Over the past year I and other plaintiffs including Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg have pressed a lawsuit in the federal courts to nullify Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). This egregious section, which permits the government to use the military to detain U.S. citizens, strip them of due process and hold them indefinitely in military detention centers, could have been easily fixed by Congress. The Senate and House had the opportunity this month to include in the 2013 version of the NDAA an unequivocal statement that all U.S. citizens would be exempt from 1021(b)(2), leaving the section to apply only to foreigners. But restoring due process for citizens was something the Republicans and the Democrats, along with the White House, refused to do. The fate of some of our most basic and important rights—ones enshrined in the Bill of Rights as well as the Fourth and Fifth amendments of the Constitution—will be decided in the next few months in the courts. If the courts fail us, a gulag state will be cemented into place. 

Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Mike Lee, R-Utah, pushed through the Senate an amendment to the 2013 version of the NDAA. The amendment, although deeply flawed, at least made a symbolic attempt to restore the right to due process and trial by jury. A House-Senate conference committee led by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., however, removed the amendment from the bill last week.

“I was saddened and disappointed that we could not take a step forward to ensure at the very least American citizens and legal residents could not be held in detention ...

Voter ID laws have received plenty of attention recently, but they're not the only controversial changes to election rules this year. Some states have made changes that critics say could impact individuals' ability to vote. Here are four.

Ohio won't count provisional ballots mistakenly cast in the wrong precinct.

Four years ago in Ohio, there were 200,000 provisional ballots cast among a total 5.7 million votes. This was the most among any state other than California. (Federal law requires states to use provisional ballots when a voter's eligibility is in question or if their ...

In contrasting decisions last month, a United States Court of Appeals struck down a US Food and Drug Administration requirement that cigarettes be sold in packs with graphic health warnings, while Australia’s highest court upheld a law that goes much further. The Australian law requires not only health warnings and images of the physical damage that smoking causes, but also that the packs themselves be plain, with brand names in small generic type, no logos, and no color other than a drab olive-brown.

The US decision was based on America’s constitutional protection of free speech. The court accepted that the government may require factually accurate health warnings, but the majority, in a split decision, said that it could not go as far as requiring images. In Australia, the issue was whether the law implied uncompensated expropriation – in this case, of the tobacco companies’ intellectual property in their brands. The High Court ruled that it did not.

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Underlying these differences, however, is the larger issue: who decides the proper balance between public health and freedom of expression? In the US, courts make that decision, essentially by interpreting a 225-year-old text, and if that deprives the ...

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which oversees commercial nuclear power enterprises, has halted the issuance of all new nuclear reactor licensing decisions after a court ruling citing the failure of industry and government to identify an acceptable solution for the long-term storage of nuclear waste.

Nineteen final reactor-licensing decisions are affected, including nine Construction and Operating Licenses (COLS), eight license renewals, one operating license, and one early site permit.

The NRC issued the order on Tuesday in response to a petition filed by numerous environmental groups, as well as individual petitioners.

The petition followed a ruling by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit dated Jun. 8, which stated that the way that the NRC deals with nuclear waste issues in its review process for new or existing nuclear power plants is unacceptable.

At issue is something called the Waste Confidence Ruling of the NRC.

“What we call Waste Confidence was an environmental finding by the commission, what we call a generic finding, meaning it applies universally (to all permit applications), that the spent waste, high level fuel can be stored for several decades beyond the life for the reactor,” Dave McIntyre, an NRC spokesman, explained to IPS.

“The US Circuit Court of Appeals… agreed with the challengers and remanded that waste confidence rule to us, and said basically, the main thing is the NRC should have looked at the possibility, what if there is no repository (for the nuclear waste)?” McIntyre said.

“Yucca Mountain (a proposed waste storage site in Nevada) has been cancelled, and there are no plans as of now. What if Congress continues to be divided and the nation doesn’t choose a direction to go and find a different site?” he said.

The NRC rule at issue assumes “(a) the NRC will find a way to dispose of spent reactor ...

On Tuesday, a Senate Judiciary subcommittee held a hearing called “Taking Back Our Democracy,” examining special interests’ increasing grip on American politics and policy, especially focusing on the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision. Two panels of witnesses, including both current lawmakers and activists, testified to a friendly panel of Democratic senators (no Republicans appeared to have shown up) that our democracy is under siege.

That sentiment was no surprise to anyone in the room (over 400 people showed up for the hearing, packing the room and causing spillover to another room). Again and again, testimonies confirmed that while money has played an enormous role in politics for decades, the past few years have marked a dramatic change:

• Sen. Bernie Sanders (I- Vt.) said that at least 23 extremely rich families have contributed at least $250,000 each in the 2012 campaigns. “My guess is that number is really much greater because many of these contributions are made in secret. In other words, not content to own our economy, the 1 percent want to own our government as well,” Sanders said.
• Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) cited Citizens United  and the DC Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision on SpeechNow v. FEC as the two cases most directly responsible for the rise of super PACs. “But our campaign finance system was hardly a model of democracy before these opinions,” he said. “We have been on this dangerous path for a long time. The Citizens United and Speech Now decisions may have picked up the pace, but the court laid the groundwork many years ago.”
• Gov. Buddy Roemer, former Republican presidential contender, lamented the “institutionalized corruption” gripping Congress, blaming it for the lack of trust Americans have in their ...

Ask any magician and they’ll tell you that the secret to a successful magic trick is misdirection -- distracting the crowd so they don’t realize how they’re being fooled. Get them watching your left hand while your right hand palms the silver dollar: "Now you see it, now you don't." The purloined coin now belongs to the magician.

Just like democracy. Once upon a time conservatives supported the full disclosure of campaign contributors. Now they oppose it with their might -- and magic, especially when it comes to unlimited cash from corporations. My goodness, they say, with a semantic wave of the wand, what’s the big deal?: nary a single Fortune 500 company had given a dime to the super PACs. (Even that's not entirely true, by the way.)

Meanwhile the other hand is poking around for loopholes, stuffing millions of secret corporate dollars into non-profit, tax-exempt organizations called 501(c)s that funnel the money into advertising on behalf of candidates or causes. Legally, in part because the Federal Election Commission does not consider them political committees, they can keep it all nice and anonymous, never revealing who’s really behind the donations or the political ads they buy. This is especially handy for corporations -- why risk offending customers by revealing your politics or letting them know how much you’re willing to shell out for a permanent piece of an obliging politician?

That’s why passing a piece of legislation called the DISCLOSE Act is so important and that’s why on Monday, Republicans in the Senate killed it. Again.

Why? Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid: “Perhaps Republicans ...

Eleven prominent law professors and 14 renowned organic, Biodynamic, food safety and consumer nonprofit organizations have filed separate briefs with the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit arguing farmers have the right to protect themselves from being accused of patent infringement by agricultural giant Monsanto.

The brief by the law professors and the brief by the nonprofit organizations were filed in support of the 75 family farmers, seed businesses and agricultural organizations representing more than 300,000 individuals and 4,500 farms that last year brought a protective legal action seeking a ruling that Monsanto could never sue them for patent infringement if they became contaminated by Monsanto’s genetically modified seed. The case was dismissed by the district court in February and that dismissal is now pending review by the Court of Appeals. The plaintiffs recently filed their opening appeal brief with the appeals court.

“Monsanto continues to claim that plaintiffs’ concerns about being accused of patent infringement after being contaminated by Monsanto’s transgenic seed are ...

The National Association of Broadcasters, an industry group representing television stations around the country, is asking a court to block the implementation of a new rule that will put political ad information online before it goes into effect next month.

The Federal Communications Commission announced last week that the rule will go into effect Aug. 2. It will require affiliates of the four major networks in the nation’s top 50 markets to post on a new website data about who is buying political ads and how much they are paying, among other information. The data is expected to help shed light on dark money spending by outside groups as well as spending by campaigns. The information is already public but is only available on paper at stations.

In a motion filed Tuesday with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, the broadcasters’ trade group said that if the new FCC rule goes into effect, broadcasters “will suffer irreparable harm … because the [rule] compels television stations to post the prices for specific advertisements to a public website immediately after the sales occur.” The motion also argues that the FCC has “engaged in arbitrary and capricious decision making by disregarding the competitive harm that is likely to result.”

The broadcasters have been fighting the new rule for the better part of a year, first mounting an aggressive lobbying effort before the FCC vote in April, then