investigator Paul D. Thacker, is that “Obama is a Democrat. And because he is a Democrat, he’s gotten a pass from many of the civil liberty and good-government groups who spent years watching President Bush’s every move like a hawk.”

Despite getting a “pass” from those who would normally have been crying foul, during his time as attorney general, Holder has “made the Constitution scream”—that according to one of his detractors. The colorful description is apt. Some of the Justice Department’s (DOJ) “greatest hits” under Holder begin and end with his stalwart defense of the Obama administration’s growing powers, coming as they do at the expense of the Constitution.

Moreover, as head of the DOJ, Holder’s domain is vast, spanning several law enforcement agencies, including the United States Marshals Service; FBI; Federal Bureau of Prisons; National Institute of Corrections; Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; Drug Enforcement Administration; and Office of the Inspector General (OIG), as well as the U.S. National Central Bureau for INTERPOL. To say that the agencies under Holder have struggled to abide by the rule of law is an understatement.

The following are just some of the highlights of the dangerous philosophies embraced and advanced by Holder and his Justice Department.

The military can detain anyone, including American citizens, it deems a threat to the country. Not only has the DOJ persisted in defending a provision of the National Defense Authorization Act that sanctions indefinite detentions of Americans, but it has also blasted the federal judge who ruled the NDAA to be vague and chilling as overstepping the court’s authority and infringing on Obama’s power to act as Commander in Chief.

Presidential kill lists and drone killings are fine as long as the president thinks someone might have terrorist connections. Holder has gone to great lengths to defend Obama’s use of drones to target and kill American citizens, even on U.S. soil, as legally justifiable. In fact, a leaked DOJ memo suggests that the President has the power to murder any American citizen the world over, so long as he has a feeling that they might, at some point in the future, pose a threat to the United States.

The federal government has the right to seize the private property—cash, real estate, cars and other assets—of those suspected of being “connected” to criminal activity, whether or not the suspect is actually guilty. The government actually collects billions of dollars every year through this asset-forfeiture system, which it frequently divvies up with local law enforcement officials, a practice fully supported by the DOJ and a clear incentive for the government to carry out more of these “takings.”

Warrantless electronic surveillance of Americans’ telephone, email and Facebook accounts is not only permissible but legal. According to court documents, more Americans have had their electronic communications spied on as a result of DOJ orders for phone, email and Internet information—40,000 people alone in 2011—and that doesn’t even begin to take into account agencies outside Holder’s purview, terrorism investigations or requests by state and local law enforcement officials.

Judicial review is far from necessary. Moreover, while it is legal for the government to use National Security Letters (NSL) to get detailed information on Americans’ finances and communications without oversight from a judge, it is illegal to challenge the authority of the Justice Department. Administrative subpoenas or NSLs—convenient substitutes for court-sanctioned warrants that require only a government official’s signature in order to force virtually all businesses to hand over sensitive customer information—have become a popular method of bypassing the Fourth Amendment and a vital tool for the DOJ’s various agencies. Incredibly, the DOJ actually sued a telecommunications company for daring to challenge the FBI’s secret order, lacking in judicial oversight, that it relinquish information about its customers. The FBI alone has issued more than 300,000 NSLs since 2000.

Due process and judicial process are not the same. In one of his earliest attempts to justify targeted assassinations of American citizens by the president, Holder declared in a March 5, 2012 speech at the Northwestern University School of Law that “The Constitution guarantees due process, not judicial process.” What Holder was attempting to suggest is that the Fifth Amendment’s assurance that “No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law” does not necessarily involve having one’s day in court and all that that entails—it simply means that someone, the president for example, should review and be satisfied by the facts before ordering someone’s death. As one history professor warned, “Insert even a sliver of difference between due process and judicial process, and you convert liberty into tyranny. Holder, sworn to uphold the laws of the United States, is the mouthpiece of that tyranny, and Obama is its self-appointed judge, jury and executioner.”

Government whistleblowers will be bankrupted, blacklisted, blackballed and in some cases banished. As AG, Holder has reportedly prosecuted more government officials for alleged leaks than all his predecessors combined. Relying on the World War I-era Espionage Act, the DOJ has launched an all-out campaign to roust out, prosecute, and imprison government whistleblowers for exposing government corruption, incompetence, and greed. Intelligence analyst Bradley Manning is merely one in a long line of so-called “enemies of the state” to feel the Obama administration’s wrath for daring to publicly criticize its policies by leaking information to the media.

Government transparency is important unless government officials are busy, can stonewall, redact, obfuscate or lie about the details, are able to make the case that they are exempt from disclosure or that it interferes with national security. As Slate reports, “President Obama promised transparency and open government. He failed miserably.” Not only has Holder proven to be far less transparent than any of his predecessors, however, but his DOJ has done everything in its power to block access to information, even in matters where that information was already known. For example, when asked to explain the “Fast and Furious” debacle in which government operatives trafficked guns to Mexican drug lords, DOJ officials—unaware that much of the facts had already been revealed—“responded with false and misleading information that violated federal law.” When pressed for further information, the Justice Department retracted its initial response and refused to say anything more.

When it comes to Wall Street, justice is not blind. As revealed in a PBS Frontline report, the Obama administration has driven federal prosecutions of financial crimes down to a two-decade low, buoyed in its blindness to corporate corruption by campaign donations from Wall Street banks (whom Holder has determined are too big to prosecute anyhow) and staffers whose lucrative financial portfolios came about as a result of chummy relationships with financiers. As David Sirota points outs:

After watching the [PBS] piece, you will understand that the word “justice” belongs in quotes thanks to an Obama administration that has made a mockery of the name of a once hallowed executive department… Rooted in historical comparison, it contrasts how the Reagan administration prosecuted thousands of bankers after the now-quaint-looking S&L scandal with how the Obama administration betrayed the president’s explicit promise to “hold Wall Street accountable” and refused to prosecute a single banker connected to 2008′s apocalyptic financial meltdown.

Not all suspects should have the right to remain silent. In 2010, Holder began floating the idea that Miranda rights—which require that a suspect be informed of his right to remain silent—should be modified depending on the circumstances. Curiously, the Supreme Court is presently reviewing a case addressing a similar question, namely whether a suspect’s silence equates to an admission of guilt.

Clearly, it’s not the Constitution that Eric Holder is safeguarding but the power of the presidency. Without a doubt, Holder has taken as his mantra Nixon’s mantra that “When the President does it, that means it is not illegal.” It may be that the time has come to create a “non-political” and “independent” Attorney General, one who would serve the interests of the public by upholding the rule of law rather than justifying the whims of the President.

WC: 1748
ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People (SelectBooks, 2015) is available online at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org.

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Liberal Legal Group Is Following New Administration’s Path to Power

By CHARLIE SAVAGE

DEC. 10, 2008

https://www.alipac.us/f19/2008-liberal-legal-group-following-new-administration%92s-path-power-355027/#post1582776