Oral Argument in ACORN v. USA in Second Circuit on June 24

The following is a press release from Center for Constitutional Rights. It is relevant to the story I posted at Daily Kos the other day, which garnered 100s of comments, and some controversy. Picking up from President Obama's Department of Justice decision to appeal the decision tossing out the illegal Congressional ban on funds for community activist organization, ACORN, the article asked, Why Did Obama Join Reactionaries in Dumping on ACORN?

Oral Argument in ACORN v. USA Tomorrow
Attorneys Say Congress Violated Constitution in Defunding Group Cleared of Wrongdoing in Federal Report Last Week

New York, NY – The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) will make oral argument on Thursday, June 24, 2010 at 10:00 a.m. in the case of ACORN v. U.S.A. regarding the Congressional defunding of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) last year without inquiry or investigation. Last week, a federal report cleared the group of false charges of misusing federal funds and election fraud.

In March, a federal judge ordered the U.S. government and several federal agencies to rescind orders cutting off funding to the community organization, its affiliates and allies. The U.S. government has appealed this order.

WHAT: Oral Argument in ACORN v. U.S.A.
WHO: CCR Volunteer Attorney Jules Lobel, CCR Attorney Darius Charney
WHEN: Thursday, June 24, 2010 at 10:00 a.m. (please arrive by 9:30 a.m. for security and seating)
WHERE: United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, 500 Pearl Street, 9th Floor, Ceremonial Courtroom, New York, NY 10007

Said CCR Volunteer Attorney Jules Lobel, "It is not the job of Congress to be the judge, jury, and executioner. We have due process in this country, and our Constitution forbids lawmakers from singling out a person or group for punishment without a fair investigation and trial."

For more information on the case, including briefs and a detailed explanation of material support, visit CCR's ACORN case page.

Why Did Obama Join Reactionaries in Dumping on ACORN?

Originally posted at Daily Kos

I was reading a great posting by powwow at FDL's The Seminal this morning. It reviewed David Cole's remarks on President Obama's refusal to apologize for the U.S. government kidnapping/rendition to torture of Canadian Maher Arar. Daphne Evitar and Something the Dog Said already diaried on that, to little notice here at Daily Kos.

But farther down powwow's article I discovered something initially reported last April, but appears to have gone without comment or notice here: that after all the verbiage about how the right went after ACORN, how ACORN was unfairly set-up by right-wing operatives, complete with doctored video... when a U.S. judge ruled that Congress's bill of attainder attacking ACORN was unconstitutional, the Obama administration backed up Congress, and defended the attack on ACORN.

Who would have thought Obama, the vaunted one-time community organizer, would join with the right to attack community organizers?

We know now that the whole ACORN video incident was a setup and a scam, and that ACORN employees did nothing illegal. Just earlier this month a Congressional report cleared ACORN of any wrongdoing (after ACORN had dissolved itself to reform under a new name). A diary noting the courage of Senator Kirsten Gillibrand in not voting for the illegal bill of attainder against ACORN hit the recommended list here at Daily Kos as recently as January 28 of this year. See also this highly recommended April 9 diary asking "ACORN exonerated: The tapes were edited. Will the media retract and apologize?"

But when, after Federal District Judge Nina Gershon struck down the illegal ban on funding for Acorn on March 12, the Obama administration appealed this decision to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. I have never seen this reported at Daily Kos.

Here's how it was reported at Law.com back on April 21 (emphasis added):

A federal appeals court was asked Tuesday to allow enforcement of legislation stripping the embattled activist group ACORN of government funding....

Tuesday, Stern was asking the circuit for an emergency stay pending appeal of a March decision by Eastern District Judge Nina Gershon, who granted a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of the funding restrictions.

Gershon found that the legislation was an unconstitutional bill of attainder, a rarely litigated bar in the U.S. Constitution (Article I, Section 9) on legislation punishing a single person or group.

She denied the government's motion for a stay pending appeal on March 31 and [Mark] Stern headed for the 2nd Circuit, where he argued Tuesday before Judges Roger J. Miner, Jose A. Cabranes and Richard C. Wesley in ACORN v. United States, 10-992.

Stern claimed that Congress had the right to instruct agencies to withhold funding from ACORN amid "indisputable reports of ACORN mismanagement nationwide."

"This is a case of taking steps on the appropriation of federal funds," Stern said. "And if Congress sees widespread mismanagement, it says 'time out.'"

WTF? ACORN had already been cleared by this time. What is Stern and the Obama DoJ talking about? And, btw, don't tell me Stern is a right-wing Bush left-behind. Stern's years at DoJ go back to the Clinton administration, and he received a DoJ special commendation award in 2007 for his work in the U.S. v Philip Morris landmark case.

What's worse is that the role of the Obama administration in perpetuating the right-wing attacks on ACORN goes unremarked by the Daily Kos community. That smacks of hypocrisy to me, though more likely it is simply a willful blindness to the bad policies of the Obama administration, a blindness born of misplaced loyalty and a deep wish for change.

So what say you, Obama loyalists? How can you alibi this betrayal? More nice pictures of the First Family?

I'm getting tired of Obama's lies: on secret prisons, on torture, on supporting community organizers, on FISA, on indefinite detention, on transparency. Jon Stewart captured some of the hypocrisy of the Obama administration the other day in a brilliant routine at The Daily Show.

The Circuit Court, by the way, reserved decision on the ACORN appeal from the Obama DoJ, and in the meantime left the ban on funding in place, until the appeal was decided.

New "State Secrets" Policy? More Lipstick on the National Security Pig

The New York Times reports:

The Justice Department is preparing to impose new limits on the government assertion of the state secrets privilege used to block lawsuits for national security reasons. The practice was a major flashpoint in the debate over the escalation of executive power and secrecy during the Bush administration.

But the Obama administration believes it's enough now that any claim of "state secrets" privilege by the executive branch be reviewed now by the Attorney General. The ACLU notes with some derision that "on paper" there is some purported progress, while Marcy Wheeler at FDL reports that Center for Constitutional Rights is calling the proposed policy "smoke and mirrors." Ben Wizner at the ACLU had more to say (emphasis added):

In recent years, we have seen the executive branch engage in grave human rights violations, declare those activities 'state secrets,' and thus avoid any judicial oversight or accountability. It is critical that the courts play a meaningful role in deciding whether victims of human rights abuse will have an opportunity to seek justice. Real reform of the state secrets privilege must affirm the power of the courts to reject false claims of 'national security.

Writing also at FDL, bmaz sees the timing of the "new" policy as related to government attempts to bury the evidence of government misdeeds in the wiretapping al-Haramain case:

The al-Haramain case is a perfect storm of problems for the government, there is warrantless wiretapping, the surveillance invaded an attorney-client relationship, there is known proof in the form of the sealed surveillance log under the protective custody of the court, and at least some of the surveillance is known to have occurred during the period after the infamous "John Ashcroft hospital scene"....

Tack in the distinct possibility that the government made material misrepresentations about their data mining and warrantless surveillance to the FISA Court and that illegally information thusly obtained inappropriately made its way into the affidavit for the search warrant executed on the al-Haramain Foundation in Oregon, and you see the veritable cornucopia of problems the government could be so determined to stop inquiry into in the al-Haramain litigation before Judge Walker....

There is a lot the government has to hide in al-Haramain, and they are desperate to do just that. It would be a perfect time to whip out a ruse in the form of a "new state secrets policy". Even if there is nothing at all new about it.

The spanking new proposed policy only raised spitting disgust from civil liberties legal blogger Glenn Greenwald:

...the so-called "new state secrets policy" which the Obama DOJ is set to unveil is such a self-evident farce -- such an obvious replica of all the abuses that characterized the Bush/Cheney use of that privilege which Obama himself has spent the last eight months embracing -- that I couldn't even bring myself to write about it. It would not have altered a single one of the controversial uses and is a complete non-sequitur to the objections raised to its abuses (including, once upon a time, by Obama himself).

For those who haven't gotten the picture yet, let me draw it as simply as possible: when it come to defending U.S. military and national security interests, there's not a cent's worth of difference between the Bush/Cheney and Obama/Biden administrations. Those waiting for the confirmation of Dawn Johnson to change things might as well be waiting for the Second Coming (or the Messiah, if you're Jewish).

And as an aside -- and switching topic somewhat -- those waiting for the Congressional bill to slap down Acorn as somehow being used in some sort of progressive jujitsu to bring down the entire military-industrial complex (see the Greenwald link above), let's not waste our time with such utopian fantasies. Some poor naive activists might believe it, and only demoralization results from pursuing such pipe dreams. The MIC will not be brought down by a trick.

Meanwhile, for readers pursuing other items of interest, this appears promising:

In an interview with former CIA officer Phillip Giraldi, FBI translator turned whistleblower Sibel Edmonds named Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle as having been wiretapped and recorded discussing plans with the Turkish ambassador in the Summer of 2001 to invade Iraq and occupy the Kurdish region bordering Turkey.