What's This Campaign?
Welcome to the Campaign for Our Constitution. We’re Southern Californians working to bring attention to our country’s Constitutional crisis and restore America’s values, which are being shredded before our eyes.
OurConstitution.net is the online home for the ACLU of Southern California’s effort to restore habeas rights, end warrantless wiretapping, close Guantanamo, and stop the presidential abuse of signing statements and overreaching executive orders.
We feel your anger. Let’s take action.
Here’s how: We’ll link you up with activists, bloggers, and experts to talk strategy. We’ll put direct pressure on our members of Congress before key votes. And we’ll get the message out to media.
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Why These Four Goals?
Unfortunately, there is a wealth of options when it comes to Constitutional meltdowns, but we’ve settled on just a few where we believe direct pressure on Southern California legislators can make the most difference. Read more about our priorities:
Revive Habeas Corpus
Restore FISA
Close Guantanamo
Bring back checks and balances
Revive habeas corpus
The right to hear the charges against you is a basic part of our Constitution. It’s in Article One, after “we the people” but before the establishment of election day. In other words, basic: “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”
Without habeas rights, U.S. citizens can be held in military prisons for years.
Habeas Corpus is a centuries-old fundamental liberty that gives people the right to know why they’re arrested and imprisoned. It is a right that is even older than the United States.
The Military Commissions Act, passed in October 2006, gave the president absolute power to decide who is an enemy of our country and to imprison anyone indefinitely without charging them with a crime.
What we can do:
We can urge Congress to correct that mistake. There are a few different bills that fix this and we are asking Congress to support measures to restore habeas corpus when they come up for a vote:
The bills:
In the House, the bills we’ll ask our representatives to co-sponsor and vote yes on:
H.R. 2826: This bill would restore habeas corpus rights to those detained in Guantanamo Bay Cuba. This bill will likely be moving though the House Judiciary and Armed Services Committee in early September. Introduced by Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee Ike Skelton.
In the Senate, the bills we’ll ask them to co-sponsor and vote yes on:
S. 185: The Habeas Corpus Restoration Act would restore habeas corpus rights. This bill has already passed through committee and we expect floor action when Senators return from recess in fall 2007. Introduced by Senator Arlen Specter and Senator Patrick Leahy.
S. 576: The Restoring the Constitution Act of 2007 would fix most of the problematic sections of the Military Commissions Act. Introduced by Senator Christopher Dodd.
Restore FISA
The Constitution forbids spying on Americans without warrants. Yet the Protect America Act (S. 1927) passed in early August 2007 was every Fourth Amendment lover’s nightmare and probably the most disappointing desertion of the Constitution by our elected officials.
The Fourth Amendment requires that “no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
But the law allows the administration to conduct warrantless wiretaps without the oversight of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which for 30 years has balanced the needs of national security with our civil liberties.
We get a second chance in February 2008. That’s when the law expires and we expect the administration to push to make it permanent.
The Campaign for Our Constitution will work to hold California’s delegation accountable. Sen. Dianne Feinstein voted for the bill. Although she’s voted against it and has called for amendments to S. 1927, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California is someone we will lobby.
What we can do:
Pressure members of Congress to amend the act and make sure it sunsets in February. We can do this with lobby visits to district offices, (we’ll invite you to join us), writing our representatives and writing letters to the editor in support of restoring FISA.
Close Guantanamo Bay
Four months after 9/11, the U.S. military flew 20 prisoners from Afghanistan to the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. It was the start of an unprecedented effort to create a new class of prisoner outside U.S. and international law.
President Bush had announced that the captured men were not prisoners of war, but “enemy combatants,” a term recognized only by the U.S. government, and authorized their indefinite detention.
In the five years since then, the total number of detainees has risen to more than 750, some of whom are children. Only 10 prisoners have ever been charged with offenses, and only one has been tried and found guilty of any crime. The vast majority, according to the Pentagon’s own documents, have no direct ties to al Qaeda or the Taliban. Most were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Yet day after day, detainees continue to be held with no charges, in humiliating and torturous conditions, giving America a black eye where its moral authority used to be. The administration calls it a camp full of terrorists, but what is really seems like is a camp full of mistakes.
What we can do:
We will lobby our members of Congress to support the Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility Closure Act of 2007 (S. 1419), introduced by Sen. Tom Harkin. Plus we will talk to friends about the problems with Guantanamo, write the media as the bill approaches, and take online action.
Restore checks and balances
The political doctrine in which the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government are able to challenge one another to prevent abuse of power has quietly been derailed.
The Bush administration has taken aggressive, but little-noticed steps to undermine checks and balances by elevating the concept of the “unitary executive theory,” or the idea that presidential power must be unilateral, and unchecked. Bush has done this through disturbingly frequent use of “signing statements” and claims of “executive privilege” thereby expanding presidential authority and ignoring the intentions of congress.
What are signing statements? As former Nixon White House counsel John Dean noted in one of his columns on FindLaw.com, “Presidential signing statements are old news to anyone who has served in the White House counsel’s office. Presidents have long used them to add their two cents when a law passed by Congress has provisions they do not like, yet they are not inclined to veto it.”
George W. Bush, however, has relied almost exclusively on signing statements rather than the veto pen not just to quibble with the substance of the legislation but to dispute a bill’s constitutionality and even Congressional authority itself.
What is executive privilege? American presidents have long claimed special rights as the executives to resist certain encroachments by the congressional and judicial branches, including requests for information. While these rights are not expressly stated in Constitution, presidents’ reasoning for this is that by uncovering the inner workings of the executive branch, the other branches violate the constitutional provision of separation of powers.
The Bush administration has taken this claim to extravagant levels, claiming executive privilege for not only the president, but the vice president, their advisors and other lower level executive branch personnel. This claim has effectively stonewalled Congress from investigating any alleged wrongdoing by this White House.
What we can do:
Let’s ask John Dean when he joins us for a conference call on October 4th.
